The Good Immigrant, by Nikesh Shukla
For me, this has to be one of the most important books that I’ve ever read. Then again, I don’t read a lot. Therefore take that last comment with a pinch of salt.
What I do however know, outside of books read but from lived life experiences, is that when you grow up in a mixed (back and white) household; that it is very easy to distil prejudice, discrimination and or racism down to a single binary element. That is to say that ‘this only happened to me as they see me as a black boy’. This book, opened my eyes and helped me further understand the complexity of being British and see how others, not from the black community, grew up in the same exact same environment and experienced the very same. ie it’s not a black view on life it’s a minorities perspective.
Don’t worry this book isn’t aimed exclusively at immigrants or descents thereof, but anyone and everyone who considers themselves British today.
Quite simply it’s a collection of short essays about the British immigrant experience and is a book that I wish more of my friends have read. therefore if you’d like me to send you my copy then just let me know.
“Integrate well. Move upwards in society. Be praised – until people worry that you’re doing too well, and then they remember that you’re foreign.”
“Racism in society often works through a divide and conquer strategy, more often than not it is also intertwined with classism as well as other forms of oppression. Structural racism can divide a community that would be stronger together, by keeping individual groups entrenched in their own class —in this case, caste discrimination.”
‘The Ungrateful Country’ closes the book, once said to me that the biggest burden facing people of colour in this country is that society deems us bad immigrants – job-stealers, benefit-scroungers, girlfriend-thieves, refugees – until we cross over in their consciousness, through popular culture, winning races, baking good cakes, being conscientious doctors, to become good immigrants. And we are so tired of that burden.”
“It’s a tree falling in a forest conundrum: if a white kid raps all the lyrics to ‘Gold Digger’ and there isn’t a black person around to hear it, is it still racist?”
“There is no ‘Aum’ without Indian dharmas, as there is no ‘Allah’ without Islam, nor ‘Pull-up!’ without UK Garage, or two hands coming together to form a W without Wu Tang. That is to say: You cannot have meaning without knowledge of the environment from which it stems.”
“When I was 10, a man who worked with my father called for him on the house phone. When I answered he said, ‘Oh, I must have the wrong number. How can a child that speaks like you have a dad that speaks with that ridiculous foreign mess?’ The mess was not that my father pronounces ‘hatred’ to sound like ‘hatriot’. Rather, that there is a whiteness that exists to be so tone-deaf it cannot make out our words, nor our lamp-fixtures, gods, nor our names –where all are as good as the dog-whistle without the Labrador.”
“We’ve never really been split, never been cut in half, we’ve just been silent about how we’ve been empowered because we haven’t always felt it, have been too busy being good immigrants, not making a fuss, and quieting down when people felt uncomfortable.”
“The fetishisation of the sexuality of black people comes from centuries of dirty dark shade. It starts with sleazy old jokes that black men have huge cocks, or that black women are hyper-sexual, and it festers to become something toxic and sinister. This continues now, mostly unquestioned, with the sexual objectification of women, rounded fat bottoms and full lips all across the media industry. But once the canned laughter dies down or the fashion shoot is done and dusted, and you stop and take a cold hard look at the root history of these jokes and stereotypes, it all comes from a shade so bleak and so ignorant, that it has a sub-human subtext to it –brown people for sale in a human pet shop window.”
“To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t really belong to either.”
“My mother is the same shade as Oprah or Maya. Some summers I have seen my big brother almost as brown as Idris but closer to Obama in the winter. Bob Marley was mixed, Jamaican and Celtic, same as me, his shade looks pale in some photos, sometimes much darker. You see, it all depends on the filter and the time of year, it all depends on the light, it all depends on the shade. It depends on what point people are trying to make, to advertise things, to sell you things, to make money.”
“Respectability politics is the dogged belief that if black people just shape up, dress better and act right, racists would suddenly have a dramatic change of heart, and stop their racist ways. Respectability politics puts all of its faith in racist gatekeepers (telling us that we must change to appeal to their inherent, good-natured humanity), and puts none if its faith in black people living under the weight of poverty and discrimination, scrabbling, trying to make a life anyway they can.”
“Your shade is not skin deep. Your shade isnot just about your heart and soul; your religion and spirituality, your elders and your history, your connection to a country, to geography and to a time and place. Your shade is an industry, your shade is a token, shade is a passport, shade is a cage and shade is a status.
“One of the many online arguments I’ve had about the importance if language, how language can hurt, has been about tea. Chai tea means tea tea. The number of times you see this on a menu makes you wonder why people can’t be bothered to do their research. Like naan bread too. Bread bread.”