Nigerian Princess Keisha Omilana says she experiences “passive-aggressive” racism from people in London who don’t recognize that she and her family are members of royalty.
During an interview in the documentary series “Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over,” Princess Keisha talks mainly about her seven-year-old daughter’s modeling career, and how the family has adjusted the last four years to living in London versus New York City.
“In the US, police officers and just white people in general can just flat out murder a Black person and not even go to jail for it. Whereas here, the racism is here but it’s passive aggressive, just like England. Everyone here is passive aggressive,” she explains in the documentary.
She added, “We were in Chelsea for three years — I can probably count on one hand the number of times somebody said hello. I’d say, ‘Hi, good morning,’ and they’d look at you as if you were about to grab their bag or something.”
For Princess Keisha, her experience in London is that some of the people who live there assume Black and brown people live in low-income housing, and that white people are wealthy. During an interview with Insider, she said her former neighbors were surprised that her family didn’t fit their “image” of what Black people should be— particularly that Black people can actually be wealthy.
“If you’re English and white and at a country club, you never question how your friend who is white managed to pay to get in. But then you question a family that’s Black or Indian,” she says.
She adds she doesn’t think everyone in Chelsea was racist and that a lot of the microaggressions and treatment they received may be, in part, because they were outsiders in a very close community.
“They were very cold because they didn’t know who we were,” she said.