Why I spoke out against racism

Nearly 60 years ago, a 17-year-old Rita Tushingham answered a newspaper ad for an acting job – and ended up starring in A Taste of Honey.

The 1961 film – in which she plays a white schoolgirl who has a love affair with a black sailor, played by Paul Danquah, and then moves in with a gay man – kick-started her career: she won a Bafta and a Golden Globe. But she really had no idea how revolutionary or scandalous it would be. “We shocked audiences without intending to,” she told Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. The film was banned in several countries. “I only learned later that Paul and I did the first interracial kiss on screen.”

For a few days last year, Naga Munchetty was “the most scrutinised person in Britain”, said Giles Hattersley in Vogue. The BBC Breakfast presenter was at the centre of an impartiality row after saying that Donald Trump was racist when he said that four ethnic minority US Congresswomen (including Ilhan Omar) should “go back” to their “crime-infested countries”. A complaint followed, and she was censured, before the BBC reversed its decision. “It was horrible,” she says. “Utter madness.” Born in 1975, she is the daughter of a Mauritian-born father and an Indian-born mother, both of whom worked as NHS nurses. For her, racism is personal. “My mum has been told, ‘You Paki bitch, get your hands off me,’ when she’s cleaning someone,” she says softly and deliberately. “My dad has been told the same thing. When they’re cleaning someone’s arse. A racist person’s arse. They came to a country that wasn’t always welcoming to people of colour, to be the best they could be. And they were told to go home all the time.” She’s also suffered racism first-hand. “I have been told many times ‘Why don’t you just f*** off to where you came from?’ Trust me, when things touch you, sometimes you can’t let that go.” So she stands by her comments about Trump. “If you saw me sit back – frustrated, angry – it’s inevitable when you’ve had these experiences.”