Jameela Jamil, actress and activist, speaks about the daily bigotry and brutality she faced as a child in a larger conversation with Zeinab Badawi about race and body image. It pains me to know that violent racism is earliest memory most melanated children have of going to school. I recall many friends in school who were Indian girls and we gravitated toward one another because of the cultural similarities we shared. Sticking together made the obstacles of bigotry a bit easier to bear.
How and why children display racist behavior is constantly blamed on the home environment and lack of discipline. But, the work of eradicating racism from the home should not be the labor of its target. Despite this, Jameela is placing herself in front of a new generation of girls and young women as a touch stone for hope and positive representation.
Jameela Jamil via Instagram @jameelajamilofficial
Zeinab: Your the daughter of Pakistani-Indian parents, but brought up in the UK. How important is your ethnicity to you? Does it inform everything you do?
Jameela: Yeah, it’s very important to me, it wasn’t for the longest time. That’s what I’m saying, I shunned it so heavily because I thought it was embarrassing and bad…I grew up in the 90s which was such a racist time in England and, you know, I got called a Paki every single day of my life and beaten up for my [ethnicity].
Zeniab: What literally beaten up?
Jameela: Literally beaten up, once with tennis rackets, by a bunch of white children. And so, I was terrorized at school for my ethnicity. I was one of the only South Asian girls. I was the ONLY South Asian girl in my primary school and one of maybe four in my entire secondary school I went to a large secondary school. So, it played a big part in my early years of my lack of identity and now as I’ve grown older and I’m getting into my 30s, I’ve fallen in love with the culture again. In love with the food and the music and everything and I realized that I’ve really missed out on not reconnecting with my culture.
Zeniab: But, I mean for a child to be attacked by a group of white children, boys and girls presumably, with tennis rackets, I mean how old were you? What happened?
Jameela: I was seven. I think I had a tooth knocked out and, you know, I had cuts and grazes, but I used to get physically abused quite often at school. Often by girls, [who are now] Caucasian women. I have nothing against Caucasian people, but I had a really rough time growing up and I think representation is a big part of that. Media is such an amazing way to familiarize people, the public, with different people and if you don’t do that [positive representation], then they don’t understand people. And, I think that [lack of exposure] sometimes incites fear and I think children kind of felt afraid of me. They disrespected me and they felt afraid of me because I was different, but really I’m not different. I just have a different level of melanin.
-Jameela Jamil, HardTalk with Zeinab Badawi, BBC, 2019
