The White Paint from Mr. Darcy’s Shop

I have often wondered why Black and brown people hurt each other so deeply. I feel it in myself sometimes, more sharply than when white people hurt me. I think it is because the wound was already there long before I even knew my name; it was a wound sanctioned by the white world I lived in. That world decided who was seen and who was worthy, often teaching us, through violence, how to administer that same judgment. We absorbed it by osmosis and carried it into our communities as internalized racism, lateral violence, turning it sideways against those closest to us.

I grew up in England in the 1960s, during the era of the Teddy Boys and intense racial unrest, when the streets themselves seemed to watch you, ready and suspicious. Racism was not subtle then; it did not pretend confusion or politeness. It lived on the streets and announced itself loudly. The hostility was ordinary, woven into daily life. It showed up in schools, in shops, in the way adults spoke freely, assuming agreement. It was understood who belonged and who did not, who could move without consequence and who had to be careful.

Groups of white boys moved through neighbourhoods with a sense of ownership, their clothes sharp, their anger sharper. You learned early how to read footsteps behind you, how to keep your head down, how not to invite attention. The threat did not always need words. Sometimes it was enough just to be seen.

When I was five, I wanted to be white. I begged my parents to paint me white, to go to Mr. Darcy’s little shop and buy the paint. I told them that if they loved me, they would do it. I don’t remember the moment clearly, but the story is still there, like a scar: the desperation, the sense that whiteness meant safety, survival, even love.

Even before I was born, the world had already weighed, measured, and priced my value as a person with Black skin. When my mother went into labour at nine months pregnant, my father had to run to the police station to call a doctor because we had no phone. The policeman refused. He had not met me, but he had already decided I was not meant to live.

I came anyway, delivered by my father, healthy, into a world that circled me with hatred. My parents, however, loved me fiercely. Their love was constant, loud, and protective. It could not shield me completely from the hostility waiting outside, but it gave me roots, a sense of worth that the outside world could not take away.

Outside my front door, the lessons in unworthiness were relentless. On the playground, the white children spat at me, their small faces twisted with a mimicry of their parents’ disdain. Inside the classroom, there was no refuge; I remember the plump white teacher with small feet looking down at me, not with care but with a clinical sort of mockery, telling me my hair “looked funny.”

White adults looked at me as if I were a stain. Silent stares, brief and cutting, made me shrink in my own skin. I in turn carried those stares in the way I looked at others, Black and white. I learned to look for fault before I learned how to look with care.

I noticed it in small moments. I would use the same yardstick that white people used. I would quickly assess whether someone was darker or lighter than I was. I would look at their hair, whether its texture leaned closer to whiteness—blond, fine, wispy—or whether it was straightened, braided, or an Afro. I coded people by their clothes, ethnic, colourful, marking them as non-white. I listened for accents, for signs of ease or strain. All of it happened quietly, before I could stop myself. Survival meant working out whom to fear and whom to mistrust.

The world said: Indians are lazy, Chinese are criminals, Black people are dangerous. Television showed people of colour only in the worst possible situations, women parading as “welfare queens” and men as gangsters. I absorbed these images as my reality. I didn’t know then that the world was being built a certain way, or that the pictures on the television were chosen to make us look small. I just believed what I saw because, to my developing young mind and heart, the powerful communication of television was simply the truth. The stories and images I viewed and absorbed taught me to desire this one thing: I wanted to be white. I wanted their love, their safety.

The television brought those images into our living room, teaching us how we should view ourselves and how to conduct ourselves under the white gaze. But this version of maladaptation, dictated by white filmmaking and white advertisement, sat alongside a very different reality; a reality that lived and breathed its way through our own stories and artists. It was natural for my parents to share our heritage; it was simply the fabric of our home. They spoke of the history of Africa, the kingdoms, the brilliance and dreams of our people. They spoke of us as resilient, gifted, descended from something ancient and mighty. Every weekend, my father’s voice filled the house, offering a quiet, steady truth: “You are not what they say.”

This internal truth found its external mirror when, amidst the static of the “welfare queen” narratives, a different vision flickered onto the screen. I remember seeing Diana Ross and the Supremes on television for the first time: Black presence, radiance, and magnetism. They were dipped in shimmering gold. When the music started, that beat, Oooh oooh baby baby, where did our love go? the sound just filled me. I watched their bodies move, the shiny gold dresses shifting and catching the light, and my own body couldn’t stay still. I moved too. I felt a surge of pride seeing Sarah Vaughan, her voice smooth and rich, filling the room with a dignity the world tried to deny us. My childhood was fed a steady diet of heroes: Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, and Nelson Mandela. They were the armour my parents tried to build for me, piece by piece.

Even with that love, though, the outside world left its mark. The streets, the media, and the hierarchy of whiteness left impressions my parents’ words could not erase. I carried both voices: my father’s, telling me I was capable, and the world’s, telling me I was a problem. The world’s voice was louder because it had consequences; it decided who was safe, who was believed, and who was worthy of care. Worthiness became a judgment that did not stop at the edges of the white world; it seeped inward, shaping how I moved among my own, people of colour.

What I carried within me, the quiet measuring of worth, was part of something bigger, a system of internalized racism and lateral violence born from the dominance of whiteness. It is oppressive and heavy, a hierarchy that demands we look down even when we are being looked down upon. Mimicking the outside white world, I became judge and jury of worth, and I aimed that power at people of colour. I saw the same judgments mirrored around me, in the sideways harm we did to our sisters of colour. I judged a sister’s success with suspicion, responding to vulnerability with condescension; I too used their bodies as a natural sanctuary for my disdain. Now, I know this judgment is not really about them. It is inherited violence, the internalized white gaze speaking in the only language it knows. It is intimate. It is searing. Because it is close. When harm moves sideways, from one of us to another, the name is clear: internalized racism, lateral violence.

I remember it in brief flashes: the shock, the tightening chest, the heaviness in my shoulders, the quiet shame after projecting my own fear onto someone I cared about. The smallness I felt as a child, the wanting to be painted white, the weight of the teacher’s judgment, the sting of spit landing on my skin: all would settle quietly into my body. The gaze I absorbed lingered, and the desire for white love and safety was always there, quiet and insistent.

Now I see it, the internalized racism, the lateral violence. I feel the twist of the surgical scalpel, penetrating my sisters of colour, while wounding me at the same time. I recognize how this violence has moved through me, how I have mirrored it without awareness. I trace it back. Frantz Fanon writes that the child learns their body is already judged, too much and not enough. James Baldwin states that the world creates people to destroy them. I carry their words. I carry the wound, yet I carry it consciously. 

Naming it, lateral violence, is how the bleeding slows. It is how I stop the scalpel from moving sideways, and it is how I begin, with care, to see and hold my sisters of colour.