They called me the ‘black boy’ in school. Pretty funny considering I’m white. Slightly darker than the average white person, but white nonetheless. I was born in Romania, so by the time I had moved to Ireland at the age of 7 I had worked up a pretty good tan. It probably sounds quite silly, especially if you know me and how white I am but, when I was younger, people often made comments about my skin colour. Like I said, they called me the ‘black boy’ in school. Probably speaks to the lack of diversity in my school more than anything. Anyone who looks slightly different, is, in fact, ‘different’. And people will make sure you know it. It’s also interesting how my ‘difference’ was equated to being black. Black is different, therefore black is bad. It is a racist attitude that is subconsciously (or consciously) ingrained in peoples' minds. But due to the discrimination I faced, I always felt like I related to black people. My introduction to politics was through people like MLK and Malcolm X. In some ways, maybe I identified as black. I know I definitely did not identify as white. The Irish and British people who made fun of my skin colour and my nationality were the white people. And if I was white, it wasn’t the ‘good’ type of white. But it’s funny now, living in England, with a Northern Irish accent and a tan that’s slowly withered away over the years, I am, seemingly, for the first time in my life, the ‘good’ type of white. I’ve even had a couple of people tell me that I don’t “look Romanian”. Probably quite xenophobic in itself. At the same time, I once had someone tell me that I look like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. I don’t. I'm white. With blonde dyed curls. When I’ve grown my beard out, people have told me I look Arabic. I don’t. Tongue in-cheek comments likely, but still worrying. Still an equation of difference to having darker skin.
Truthfully, I don’t really know what the point of this blog is. I was asked to write a blog, about anything I want, but possibly relating to the recents events regarding football and racism. I didn’t really want to make this about me, but I constantly found myself thinking about my own personal experiences with discrimination. However, that made me realise that this is personal. It’s about people’s personal lives and their personal experiences with racism, discrimination and xenophobia. So I guess my point is this: whether it’s me, Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, George Floyd or Dalian Atkinson, we all have our stories. So listen to them. Learn from them. Be open-minded. Empathetic. Understand that not everybody has had the experiences you have had in life. Or the opportunities. And fight, in whatever way you can, for those people to have those opportunities. To live a life free of judgement of things which are outside of their control. Not that they should opt for a change in skin colour if it was in their control. Black is beautiful. Brown is beautiful. White is beautiful. Slightly-tanned-white is beautiful. At the same time, let us remind ourselves of these words from 1 Samuel:
“For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”
- 1 Samuel 16:7
Let’s try be a bit more like the Lord.
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