Anber Raz is a British feminist activist. She is Acting Deputy Director of Donor Direct Action , an organisation which partners with visionary front-line women's groups around the world.When I grew up in Liverpool as a British Asian woman in the 1980s, it was not the cultural and diverse hub it is today. Being one of the very few non-white families in the city came with a price. The price I paid back then shaped who I am today; it’s why I identify as a feminist and why I work as an activist. Growing up in a racist and sexist Britain taught me something I only found words to put to later, when I read the iconic feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde:“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”My mother was 17 when she came to the UK from Pakistan. It was 1968. Like many young women, she dreamed of travelling and getting a first-rate education abroad. Her reality was very different. She described how, when she went shopping, shopkeepers who would smile at her with their “good old British charm” would then refuse to accept payment from her. They kept a jar of water filled with dishwasher soap and asked her to drop money in there, lest her brown skin rub off on them.Unlike my mother, my siblings and I were born in the UK; it’s the only home we’ve ever known and loved. However, some people never failed to point out that, actually, this wasn’t our home and we didn’t belong here. Our car was petrol-bombed numerous times; the 10-minute walk to and from school became something we dreaded, as we ran the gauntlet of having eggs and racial slurs thrown at us by neighbours and passers-by. I remember our parents were forced to turn our house into a fort, with bars on the windows and a steel-enforced front door, which took two people to open.During my teenage years in Liverpool, the racism I experienced took on a new form; it became tinged with sexism. We were already dealing with the patriarchal culture of our own British Asian communities and now we found ourselves the subject of extreme misogyny laced with racism. Asian women were viewed as “exotic and submissive” and Black women as “always sexually available”.I remember on one occasion a middle-aged white man once asked me what my religion was. When I answered “Muslim”, his response was: “Oh wish I was one of them, then I could have four of you”. Because of a combination of fear, frustration and intimidation, I felt it was usually best to ignore. But the feeling of being a target for racial and sexual harassment and an object of “fetishisation” in my home city, just for being a woman of colour, never left me.Over time, things changed for the better. More movement of people meant greater diversity. The UK’s non-white population increased from three million in 1991 to eight million by 2011 . Black and Asian women fought for their rights and for those rights to be protected in law. The 1976 Race Relations Act was replaced by the 2010 Equality Act, but attitudinal change was the major force. Blatant racism slowly became less acceptable in a “decent” society, which isn’t to say that it stopped, as any person of colour will tell you – it just became less obvious.Since we are at least now talking about these issues publicly, with movements like Black Lives Matter and seemingly better awareness of violence against women, I had hoped on some level that things had moved on. But deep down, I know that there is a huge gap between what some people say and what they really feel, which is hatred for anyone they think may rock their apple cart of power. This fear of losing privilege means that various combinations of structural sexism, racism, discrimination and hatred against anyone seen as “other” permeate all our lives.