Eunice Olumide on growing up Black in Britain

I remember being young and Black in Scotland and enjoying that beautiful, innocent bliss of childhood.

However, as I got older, things slowly started to change. The older I got, I gradually discovered how difficult it was for some people to accept me as a Black person. Essentially, in a world where skin colour shouldn’t matter, to too many people it did.

As a child—like most other children, I expect—I wasn’t really aware of people’s skin colour because my feeling is, we’re all human after all, aren’t we? But sometimes that message of humanity and togetherness doesn’t find its way through to people’s minds, and because of that I suffered sometimes. Well, quite a lot actually.

So after a peaceful and innocent start, as I got older, things started to change and my Black skin caused a reaction in certain people that I hadn’t seen before. People started to look at me a different way. In fact, by the time I was eight, nine, ten, eleven years old I became conscious that I wasn’t always allowed to hang out with other kids. Why? One reason: because I was Black.

These moments of judgement and being made to feel different have stayed with me all my life and shape the way I think about the world as a Black woman living in Britain today.

It wasn’t easy, and that’s putting it lightly. It’s been a long journey and sometimes I have found myself all at sea trying to figure it all out.

I should probably start with how my family ended up in Scotland. My dad was in the navy and that’s what brought him to the UK. To be honest, as beautiful as my country is, I don’t think he or any of my family really knew the type of abuse they would face just for being Black. Speaking honestly and from the heart as I always do, the treatment we got sometimes was extreme, like something from a Hollywood horror movie: our house was regularly trashed, spray-painted and defaced, and even burned down by vandals. We were getting attacked physically by gangs of youths with golf clubs. I admit, it was really scary sometimes and I had to grow up faster than I wanted to just to stay alive, just to survive.

Growing up, my mum was—and still is—a huge source of inspiration to me. She used to work at the High Commission and she strived so hard to provide for us. I remember she had three jobs when I was at school to ensure she set the right example and offered us the best opportunities. Through her, I was always taught you just need to work hard to do well in life. She has this powerful African spirit, which sometimes I find worrying, especially as she gets older. She still never stops. One day I asked her why she doesn’t slow down, and she was like, “Well, in Nigeria, we say if you stay still or lie down, you might not get back up.”

Growing up in a place like Scotland is very difficult because the experience of being Black isn’t always the same as when you’re Black and come from England.

In many ways, I think it was worse. Living north of the border, as they call it, we didn’t have a whole community of Black people to turn to, no close-knit circle of Black families to share our experiences with, no special membership, no support network to talk to and help protect us. There were no large groups of Black people that I could really identify with, or that I could go to and talk about the trauma that I was suffering.

Sometimes being Black and Scottish isn't appreciated. In the same way that the USA overshadows Canada across the pond, England dominates everything here in the UK: jobs, education, arts, media, broadcasting and fashion.

Sometimes as a young Scottish person, Black or white, you’re led to believe that you’re inferior, not good or special enough, that your accent is wrong. I see it too often, sometimes when I watch films or a much-loved television show; the Scottish characters are often seen as slightly strange. The butt of the joke. The silly ones who are always made fun of. This isn’t fair. I’m now trying to do my bit to change people’s idea of Scottish people. I’ve made TV shows just to show people, children in particular, that our stories, told in our own accents, do exist and they do matter. Scottish children are constantly seeing English people on their screens, and I know of many kids who are petrified that they won’t be taken seriously or get their dream job because they don’t speak with an English accent. We need to show the world that isn’t the case. I’ve too often been told that the way I speak is wrong because it’s not the “King’s English”. It might seem obvious, but people from Scotland deserve to be respected too.

Growing Up Black in Britain by Stuart Lawrence (Scholastic, £10.99) is available now