I Encountered Very Little Racism Due To A Multi-Cultural Environment: Nasser Hussain

Former England captain, Nasser Hussain has recently said that he faced very little racism while growing up and playing for Essex as it was a multi-cultural club.

In the past few months, there have been huge talks about racism on and off the field have. The Black Lives Matter movement was at its peak after the police brutality incident, which resulted in the demise of George Floyd in Minnesota, USA.

I was lucky enough to play at Essex: Nasser Hussain

Nasser Hussain believes he was fortunate enough to grow up in a multi-cultural and multi-racial society where he faced very little racism. Born in India, Hussain, because of his name and surname did encounter some name-calling.

At Essex, Hussain and his father played with varied cultural cricketers from Pakistan and West Indies origin. Hence, they had a lot of fun when India played Pakistan or England played the West Indies.

Nasser Hussain told PakPassion.net, “I encountered very little racism at Essex. Growing up as a young boy in Ilford having been born in India and having a surname of Hussain and a first name of Nasser I did encounter some name-calling due to ignorance.

“I was lucky enough to play at a club like Essex where we had a middle-order of Nadeem Shahid, Saleem Malik and myself. We had a very multi-cultural county in the south of our county at Ilford where I grew up with my dad and his cricket school where we had a British West Indian net, British Indian net and a British Pakistani net and we would all take the mickey out of each other when India were playing Pakistan, or England were losing to the West Indies. It was great banter and it was fun.”

The cricketer-turned-commentator said that he was fortunate to grow up in a privileged white-ish middle-class and multi-cultural society.

“I grew up in that multi-cultural environment and I was very fortunate. But I understand that I was a white-ish middle-class, public school educated boy so I can’t put myself in the shoes of some of the British Asians that are growing up in certain parts of the UK,” Nasser Hussain added.

Michael Holding gave a passionate monologue on educating people about discrimination based on colour and other forms before the Test series between England and West Indies – post the resumption of play in the pandemic era. Players in all sports have been supporting the BLM by taking a knee.

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