A serious one
My Grandmother is black and now lives up near co. Durham. As a child, I never even realised there was anything different about her. She is not 'black as the ace of spades'. People seem to forget there are many different colours that are classed as 'black'. This is irrelevant anyway. As a kid I used to go and spend a few days/weeks with her up north and used to love my time there.

One day we got on the bus for a big day out in the metro centre (those who live there will know that it's the biggest and most horrendous shopping centre in the country). As we got on, some guy shouted to me (I am white, largely by a freak of genetics and mixed raced parents) that I 'should step away from that fucking nigger and respect my country'.

I respect my country and I'm proud of my relatives. I didn't know what to think that day when I watched my Grandmother hold her head up high and ignore the guy that had made ME realise that my family was 'different'.

My relatives worked hard for their place in society and I will never accept any form of generalisation against any migrants to this country. Prejudice is the one thing that makes me want to fight people, even if I end up in hospital.
( more balanced than jeremy beadle It wasn't me..., Thu 1 Apr 2010, 23:18, 1 reply)

I know the feeling
I'm the white-skinned daughter of a brown-skinned mother (hi, genetics!), and when I was a kid it seemed like someone always had something to say about us. Whether it was someone asking me where my 'real mother' was or someone insisting she was 'insulting [her] heritage' for having a white-skinned kid, people always thought it was their place to judge. I like to believe that one day, a family like mine will be as ordinary and as unworthy of comment as a duck in a pond.
(louveciennes , Volvospotter, Mon 5 Apr 2010, 21:31, closed)