FIJ
Onatejiro Odudu, a Nigerian-born UK TV show host, has detailed the horrendous racism she faced growing up as a child in Blackburn, a town in Lancashire, England.
According to a UK Daily Mail article published on Friday, Odudu, 35, said she started experiencing racial abuses in the neighbourhood she grew up in from age nine.
In a predominantly white neighbourhood, Odudu said, people, especially her mates at school, would touch her hair and ask her why no other part of her body except her palms were white.
“I remember going home and saying ‘Mum, why is that the case, what is going on here?’ That is when my mum started to teach me about Nigeria and say ‘there’s loads of people that look like you, they’re just not in this country,’” said Odudu.
The presenter added that it never felt good being the only Nigerian in her class because other children would always pick on her because of the way she looked.
“I just hated any attention on me at that time. I was just like ‘I’ve just got to get through the school day and get back home to my brothers and sisters,” Odudu, who is also popularly known as ‘AJ’, said.
The TV host said she sensed the unfriendly gestures she suffered from her predominantly white classmates in school stemmed from their parents’ influence on them.
To back this claim up, she spoke about how the only white pupil who would play with her in school during lunch break got shouted at by her father after he noticed they had become friends.
“And I couldn’t believe it. I was like ‘she’s not allowed to play with me, but it’s not that she doesn’t want to, it’s because her dad doesn’t want her to do that,’” said Odudu.
