By Jess Bourne
Living and growing up in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s was difficult. There was the worsening economic crisis, Margaret Thatcher, and the Miners’ Strike.
And while these aren’t affecting the country any more, one thing that was around then, and is still to this day is the blatant racism that ethnic minorities are faced with daily.
Now, imagine being born during that time, growing up in one of the most diverse cities in the UK, and you think that there will be other children who look like you, sound like you and live similar lifestyles. But you quickly realise that you’re the only brown child in school. Everywhere you look, the children are white.
It wasn’t just a thought for Riaz Khan though. It was his reality.
At school, he was forced to listen to the racial slurs that the other children had picked up from the television, media or at home.
Unfortunately, it was normal for Riaz. That was his life – he knew no different.
Riaz Khan, now 59, was born and raised in Leicester to his Pakistani father and Afghan mother. At home, he followed his parents’ culture that they had bought to the UK, but at school, he had to adapt even further.
“It was a bit of a culture clash. At home, I had to be the good Pakistani and Afghani boy… and at school I had to adapt to a different culture altogether. Even though I was born here, I was torn,” says Riaz, thinking back to his childhood.
Looking back, Riaz recalls preferring the Leicester culture, rather than the ‘obedient’ culture insisted on by his parents.
“I thought it was a bit rigid. But here, you could be a bit more liberated, and a bit more free to do what you wanted to do,” says Riaz. “At home, you couldn’t do this, you couldn’t watch this, you couldn’t say this. It was limited because my parents came from the [Asian] villages, where their traditions were very conservative, super conservative.”
Despite racism becoming illegal after the introduction of the Race Relations Act 1965, Riaz still had to develop a thick skin very quickly. He still faced racism from the public, police officers, and arguably the most hurtful, from the children he went to school with.
“At the time, I didn’t realise why they [his parents] kept us indoors, but now as you get older, you realise it’s because of all the racism out there,” he explains.
“A police officer came up to me when I was small. He looked at me, licked his finger and looked at it to see if anything would come off my face. That’s the times we were living in. That’s how tough it was,” Riaz says, as he recounts one of the first racist encounters he experienced.
“It made me more resentful towards myself even though I’m fair skinned compared to other Asians. I was really resentful about my own culture, my own upbringing and my own background. I just wanted to be a white lad.”
In 1982, Riaz was in college and started hanging around with an Asian gang called the FBI, or otherwise known as the Female Body Inspectors, purely for protection.
The group, including himself, used to hang out around the Haymarket Shopping Centre as it was a relatively safe place for them to be.
And then one particular day that Riaz was there, he saw a group of men walk past him, and the leader was black. He recalls how uniquely dressed they all were, which is something that Riaz dreamed of.
This was an important thing for Riaz when he was growing up. He admits that he was probably the worst dressed child in school. His parents prioritised working hard and sending money back home to their families in Asia.
“Whatever money they had, it would pay the bills and groceries and then the rest of the money would go back [to Asia]. So, when it came to clothing, they didn’t provide for us that much. Me and my brother were really scruffy at school.
“All the white lads were dressed really well at school, and I’ve always wanted to be like that,” Riaz explains.
After that day at the Haymarket Shopping Centre, Riaz’s life changed. He decided to start dressing like the group – but this lifestyle he adopted came at a price.
He started committing petty crime so he could afford all the clothes that he needed in order to fit in. In those days, how you dressed mattered.
“You had the goths with black eye makeup and black fuzzy hair, then the punks with the spiky hair and studs everywhere. The skinheads, the mods, who were both dying out. The rockers, the casuals, the football hooligans. They all dressed a certain way.”
While in Leicester, Riaz was approached by one of the men in the group who invited him to a football match against Birmingham. At the time, Birmingham had a massive ethnic minority following, called the Zulus, and they were trying to get enough people involved in Leicester to show that they had the same thing.
The Saturday came and Riaz arrived at the train station to be greeted by a sea of people and immediately felt a sense of community.
