"Is she talking to us?" "Nah just keep walking."

Allow me to set the scene. My boyfriend and I are walking through the park on our way home from College. Its dark, its cold but it’s still romantic. Sort of. During our conversation, we slowly become aware of an old man walking behind us, mumbling to himself. Crazy old people are nothing new, and so we keep walking. But this mumbling keeps getting louder, until we start to think it’s being aimed at us. This being East Ham, we assume he is trying to tell us about the tin foil hats we must all immediately start wearing. So we ignore him. Until we hear this:

“She’s evil… (Mumble mumble)…black boyfriend... (Mumble mumble) evil”

Yup, he was definitely talking to us. Not that my boyfriend is black (mixed race), but we were the only couple around. I brushed it off at the time. I wasn’t going to let one crazy person convince me that the world was full of idiots. I tell myself that he wasn’t even talking to us; maybe he was seeing loads of couples in his crazy brain. But after being with my boyfriend for two and a half years, the reaction from others has been surprisingly hostile.

 Not everyone is so daring as to call us evil in public. A group of young girls did ask my boyfriend what he was doing with “that white girl” and told him he didn’t know “how to walk”. (I had to call one of my friends to explain that one; apparently it means that you shouldn’t be with who you’re with. I know, it sounded stupid to me too.) But most of the time it’s just filthy looks, and double takes. Which of course, is nothing compared to what people had to go through in the past.

When asked, one person told me that their mother had been dragged out of her own home by the hair, for daring to be married to a black man. Surely we’ve moved on since then? Apparently not. Another woman I asked told me she had encountered the same problems as me and my boyfriend. “It’s really difficult to be in a mixed race relationship. People from your community and their community give you dirty looks in the street all the time, it’s horrible.”

 So what on earth is the big deal? The world must have seen this coming, what with the ease of international travel and immigration and all that. If two people have grown up in neighbouring postcodes, gone to schools two streets apart and gone through the same crap growing up, it can’t be surprising when they can find common ground.

 I’m not going to paint the whole world as racist. I know of many mixed race couples who have never had any encounter with old men calling them “evil”, or having dirty looks thrown their way. In fact, when asked, some couples told me they had never encountered any race related problems, which is lovely to hear. I admit that most of the time, the dirty looks we receive are probably because my boyfriend and I look funny, or because of our habit of pretending to be unicorns and/or other mythical creatures.

 But it only takes one or two idiots to convince you the whole world is whispering behind their hands. It doesn’t matter how many times I’m told that we’re a cute couple, the little incidents from the past are always there, hovering in the back of my mind.