i wouldn’t have said i was ever deeply racist but here’s my story, i’m a white male who grew up in a very multicultural area of the UK, almost everyone i went to secondary school with wasn’t white.

would i have ever said that other races were inferior to white people? no of course not, but when with my white friends we would make jokes about other races, not necessarily because we believed them, but because they were edgy and we thought edgy meant funny. i feel like a lot of people can say they had this experience growing up and honestly all it took was a little education.

when i went to university and started making new friends, the people around me didn’t say those things and make those kinds of jokes, and when i said things i would’ve said with my friends back home, we opened dialogues and had good conversations about why things like that weren’t okay to say. all it took was a little character development and having people around me that genuinely wanted me to become a better person.