Rishi Sunak was being questioned on the sidelines of a cricket match, days after a damning report emerged that it is a racist and sexist elite sport.
“Of course I knew racism growing up, of course I know it exists.” British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is the first head of government in the United Kingdom of Indian origin, explained on Saturday July 1 that he had been the victim of racism in his youth. “It stings you. It hurts”, Rishi Sunak, 43, told the BBC. Racism “stings you like very few other things do”, added the head of the conservative government. “And I have a job where I am criticized every day, every hour, every minute”, he continued.
Rishi Sunak, who grew up in Southampton, is the eldest of three children and the son of a public health system GP and a pharmacist. Born in India or of Indian descent, his grandparents emigrated from East Africa to the UK in the 1960s. He quickly rose to the elite by attending Winchester College, a very posh boarding school for boys. He then studied politics, philosophy and economics at the prestigious universities of Oxford, England, and Stanford, USA.
“It was really difficult”
Rishi Sunak was being questioned on the sidelines of a cricket match, days after a damning report emerged that it is a racist and sexist elite sport, which he deemed “sad” the report on cricket, a sport of which he is particularly fond. “It was, for people who love cricket, very hard to read”he commented. “One day I was with my younger brother and younger sister in Southampton in the south of England and people said several things and I felt doubly bad,” said Rishi Sunak. “I felt bad. And I had my brother and my sister with me and I didn’t want them to hear and be exposed (about this). It was really difficult,” he continued.
But the Prime Minister assured in this interview that the country had changed: “What comforts me is that the things that happened to me when I was a kid, I think wouldn’t happen to my kids today, because I think we’ve made incredible progress in as a country and that we should be proud of.” “Racism, sexism or anything else has no place in our society and when we see it we must eradicate it”, Rishi Sunak also said.