Peter Andre shared on Monday an impassioned post about his experience with racism growing up in Australia with Greek parents.
The singer was inspired to share his thoughts following a heated race debate on Good Morning Britain between journalist Piers Morgan and a lawyer defending one of the police officers involved with the murder of George Floyd.
Andre was born in Harrow, north-west London, to Greek parents. But he says his family had racism thrown at them “for years” after they moved from London to Australia when he was six years old.
“Both my parents are Greek and we had racism thrown at us left right and centre for years,” Andre shared on Instagram.
“When you see or experience racism. When you see it happen to people over and over again. When you see what happened to George Floyd, you can’t just sit back and say nothing. It’s not right, it never has been.”
This isn’t the first time Andre has spoken out about the racial abuse he experienced in Australia as a result of his Greek ethnicity.
Just last year, he spoke with The Guardian about how the panic attacks he suffered for the best part of two decades were probably related to his early years in Australia.
“When I moved to the Gold Coast, we were the only ethnic family I knew. It was all blond-haired, blue-eyed Australians. At school one day they tied me to the fence and took turns throwing stones to see who was going to hit me in the head. I was petrified,” Andre told the media outlet.
“But it was pointless going to the teachers because they were just as bad. I remember a teacher saying to me: ‘Listen here, you greasy wog, if you think you’re going to do well in my class, you’ve got another thing coming. You sit in the back corner. I don’t want to see your face.’ That’s how they talked. The teachers!”
But despite an early childhood filled with racism, Andre is now making up for lost time career-wise. As well as touring the UK with Grease last year, he also made his big-screen acting debut in The Inheritance, a short film about a heroin addict for which he received a best actor nomination at the North Hollywood film festival.
