When I was a child, I knew I had superpowers.
That's right.
I thought I was absolutely amazing because I could understand
and relate to the feelings of brown people, like my grandfather,
a conservative Muslim guy.
And also, I could understand my Afghan mother, my Pakistani father,
not so religious but laid-back, fairly liberal.
And of course, I could understand and relate to the feelings of white people.
The white Norwegians of my country. You know, white, brown, whatever,
I loved them all. I understood them all,
even if they didn't always understand each other,
they were all my people.
My father, though, was always really worried.
He kept saying that even with the best education,
I was not going to get a fair shake.
I would still face discrimination, according to him, and that they only way
to be accepted by white people would be to become famous.
Now mind you, he had this conversation with me when I was seven-years-old.
So while I'm seven-years-old, he said, look,
so its either got to be sports, or its got to be music.
He didn't know anything about sports -- bless him -- so it was music.
So when I was seven-years-old, he gathered all my toys, all my dolls,
and he threw them all away.
In exchange, he gave me a crappy little Casio keyboard and singing lessons.
He forced me, basically, to practice for hours and hours every single day.
Very quickly, he also had me performing for larger and larger audiences,
and bizarrely, I became almost a kind of poster child
for Norwegian multi-culturalism.
I felt very proud, of course.
Even the newspapers were starting to write nice things about brown people,
so I could feel that my superpower was growing.
So when I was 12-years-old, walking home from school,
I took a little detour because I wanted to buy
my favorite sweets called Salty Feets.
I know they sound kind of awful, but I absolutely love them.
They're basically these little salty licorice bits in the shape of feet.
And now that I say it out loud, I realize how terrible that sounds,
but be that as it may, I absolutely love them.
So on my way into the store, there was this grown white guy
in the doorway blocking my way.
So I tried to walk around him, and as I did that, he stopped me
and he was staring at me, and he spit in my face,
and he said, get out of my way you little black bitch,
you little Paki bitch, go back home where you came from.