yeah, moments like that make me feel, like, ok, ali, maybe you re doing something right. maybe you re doing something right. typically, when people think of british bangladeshis, they may think of, like, east london or tower hamlets or that brick lane street. not for me. you know, i grew up in an area in the county of devon. ..one of the whitest parts of england. look, i live right outside of this river, i ve got views. there s a super pool. they trying to, like, push into me. oi, no! to a lot of my white friends, i was actually the only brown person they had ever met in their entire life, right? it got so bad that once my cousin came to visit me in town, but my friends got me
it sounds funny when i say it now, but. ..every now and then on a game show you d have, like, a brown person come on. and that was a moment for my family. we were like, come, come, come, there s like some indian guy on here, you know. all i remember now is he was just brown. that was good enough for us, right? ifeel like being bengali and bangladeshi, it s almost seen as at the bottom. we re like a minority within a minority. being a bangladeshi woman, that stopped me achieving certain things. we as a community forget the power we have. in the year when bangladesh turns 50 years old, i m going to show you what it means to be british bangladeshi in 2021. look here with ali official. let s go! and how the young generation of british bangladeshis are changing things up.
this is bbc news. we will have the headlines and all the news straight after this programme at the top of the hour. i m ali shahalom, also known as ali official, and i m a comedian. no, no, man, just chilling. just filming this thing for the bbc. yeah, bangali british corporation and that. white people get degrees to getjobs, right? asian people get degrees to get married. laughter. one of the easiest ways for me to show love is just by bringing mangoes home. yeah, just bring mangoes, you know, and i come home, bring the mango box, shout, hey, rukhsana, i ve got mangoes. if that s not love, i don t know what love is. there are around half a million people of british bangladeshi ethnicity in the uk, and i am one of them. but honestly, sometimes i feel like we re forgotten about. i remember growing up.