Nadiya Hussain has admitted she’s too scared to call out racism in an industry that ‘isn’t her world’.
The Great British Bake Off winner said she has been experiencing more racism in the last five years than in her entire life and fears work will disappear if she complains.
The 35-year-old told Radio Times magazine she had encountered ‘racism throughout my life…
‘I now work in an industry that’s very much middle-aged, Caucasian, male, and there I am – a five foot one Muslim brown girl, and it’s not my world.’
She continued: ‘We have to question why there aren’t more people of colour working in television, publishing, the hospitality industry.
‘When I did this show I looked around and I thought, “Wow, there’s literally just me and the home economist, who’s Korean”.’
Nadiya fears that speaking out against racism will result in nobody working with her ‘ever again.’
She won the sixth series of the Great British Bake Off five years ago, and has gone on to be a much-loved TV chef with her own shows including Nadiya’s Family Favourites.
It’s not the first time she has spoken out about the racist abuse she has encountered, tweeting in 2017: ‘I get abuse for merely existing. Too brown to be English. Too Muslim to be British. Too Bengali to eat fish fingers!
‘There is no end! I exist, we all do! Sometimes I hate myself for simply breathing the same air, that I am so often told, I am not entitled to.
‘Tear away your flesh, you are skeleton underneath like me, like everybody! So let’s just breathe our air, let’s exist, because what else are we supposed to do?’
The full interview is in Radio Times magazine, out now.
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