Racism made me change my name to Nadia, says Naga
BBC Breakfast’s Naga Munchetty briefly changed her name to Nadia because of racist hostility, she has admitted.
The 45-year-old has also told of her hurt at school when a white boy called her a ‘P**i’, aged just seven.
And she disclosed that all four main presenters of BBC Breakfast are now paid fairly, after she was involved in an equal pay complaint.
The presenter was at the centre of an editorial row last year over comments she made about Donald Trump and racism.
However she said ‘lessons have been learned’ on both sides over
‘I felt humiliated at being different’
the row. Discussing life growing up, she said her mother and father ended up going by the names Michelle and David because people could not or would not try to pronounce their real names.
Her mother had come to the UK from India and her father from Mauritius in the 1970s. They had both worked for the NHS and were very keen for the family to fit in to British society.
Miss Munchetty said her mother would open the back door when cooking and make them change out of school uniform because she ‘did not want us to be those Asian kids who smelled of curry’.
The presenter also admitted she temporarily went by the name of Nadia to fit in. She said: ‘There was a point where I was going to change my name.
‘I’m glad I haven’t. I feel kind of sad that I spent so much time agonising over it.’
Miss Munchetty told The Guardian newspaper that her parents had tried to protect her from racism. But she recalled the first time a racist term was used against her, when she was aged around seven: ‘It was by one of my friends, a white kid.
‘We’d been friends for ages, then one day he just said: “I’m not talking to you any more because you’re a P**i.” I didn’t know what it meant. I remember going home and being really upset. I was ashamed to tell my parents because I felt humiliated at being different.’
She was one of more than 100 women who complained to the BBC about equal pay in 2017. She said the outcome of this was that ‘all four main presenters of BBC Breakfast are equally paid for their work’.
The presenter also opened up about the controversy sparked when she spoke on the breakfast show about Mr Trump telling female Democrats to ‘go back’ to their own countries.
Miss Munchetty had said that ‘every time I have been told, as a woman of colour, to go back to where I came from, that was embedded in racism’.
She was found to have broken editorial guidelines but the ruling was later reversed. She said ‘lessons have been learned’ following the furore – and that she’d had ‘very robust’ conversations with senior figures at the broadcaster over the incident.