Status:
Completed
Rating:
4 Stars
Quotes & Highlights
As well as being wrong, the idea that there were no immigrants in the nostalgic Britain of old is also irrelevant, because while it claims to be about foreigners coming to the UK, it’s really about something else. The true purpose of modern claims about immigration is to create a scapegoat for society’s deeper, more intractable problems.
Most of the well-heeled residents of my home suburb prefer to say they do not see race at all. And because race allegedly did not exist, in this all-white world, the whiteness that made me so self-conscious was regarded as completely normal. It was I who was at odds with my environment – I did not conform. But, since there was no such thing as race, there was no space in which it could matter. But it did matter to me. Even before I had a vocabulary to express it, race began to manifest itself in my life.
My childhood world was very, very different. Wimbledon: a plane- and oak-tree-lined London borough, with Edwardian houses, laid out methodically on the steep streets of this patch of high suburbia famous for the tennis championships, an annual celebration of typically British stoicism in the face of summer rain, strawberries and cream, and the ever-elusive fantasy of national triumph in global sport. My memories are filed under the botanical English seasons that thread through them; berry-stained rambles on Wimbledon Common, gathering crumble fillings for autumn puddings, sledging on snow days, nature trails in spring and picnics in summer. It was a soft and silky childhood, with treats, adventures, absorbing schoolwork and intense friendships, challenges that I embraced and seasons that I loved; tossing in bed on long summer evenings, listening to the sounds of older children still playing on the street, kicking up the leaves on the walk home as the autumn nights drew in, hot chocolate on stormy nights, fires in the hearth in winter, school uniform bulking and shedding as the planet turned away from and back towards the sun.
I already knew that I looked different – kids work that out for themselves – but that there was something bad about my difference, something inherently undesirable about being black: that, I had to be taught. The first teachers were my peers at school. From the age of seven to the age of eighteen, I went to the same school, where I was one of a minuscule number of children with brown skin. In primary school, my classmates’ favourite name for me was ‘troll’– more a reference to my hair than my skin colour. In the 1980s, the days before social media, high-budget Dreamworks movies or Justin Timberlake songs, ‘troll’ described unglamorous little plastic key-ring toys with Day-Glo, gravity-defying hair.
If I were to single out the most persistent reminder of that sense of not belonging, it would be The Question. The Question is: where are you from? Although I have lived in five different countries as an adult, nowhere have I been asked The Question more than right here where I started, where I am from, in Britain. It can be difficult to communicate to British people who innocently ask The Question, usually out of a harmless, well-meaning curiosity, what is wrong with it.
The confusion I experienced, as a mixed-race girl descended from Jewish and African immigrants in a European country in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is no different from those that have gone before. It’s not the muddled inheritance itself that is the problem. There is no such thing as racial purity in any event. It’s the muting of the conversation – the fact that we cannot in Britain today cope with exploring and accommodating these identities in a healthy way – that is the issue. This failure is capable of turning both our individual and our national heritage from a rich and complex asset into an identity crisis of epic proportions.
In Britain, we are taught not to see race. We are told that race does not matter. We have convinced ourselves that if we can contort ourselves into a form of blindness, then issues of identity will quietly disappear.
…
We want to be post-racial, without having ever admitted how racial a society we have been.
“Britain has no ‘white history’. British history is the multiracial, interracial story of a nation interdependent on trade, cultural influence and immigration from Africa, India, Central and East Asia, and other regions and continents populated by people who are not white, and before that, invasion by successive waves of European tribes most of whom, had the concept of whiteness existed at the time, would not have fitted into it either.”
White supremacy is ever-present in British society. I’m not talking about hooded hillbillies in the Deep South burning crosses, or skinheads with Nazi tattoos – although they do exist – but the underlying ideology for a system where generations of people were conditioned to believe in the inferiority of non-white, non-Christian, non-Europeans. An empire was built on this idea; the enduring concept of ‘Western civilisation’ is an expression of this idea. It is not something that disappears overnight, especially when it has never actually been defeated or overthrown. You cannot get over a wrong without the wrong having been named, owned and acknowledged. You cannot change without articulating what needs changing.
