‘I don’t mean this maliciously.’

The words spoken by Olajide William Olatunji, better known as KSI, should have served as a warning sign. 

Sure enough, immediately after saying that, the YouTuber, rapper and occasional boxer uttered a hateful slur – ‘the P word.’

He used this as an answer for a word-based game show hosted by his YouTube group, The Sidemen, and the slur was bleeped out on the group’s video, but you could see him mouth it.

When I first saw the video on Twitter I was in shock. How could one of the biggest internet personalities in the UK, the world even, use this word? Then I was filled with anger. 

And that’s before I even consider how ridiculous KSI’s preamble was – the idea that that word can be used without malicious intent is frankly laughable. 

The Londoner, who has since apologised, is facing a wave of backlash but to me the whole episode goes to show how racism against the South Asian community in Britain is not taken seriously enough. If it was, he wouldn’t have said it in the first place. 

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What angered me most was the reaction from KSI’s co-stars. 

His colleagues just sat there and laughed, and one of them, Yung Filly, had even advertised the video as a ‘banger’ before it went live. 

Seeing not only white co-hosts, but those ‘Sidemen’ who are members of the BAME community, laugh off such a hurtful comment is frustrating. 

Not least because at least one of the co-stars, Chunkz, has acknowledged he has responsibilities as a role model, and I know that he has a lot of fans in the South Asian community.

The fact this situation has escalated this far is indicative of how I believe Britain does not take the issue of anti-South Asian racism seriously enough. 

As a young South Asian man living in a city with one of the largest numbers of British Pakistanis, Bradford, I have had more than my share of this word being hurled at me.

I remember one experience when I was 16 – my friend and I were approached by a drunken older man who, completely unprompted, shouted the word at us. 

It stuck with me, because as a child I was taught about such racism in a historical context. I thought as a society we had moved past this hateful intolerance but it was an indication to me that problems still existed.

My grandfather has recounted many stories to me of the prejudice he faced when he moved to Britain in the 1960s. 

Walking past boarded up buildings painted with ‘P***s Out’ signs and businesses with ‘no P***s allowed’ plastered on shop fronts were just some of the indignities he had to endure. 

While my generation isn’t suffering the same levels of open abuse that our community has historically faced, the ‘P word’ to me represents the struggles others went through in order to integrate into British society, and there’s no excuse for ever using it. 

What unnerves me about this incident is how it was clearly not just an of-the-moment slip of the tongue from KSI. 

He is one of the biggest stars in the UK with, presumably, a huge team surrounding him. 

For the video to have been published it must have gone through an editing process, involving a number of people. Yet it seems not one of them thought to do anything other than merely bleep this blatant offensive slur and play it for laughs. 

This is damning evidence that for some, this word has become normalised.  

KSI’s influence is a huge concern for me too – with a combined 40million subscribers on his own channels, and over 18million on the Sidemen channel, he’s a massive star. 

You just have to watch videos of the carnage that unfolds when shops stock his new business venture, the energy drink Prime, to understand his impact. 

While KSI’s apology was a good first step it simply isn’t enough

KSI should be setting a good example but instead seems to have promoted the normalisation of this racism to millions of impressionable young kids. 

This is apparent in the army of keyboard warriors I’ve already seen on social media trying to excuse his actions – that they are trying to defend the indefensible shows just how intense his fandom is. 

While his apology was a good first step it simply isn’t enough. I couldn’t help but feel a degree of cynicism when I saw him announce a social media break – something that is not going to proactively help those he has offended.

KSI must go out and meet community leaders to understand the significance and hurt of his words. 

The fact that he hasn’t appeared to suffer any major consequences, like losing sponsorship deals, suggests to me that anti-South Asian racism isn’t being taken as seriously as it should be.  

The timing of this incident shows that this is not just a one-off case, but something society as a whole struggles with. Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, was only this weekend accused of using ‘dog whistles’ when discussing child-sex grooming gangs and the British Pakistani community. 

Braverman said that ‘almost all’ members of grooming gangs were British-Pakistani men. 

Not only is this, according to a 2020 Home Office report, inaccurate, I believe Braverman’s words will only serve to sew divisions between different communities. 

Despite many British Pakistanis recently celebrating history with the election of Humza Yousaf, KSI’s comments and the claims of Braverman show just how far we have to go to tackle anti-Pakistani sentiment. 

To start, we need better data to understand the scale of the problem. 

There needs to be education in the classrooms around the history of the vile P word as well as around the contribution that British-Pakistanis, and all South Asians, have made to the UK. 

Britain still has a long way to go in terms of race relations – and whether a YouTube megastar or a top politician, everyone has to mind their language.

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