Life in the suburbs isn't all it's cut out to be, especially if you're a Middle Eastern person living amongst a sea of middle-class Brits
Suburb in south-west London. Image credit: Dan Senior, Unsplash
Born and raised in the UK, one would never think you could be classed as anything other than a typical British citizen. The fact that I was an Iraqi-Kurd living in a predominantly white area never bothered me until recently.
Let’s rewind to my first racist confrontation. It was year seven and my 11-year-old self was navigating how to create a website in an IT class. After asking the boy nearby if he knew what to do, his reply was: “No, you furry Muslim.” The only thing I felt insecure about was that this guy had called my peach fuzz furry. After asking around, a friend informed me it was racist.
A 2011 census found that there were 230,000 Middle Eastern people in the UK. That figure has grown since then. According to the Office of National Statistics, there are now more than 300,000 Middle Easterners living in the UK. With this surge in immigrants and asylum seekers came the racism and rejection.
Metropolitan Police car. Image credit: Alexandre Debiev, Unsplash
Fast forward to 2019. A Palestinian co-worker living nearby informed me of an incident with the police. They had racially profiled and stopped him because he was a Middle Eastern “foreigner” walking around a nice area at night.
The idea of being treated like that kept me vigilant when cruising around my neighbourhood. I would politely smile at the next-door neighbours until my cheeks hurt before my usual morning commute so they wouldn’t think of me as ‘the rude Arab’. The fear of being belittled by the other people living in this crescent is always there, lingering in the back of my mind.
This mentality probably applies to most Arab-looking people in my area. That’s because more than half of people in the UK associate Arabs with Islam and terror attacks. Systemic racism is here to stay, we’re just adapting to a hostile environment.