I’ve mentioned before that I’m trying to challenge myself more this year. Saying ‘yes’ more often in a bid to finding the ‘new’ or ‘real’, post-baby me. Just starting this blog and more importantly, sharing it, has been quite a big step.

This week, I took a bigger step. A journalist asked me to post my most personal piece on the Huffington Post. VERY.BIG.DEAL. So in the shock and excitement, I posted it. People were happy for me. My mum said she was proud (sob!). It felt great.

Then I started to read the comments. Yeah, someone called it a load of tosh. Fine, I don’t expect everyone to agree with me. Someone on Twitter said I was perpetuating the issue – I don’t think they got what I was trying to do with the piece. Whatever. But one of them really stuck, suggesting ‘we return to my country of origin if I think the UK is so bad.’ Woah.

Do people really say that? And to complete strangers?! Isn’t it this kind of ignorance I’m trying to challenge? Was my piece so offensive, that a stranger took the time to type such a comment, rather than just click on the next article? If they’d read it in newspaper, would they have written a letter to respond? Probably not.

Whilst this was a faceless person, I’m very unlikely to ever come into contact with, it still hit me and it hurt. I’ve always just thought ‘ignore trolls’, ‘they have nothing better to do’, but my instinct was to reply, defend my opinion and put him in his place. I could have so easily given in to his provocation.

It’s really made me think about how powerful social media and the internet is. I consider myself to be quite a strong, confident person, but was quite surprised at how much one random comment hit me. What if I was a young, impressionable teen, whose taken months to build the confidence to post something online? The impact it could have had on me, could be so much worse.

Social media and the internet has made it so easy to react, insult, provoke people we do not know, without any thought of the consequences. Maybe I should be worried about my children going into a world where this is the ‘norm.’ I just  hope I can give them the confidence and resilience to ignore these faceless, and probably spineless, people.

xx

PS – you can read the piece in all its glory here http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/claire-quansah/teaching-children-about-racism_b_11873270.html?utm_hp_ref=uk