Persona Non Grata
Nullius Loci
What does it take to belong in a society that doesn’t want you?
“Europe wants immigrant labour but not the immigrant, the profit from the one, not the cost of the other...Globalisation and immigration are part of the same continuum. We are here because you were there.”
I’ve been reluctant to write this.
Some wounds become so familiar that you stop recognising them as wounds. The injuries sit beneath the skin like a few of my old fractures, aching whenever the weather changes. Every time I’ve tried to approach this subject, I’ve found myself circling it, covering it over, applying another layer of explanation, reasonableness, understanding, and silence.
The truth is that it hurts too much.
I’ve spent years coming to terms with being a woman and with the particular terror that accompanies that reality. There is comfort, if that is the right word, in knowing that half the world’s population understands some version of that fear. The constant calculations and the vigilance. The knowledge that violence is never as far away as we’d like to believe.
But being brown is different.
Being a person of the global majority in a society that constantly reminds you that you are a minority is a form of gaslighting so pervasive that it becomes gravity itself. You are weighed down before you even realise it’s there.
Whiteness only exists because it has an opposite. I am a person of colour in the same way that a white person is also a person of colour. Yet somehow I became the category. The qualifier. The ethnic minority on a government form. The diversity statistic. The lone darker face in an office photograph. The unspoken expectation that I should tolerate homogeneity in institutions that claim to represent everyone.
I live in a country where people who look like me make up less than 10% of the population, yet somehow dominate the national imagination. We are endlessly discussed, analysed, feared, and blamed. We are accused of invading places our families have lived in for generations. We are told we are taking jobs, changing neighbourhoods, threatening cultures. We appear in headlines as criminals, extremists, predators.
Entire moral panics are built around our existence.
And I often wonder where those headlines were when violence happened to me.
Where were they when police officers treated me as a suspect rather than a victim?
When I was told, explicitly and implicitly, that as a brown girl I should not have been outside in the first place, that I should have known my place? That consent doesn’t exist for people like me.
Where were the think pieces then?
Where were the politicians demanding accountability?
Where were the front pages?
I think about this too when I remember the white feminist spaces I once moved through. Spaces that spoke eloquently about liberation while quietly recreating old hierarchies. Spaces where women of colour were expected to organise, support, nurture, educate, and disappear. We were invited into the movement, but rarely into the centre of it.
We knew our role.
We were there to help.
Not to lead.
Not to be seen.
Certainly not to complicate the story.
And yet I know there are others who carry heavier burdens than mine.
I know this because I watch them.
I watch Muslim women board trains and feel entire carriages shift around them. I have seen the subtle recoil, the second glance, the unconscious movement away. I have had versions of it myself. After every terrorist attack, there is a familiar tension in public spaces, a collective search for a face to blame.
People see my skin before they see me.
But I do not have my hijab ripped from my head. I do not face my places of worship being firebombed and attacked. I am not followed by PREVENT in an educational setting, even though I witnessed it firsthand.
I watch my Black friends, particularly in America, live under the constant shadow of state violence. I watch videos that would be unimaginable in any society that truly believed all human beings were equal. I watch stop and searches targeting the same people over and over for no real reason. I watch families grieve and organise and protest and grieve again. I watch institutions close ranks around themselves.
And I know that what I experience is not the entirety of this reality.
It is only one part of it.
Still, the insults stay with you. The slurs. The casual cruelties. The word “P**i” thrown at you by strangers, or “your culture” pointed out by classmates, colleagues, people who would never consider themselves racist. The denigration of your accent. The mocking tone of your “curry smell”. The fetishisation of brownness. The small reminders that no matter how long you’ve lived somewhere, no matter how much you contribute, your belonging remains contingent on X, Y, and Z.
Provisional.
Revocable.
And there is another indignity that rarely gets discussed.
Not the insult itself, but what happens afterwards.
I have lost count of the number of times I have tried to describe an experience only to find myself pulled into an argument about whether it really happened the way I understood it. The conversation shifts. Suddenly, we are no longer talking about the thing in question. We are talking about my reaction to it.
Was it really racism?
Did they really mean it that way?
Am I being too sensitive?
Am I interpreting it through the wrong lens?
The burden quietly moves from explaining the behaviour to explaining my perception of it.
What frustrates me is not disagreement. It is the assumption that every account of racism must first survive a cross-examination before it can be recognised as real.
Sometimes people respond by pointing elsewhere. Other countries. Other prejudices. Other forms of exclusion. As though the existence of injustice somewhere else makes it less real here. But I do not live in those countries. I live here. I am speaking about the place I call home and the experience of being reminded, over and over again, that some people regard my presence as conditional.
And then I think about what happens when our victimhood collides with the stories society wants to tell about us.
Sometimes the story wins.
A Bangladeshi British girl is groomed and raped by terrorists and is ultimately stripped of her citizenship. Even then, she does not become the victim in the public imagination.
And somehow, we are told that none of this has anything to do with history.
We are told that colonialism is over.
That empire is over.
That the extraction of wealth, labour, bodies, cultures, and futures belongs safely in the past.
We are told there should be no reparations. No accountability. No consequences. We are told that contemporary inequalities emerged from nowhere, that migration happened spontaneously, that the world simply arranged itself this way.
But we are here because you were there.
That phrase contains more history than most textbooks.
It is not an accusation directed at individuals. No one alive today personally created the empires that shaped our world. But history does not disappear simply because its architects are dead. Its structures and pillars remain. Its assumptions remain. Its hierarchies remain.
And so do its wounds.
People of the global majority are not demanding guilt - only recognition.
What many people fail to understand is that the hostility I encounter did not emerge in a vacuum. It has a history. The assumptions people make about me, the suspicion that sometimes follows me into a room (or a store), the feeling that my belonging is conditional rather than automatic, all of it comes from somewhere.
For a long time, I thought I was imagining parts of it. That perhaps I was reading too much into certain comments, looks, and moments. But eventually the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. You begin to notice how often you are expected to explain yourself, reassure people, and prove that you belong.
And after all these years, what strikes me most is how ordinary my desire really is.
I do not want special treatment, guilt, or revenge.
I want to be able to walk through the place I call home without second-guessing whether the person looking at me sees a neighbour or someone who doesn’t belong.
When I talk about things that have happened to me, I don’t want the discussion to become an investigation into my credibility. Sometimes I’d like to be believed without having to build a case for myself first.
And I wish my pain could simply be treated as pain. Not compared, qualified, explained away, or measured against whatever assumptions people already carry about people who look like me.
Most of all, I want the freedom to exist as a person before I am seen as a category. Not a demographic. Not a headline. Not a diversity statistic. Not a problem to be solved.
Just a person.
Copyright © 2026 Suswati Basu. All rights reserved.
I loved that you wrote this. Personally, I’ve always been surrounded by people who refused to look beyond their own perspective - out of fear, or simply because of what society deems “normal.” There are so many stories we hide because of this kind of repression.
Such a beautiful article