“This is where I belonged. Throughout the school years, I didn’t belong to anything. I didn’t belong to any subcultures. No one really accepted Asians in those days,” Riaz says.
When they eventually arrived at Birmingham New Street, they stepped out and the group of Birmingham men, the Zulus, came charging towards them.
“People get excited jumping out of a plane, people get excited from getting in a cage and fighting someone. The adrenaline, the fear, the excitement, I was a ball of emotions,” he said.
Riaz recalls getting ready to punch this one man, but before he was able to, he was getting lifted off the ground by a police officer and he experienced his first time in jail. This is where he got to know other people from the Baby Squad, the city’s football hooligan ‘firm’.
The ones that Riaz was talking to were the YTS, Young Trendy Squad, but were all under the umbrella of the Baby Squad.
Riaz was released at about 9pm the same day, and when he returned home, he was expecting his dad to be furious with him, but when he learnt that Riaz had been fighting, he calmed down instantly and just warned him to not do it again.
He did not heed that advice.
For the next six years, Riaz and his little brother were travelling up and down the country with the Baby Squad and he saw it as another layer of protection.
“If anyone called me any name, I had a group of lads, who are Asian, black and white who would give it back to them. It was for protection and for camaraderie. The brotherhood that we had at that time was amazing,” says Riaz.
“It was violent, but we only fought those who wanted to fight us. We weren’t hooligans. We had a bit of finesse to us, a bit more class,” Riaz explains as he thinks back to the fighting days.
It wasn’t long until Riaz had to face jail time. He was sent down for four months after a Leicester vs Aston Villa game. He was being called names, and normally he could handle it and ignore it, but on that day, Riaz wasn’t going to take it. He ended up running into a crowd of people and eventually the police got hold of him and took him to the police station.
After the prison sentence, Riaz decided enough was enough. He realised that more and more people were getting arrested and sent down for longer and longer each time. So, instead he turned to raves, taking drugs and dancing, which went on for 18 months.
But the end of this lifestyle came after he took an acid tablet. It turned out to be a bad experience for Riaz and caused him to be extremely paranoid of everything and everyone.
“I became an introvert, and my friends didn’t want to know me because they couldn’t deal with who I was,” Riaz recalls.
His life turned into smoking weed and staying indoors most of the time.
“For the next 18 months, I was in a dark period of my life. I felt suicidal, I hated myself, I wasn’t well dressed anymore, my hair was falling out, I was scruffy. I was at rock bottom.”
Thankfully, Riaz was able to change his life around. He remembers one of his friends visiting, who he would previously buy weed from. Riaz remembers him having a long beard and told Riaz about his new life and religion.
A year prior to this encounter, Riaz had bought the Quran as he liked the cover on the front. And following his low mood, he decided to read it and managed to do so in two days.
“All the answers I was looking for during that dark period of my life were just there, in the Quran. Overnight I stopped smoking drugs, I stopped drinking alcohol, I stopped being horrible to people, and I just started looking at people as they were,” says Riaz.
Over the following years, he got a new set of friends, he got married, had children and got a degree in International Relations at De Montfort University and now works there as the EAP Module Lead and Senior Lecturer.
“When you have children, everything changes. Your whole perception of life changes, because you think about them more than you think about yourself,” says Riaz.
Since then, after seeing the rise of the EDL (English Defence League), Riaz has written a book about his life named Memoirs of an Asian Casual hoping that it could change at least one person’s life.
During the riots in 2024, sparked by Axel Rudakubana’s murderous attack on a girls’ dance class in Southport, many of the rioters were directing their abuse towards Muslims by attacking mosques or hotels that were housing asylum seekers. Many were misinformed by false social media speculation about him.
“It tarnishes the whole community, whereas the vast majority of us are law abiding, go about our own business, we want the best for our children,” says Riaz.
“It’s the media’s fault as well, fuelling the hatred. The upper class have always divided us.”
He is a firm advocate for ending hatred against Muslims and he continues to do so on his Instagram and Facebook page, where he continues to share his views and opinions.
Photo credit to Bundesarchiv and Wolfried Pätzold