It was the perfect place to raise a family, in all but one respect. I had brown skin, an African name, hair that coiled tightly, knotted and frizzed when brushed, and never flopped around my face.
Author’s Foreword:
‘England is an island but not I land,” say the Rastas. They may have been born in Birmingham or Bristol but they don’t believe they belong in the UK. The same feeling courses through every fibre of Afua Hirsch’s being. The daughter of a black Ghanaian woman and white English man, Hirsch recalls how, in going to work in Senegal as a young adult, she “had left Britain to leave being British”.
An investigation into a nation’s identity and the barrister turned journalist’s lack of a sense of belonging, Brit(ish) is a hybrid of memoir, reportage and social commentary. But it is also a quest to articulate and complete a personal identity by looking to Africa for answers, and this has taken place down the ages.
One of the most notable “Back to Africa” movements, which flourished during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was Marcus Garvey’s attempt to establish a colony in Liberia and founding of the Black Star Line steamship company. Such movements were predicated not just on the dream of physical reunion – of black people restored to the motherland after the profound wrench of the transatlantic slave trade – but also on the need for psychological repair. Unlike those “stealing away” on the Black Star Line, Hirsch is not the product of slavery. A reprehensible relative on her mother’s side was a Dutch slave trader who set up camp at Elmina, western Africa, the point of enforced departure for many of the enslaved to the New World. Though such an ancestral lineage complicates matters, the same Back to Africa current fizzes through Brit(ish). It is heartrending to read how, after two violent incidents on the African continent (she was attacked alone in Senegal, and then with her husband, Sam, in Ghana), her dream of belonging dissipates “into the heat like a desert mirage”.
Hirsch combines candour with self-deprecating humour: she is challenged by hair difficulties (“Being black is like having beauty special needs”), and Sam teases her that writing the account constitutes a degree of privilege. “What kind of black person feels they actually have to write a book about being black?” he asks. But Hirsch is also inserting herself into history.
The arrival of Caribbean people on the Empire Windrush in 1948 forced white Britons to see, perhaps for the first time, a history that had been hidden from them or packaged in a flattering way. When, as a schoolchild, Hirsch was taught history, she would emerge from lessons on William Wilberforce with the impression that the British only took part in the transatlantic slave trade so they could later abolish it.
Hirsch’s focus is not the more violent racism she has suffered; the story of the man who took off his belt threatening to thrash her following a racist spat is only given a sentence. Rather it’s the many micro-aggressions that draw her attention. At Oxford University she was a self-consciously alien presence, irritated by porters who insisted she show her ID as she entered its colleges, while her white student friends were not stopped. At Sky News she becomes a source of irritation to a jealous colleague who on Hirsch’s appointment tells her: “Don’t take this personally but you can’t get a promotion around here if you’re white these days.”
Brit(ish) is the work of a confident social guide all too used to “collecting examples of blatant racism in the mainstream press”. Only rarely does her compass go awry. Hirsch’s visit to a seedy swingers’ party held by the Black Man’s Fan Club, for white women (and their watching partners), is not the most subtle route into the complicated myth of black male hypersexuality. More powerful is her argument that there has been a failure of imagination among a generation of progressives, who have steadfastly absolved themselves of racial bias, convinced that they don’t “see colour”.
The book’s critique of the vicissitudes of black life calls to mind one of its more potent precursors, Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Thirty years on from that academic work, it’s a depressing indication of continued British prejudice that Hirsch tells – with justified anger – similar tales of the miseducation of black boys and attempts to degrade black female sexuality. The power of her writing matches that of other important black writers, among them Gilroy and, going back two centuries, the American abolitionist John Brown Russwurm, who proclaimed: “Too long have others spoke for us [such that] our vices and our degradations are ever arraigned against us, but our virtues pass unnoticed.”