On living with a white person

When home becomes a site of microaggressions and cultural insensitivity.

I love the place I rent, how big it is, the fact that I have a garden, how every square inch hasn’t been capitalised by the landlord to turn a profit. It’s an all-female three-bed house share (not with friends) where we don’t have locks on our doors because we trust each other, and we communicate about everything. I call it the place I rent because ‘home’ is the name reserved for my parents’ place. At my parents’, I can pray wherever, eat with my hand, use a bodna (bidet), speak Bangla, go by my dakh nam (nickname), and all the other stuff that makes it feel like home. I can do these things at the place I rent too, but I just feel different, like I have to explain myself and justify the things I do.

In this house, I seldom make curry, and if I do, I eat it with cutlery as opposed to my bare hand as I would at home. I keep a water bottle hidden in my kitchen cupboard to use as a makeshift-bidet in the downstairs toilet. I pray in a corner of my room, squashed between my wall and the mattress on the floor, despite having plenty of space around the rest of the house.

That is all to accommodate my white housemate.

I know I sound like I’m an agent of white supremacy and overcompensating by taking on these assumptions without being explicitly told to. She hasn’t exactly told me I can’t do these things (I don’t think she’d have a problem with any of it), but it’s to say that I feel othered in this house. Like my differences are loud, and I have to apologise for it. The thing is, I’ve been made to feel like this.

I’ve felt different in this house since I moved in. I’ve experienced too many microaggressions to feel totally comfortable in this place. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the harrowing story of a racist neighbor sexually abusing his dog. When I was explaining racist police violence to her, my housemate turned around and said to me, “but you’re Black, and you’ve had okay experiences with the police.”

Reader, I’m not Black, and even if I were, it feels like an odd sentiment to make. Sensing that I was taken aback, she self-corrected and said, “Sorry, I mean, you’re coloured.” In the year 2023, I was not expecting to be described as coloured.

Call it ignorance or naivete on her part, but it didn’t sit right with me that a woman in her late 20s, who had been living in London for almost a decade, thought it okay to refer to a person of colour as coloured. I know it’s a small distinction, but the latter is so loaded, reminding me of segregation in apartheid states and times of extreme racial divides (not that we’re hugely better off now). The ironic thing is that when this whole exchange happened, she was reading Diversify by June Sarpong, a book about the benefits of diversity.

This interaction might sound like an isolated incident where she had an ill-judged slip-up, but white ignorance is loud and persistent, the weight felt mostly by its subjects. I can’t forget the time she told me she was more drawn to white women when it came to doing housemate auditions to fill the third bedroom in the house. Or when she kept insisting Nigerian people are blunt and loud, or the dramatic decline in politeness she displayed when we saw potential housemates of color. Or the umming and ahh-ing for weeks before finally accepting our current Black housemate, telling me there was something she can’t-quite-put-her-finger-on that she didn’t like about her.

I don’t think she thinks much about these conversations, but I haven’t stopped. When I tell these stories to people, everyone tells me to confront her and educate her on her ways. But why should I? Why would I exert any labour to teach someone the basic etiquette of being a decent human being? Why do white people have to read books and articles to figure out that they should treat people of colour as they would want to be treated? Why is there so much white fragility that I have to consider whether I even want to risk upsetting her by telling her how I feel? I know for a fact that if I were to open this can of worms, I’d have to comfort her white tears, and then things would eventually get so awkward and uncomfortable, we’d either stop talking, have a cloud over us all the time, or one of us would have to move out.

So I’m not going to tell her any of this. Instead, I’ll tell you all in a potentially misguided attempt at catharsis and hope she doesn’t stumble across it. I can't be bothered for that conversation.