Member Since: 4/10/2012
Posts: 14,394
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I didn't know until recently either. She talks about her heritage in this interview:
Quote:
Charli's mom settled in Bishop's Stortford when she arrived from Uganda because of its proximity to London Stansted Airport. Her grandmother lives in Brighton. Growing up, Charli didn't take an interest in her mother's heritage, but that's now changed.
"I just don't think I really understood when I was younger," she says. "I never really questioned it. She was just my mom. And then, I think as I got older, I began to start asking her about where she lived. She lived at the bottom of a valley, and on either side were two shantytowns. I remember she told me that one day they came home from school, her and her younger sister, and they found a gardener dead in the garden with some shears stabbed through him. It's kind of intense. And I just remember her telling me stories, like their treat was to have McDonald's once every two months. My nana is still very much in love with Uganda and the culture, so whenever I see her, I hear the music and I hear about her Indian heritage and things like that. I'm actually at the moment really interested in Indian music and Gujarati folk music. I'm feeling like that's maybe where I might go with my next record, but I don't know yet."
As a child of Ugandan Asian descent, Charli didn't experience any racism directed toward her, but she witnessed it firsthand. She believes that those attitudes filtered through to the kids whose grandparents grew up in East London and Harlow.
"I grew up around people throwing the word Paki around," Charli remembers. "And they'd be like, 'Oh, we're going to the Paki shop,' like a corner shop or whatever. I personally think that's really racist. A lot of people I knew would throw that term around, and it would always upset me, not because I'm Pakistani, but just because I thought it was really wrong. And my mom actually once had an incident where she was getting out of her car in broad daylight, in the middle of our town, and these guys went past her on a bicycle and threw a milkshake at her and called her a Paki. She was so upset, as she would be. But that's nothing to some things that happen.
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http://www.undertheradarmag.com/interviews/charli_xcx/
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