ABSTRACT
While some white people might consider such insults to be part and parcel of playground life, there is no doubt that a number of the children found them deeply distressing.
‘It was when I was 9 or 10, and we moved to X [an outer suburb] and there was no black people up there, and I got called names, blacky, nigger. I couldn’t understand it, I mean, I was a person, it’s just that the colour of my skin was different. I had friends, white friends, and they were really good to me, but it was these boys, they used to call me names, and it used to upset me. And they didn’t like my mum, because my mum lived with a black man. And my parents didn’t want me to grow up being upset and hurt, so we moved back to Y’ [a racially mixed area].
