Handsworth is very diverse and there are a lot of Afro-Caribbean people here, including me. My grandparents on both sides were born and raised in Jamaica and they came here in the early 1960s.
The area is changing a lot now the Eastern Europeans and also people from Kurdistan, Iraq and Iran have come in. I don’t have an issue with it; a lot of them have come from the same struggle no matter what colour they are.
I know some people who have come here in recent years who have already gone back. I asked why and they said, ‘They don’t want us here’. I told them they didn’t want my grandparents here and if they’d went back home I wouldn’t be here. Others have come here just like they did – forget what we look like. Irish people will tell you the same thing; they didn’t want them here. They only live across the water from us and they treated the Irish almost as bad as Africans back then.
I feel that Britain wants to leave the European Union and be this ‘Great Britain’ again; they want to get rid of people who have done a lot to build this country up. For Britain to go it alone they’re going to have to get immigrants, they’ll have to go back to the Commonwealth again. I can’t see us standing on our own two feet without having to open up the borders.
I reckon once Brexit goes through you will see an increase in migrants coming in; they’ll have to It won’t benefit me, but is it going to improve my kids’ lives? Only time will tell. I think it’ll be them that it’ll affect because they’ll be growing up in that period of time.
I experienced a lot of institutional types of racism as a teenager. Between the ages of 16 and 19, in one period I was stopped five times by the police, two times in one day on one particular day, but it was always at least once a week. Even as a kid going to school, I felt like teachers had a handbook on how to deal with particular kids when it came to race.