James

It all started when I was 7 years old. My family moved to India (Dad was a chef and need inspiration on Indian cuisine) and I was put in a boarding school there. I was heavily bullied by the local kids for racial reasons. The thing was, even from a small age I understood the concept of racism and I developed a tough skin to deal with the mental trauma. Something that never even crossed my mind at that age was a discrimination of hair colour. Let’s fast forward to high school (back in nz), new to a big school, with a fragile teen outlook on life. Until then only racial discrimination had been a problem for me. But the world had come a far way by this point, it was cracking down on the Neanderthal-like intelligence racism came from.

 

By this point it was really not ok to judge someone on their race. I was then hit full force with terms like “gingaa” “ging” “fanta pants” (courtesy of a teacher who thought it was funny to call me that in front of the whole class). It did not matter if I crushed the opposed argument, beat them with higher grades and physical accolades they knew they had me with four simple words “but you’re a gingaa”. It did not make any sense in my head why my hair colour had anything to do with anything. I was then the centre of extreme prejudice and bullying. I couldn’t walk 2 minutes without kids calling out names at me. This resulted in severe depression, social anxiety and hating my self-image. I couldn’t look in a mirror without seeing a monster the people all around me were etching into my brain.

 

I remember a girl coming up to me in school and telling me that I was “pretty good looking for a ginger”... Its this kind of thing that disgusted me but also made me hate myself even more. I couldn’t get away from my hair colour, dying it would be even worse. Truthfully I was pretty scarred coming out of high school. But something I did notice, as all the kids got older the less discrimination I experienced. All the mental trauma helped me build a wall, which filtered in the good out with the bad. It has taken most of my adulthood to recover from the experiences endured, there is still a very strong negative image about red heads today, but I am much more resilient than I was. Red head discrimination is like the flat earth theory, its complete nonsense but people still cling on to it for some reason.

 

I think redhead discrimination is the equivalent of racism, yet people just don’t see it that way. I understand this was pretty heavy and mostly negative, but I took a lot of positives out of it too. I just think it’s important for people to know what a negative impact they can have on another persons life, for something they consider harmless.