by Waheed Khan
Filmmaker

As a 30 something Londonstani I’ve grown accustomed to being stopped and searched by the boys in blue. My white friends forever ask me, “What is it like to have the police stopping you just because your skin colour fits a racial profile?”. Same old shenanigans. Black friends jokingly say, “It’s your turn to be enemy number 1!”

If you flip the script what would it be like if you were born in the wrong colour skin. I’m talking about Albinism, a genetic condition that affects the pigment in your eyes, hair and skin. This is the subject of my latest documentary ‘Britain’s Whitest Family’ where I meet 3 young British Albinos.

1 in 17,000 people are born Albino but British Pakistani Haider Ali, 25, is from a family where all 7 of them have the condition. If you include his first cousins, that makes 15 Pakistani Albinos in one family. It’s understood that Haider’s family could be the biggest Albino family in the world.

Coventry based Haider is 6 foot 3 and dreams of cashing in on his unique look and becoming the first Pakistani Albino in Bollywood – but he is struggling with his identity and lack of support from society.

He says: “Asian groups don’t want to accept us, English groups don’t want to accept us. Because they think we are a race of our own. We are labelled as freaks…or something out of a horror movie.”

Londoner Ayo Unoarumhi is 16. His parents are black Nigerian but along with his brother and sister, all three are Albino. All Ayo wants is for people to believe he is Black.

“Its really irritable when someone comes and tells me, that I try to be black. How the hell can I be black, how the hell do I be black? I’m constantly surrounded by black people, I have a black African family, I’ve got the lips, I’ve got the flared nostrils, I got the black build, I will only have black or half black children, surely I’m black, or what the hell am I?” he says.

Caucasian Joey Stevenson is 15 and lives in Bolton. You may think because his parents are ‘white’ and he is English he isn’t as effected as Haider or Ayo, but he too has been ostracised and bullied by locals who refer to him as a freak. Joey finds solace in music and can play keyboards, guitar, bass and drums.

Joey says: “At 4 years old I used to wear really dark glasses and I used to have to wear an eye patch. So I knew then I was different and I wasn’t gonna fit in.”

Waheed Khan’s documentary film ‘Britain’s Whitest Family’ – Friday 3rd October, Channel 4, 7.30pm