Afua Hirsch: Brit(ish)

“Brit(ish)” (2018) is a book by Afua Hirsch about race, identity and belonging in Britain.

Hirsch:

“Sometimes, when people tell me to ‘get over’ the questions of race and identity that so preoccupy me, I think how carefree that would be.”

The book opens with the words of Maya Angelou when she went to live in Africa:

“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

Hirsch has never felt that. She is too Black for Britain and too British for Africa. And even too posh for the ‘hood.

The Question: Everywhere she goes, but especially in Britain, she gets The Question:

“Where are you from?”

Race: Her mother is Black, her father White. Of her four grandparents, two came from Ghana, one from England, and one, her Jewish grandfather, fled Nazi Germany. Her parents brought her up to be British. They did not think of her as Black.

Britain: She grew up in a White, well-to-do part of London, the Wimbledon of tennis fame, and went to one of Britain’s top universities, Oxford. Both places were made by and for White people. She felt out of place in both.

Africa: She left Britain to go live in Africa, in Ghana. But she felt out of place there too. She returned to Britain – to find she was not the only one going through an identity crisis:

Brexit: In the 2010s immigration became a huge issue. Britain broke away from the European Union, in part to stop the free flow of foreigners into the country. Britain needed them – but they made easy scapegoats for Britain’s troubles. And she was seen as one of them, despite having grown up in Britain. Not because she was, in fact, born in Norway, but because she did not look White.

The Good Immigrant: She was expected to be a Good Immigrant: to marry White, never be drunk or loud, never bring up racism, never make White people uncomfortable, distance herself from Bad Immigrants, etc. White people in turn would tolerate her living in “their” country – and pat themselves on the back for being such tolerant people!

Many in Britain long for the good old days that never were, for the false, Whitewashed picture of the past they were taught as schoolchildren. Make Britain White again!

• Thus “Downton Abbey” and all those other lily-White period dramas they love so much.
• Thus the way many could not abide a mixed-race Meghan Markle as part of the royal family.
• Thus the many Blacks and Muslims in Britain who no longer regard themselves as British, not really.
• Thus the homegrown terrorists who no longer see Britain as their country – not because of “radical clerics” or anything like that, but because of White people themselves.

White Britain is racist “with a smiling face” – but is too blind, colour-blind, to see it. To see it would destroy their storybook picture of themselves.

– Abagond, 2020.

See also:

• books – those I read in 2020
• Maya Angelou
• Britain
  • The British through time: the last 10,000 years
  • “Britain no longer has a serious race problem”
• compare:
  • Grada Kilomba on racism in Europe
  • growing up in the USA: Black, biracial, Latino
• tropes:
  • “Where are you really from?”
  • “I don’t see colour”
  • respectability politics – similar to the Good Immigrant thing
  • White nationalism – well, the US sort
• yet more mixed chicks:
  • Meghan Markle
  • Zadie Smith: Swing Time
  • Belle
  • Where Hands Touch
  • mixed-ish
  • The Feast of All Saints
  • Jennifer Beals
  • Lacey Schwartz
  • Nella Larsen: Passing
  • Danzy Senna: Caucasia

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