I prefer to live in a multicultural melting pot, so to say. However, the human condition in multicultural societies such as Britain or the US or India can be one of growing uneasiness and disenchantment instead of being comforting and ennobling.
Shukla (2017) is a collection of essays by 21 writers. It is a brilliant exploration of what it means to be Asian, Black and minority ethnic in Britain today. You cannot miss out these experiences of immigrants in Britain if you are keen to pursue higher studies there.
You also cannot be blind to these experiences if you are carried away by the 1891-92 “Leaves of Grass” poems of Walt Whitman so as to harbour the illusion of settling down well as an equal to the white person in Europe or North America. Whitman had thought of America as the “centre of equal daughters, equal sons”, who are “strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable”, and who identify themselves with “Freedom, Law and Love”; and saluted America as the “grand, sane, towering, seated Mother” who is “chair’d in the adamant of Time”. Unfortunately, white supremacism—the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them—is a blunt or subtle reality experienced by most immigrants in the western countries.
As Shukla points out, this volume is a documentation of what it means to be a person of colour now under the systemic racism that runs through Britain. The beautiful, powerful and unapologetic essays in the volume underline the point 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.”
In other words, this volume along with the 26 essays in Shukla and Suleyman (2019) address the compelling question as to what it is like to live in a so-called ‘multi-cultural’ country such as Britain or America that does not trust you and does not want you unless you win an Olympic gold medal or a national baking competition!
Here I give you a concrete flavour of BAME—Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic—writing, that you find in books like these, as follows.
As a Pakistani or Gujarati Indian, you can see race and difference reflected in the casualness of the usage of belittling words (‘you are a paki’) or even “Namaste” on the part of the whites.
As a mixed-race child, making sense of your identity is confusing. You do not always come out looking like your parents, and often you will be racialised differently to them. If you are a cross-breed between a black father and a white mother, you are sometimes called “Oreo” which means you are a kid that is black on the outside and white on the inside. But instead of seeing you as neither black nor white or raceless or mixed or orange, the world basically sees blackness in you before it sees anything else and operates around you with blackness in mind. You are said to have “Afro” hair or lips. The idea that there is one way to be black prevails although there is no singular way to be black, no universal set of experiences that blacks all share, no stereotype that can accommodate the vast array of personalities and histories and ethnic backgrounds that black people possess!
Mixed children are called half-caste, half-breed, and mulatto. But surely if you are from two colours, two races, you are two shades, and therefore not half-caste, not half anything, but whole, you are double-caste. But half sounds shadier. Half means less. You lose. You are half a person. You are a “golliwog”.
As a mixed-race person, you are nothing but a shade, light or dark. And this shade is your identity. Most of us are mixed something or other, and the world is majorly populated with minorities of shades.
From India to Africa, the Caribbean, all over the world, skin bleaching is big business and the shade of your skin is your freedom or your prison. The colour of the outside of you dictates existence and acceptance. Your shade is the symbol of your wealth, your beauty, your worth and your success!
The fact all the same is that “We live in the shade and shadow of secrets and lies, this shared dirty history of colonialism, rape, land theft and slavery. Slavery was abolished, at a cost, with promises of land and wealth and freedom. Jamaica may have gained independence from Britain in 1962 but today we still chase those broken promises and fight for truth, justice and reparations.” “Britain is an island surrounded by salt seawater and inhabited by people of every shade. On a whole I do not think of people as flocks of sheep but more as shoals of fish, swimming to find food and heat and migrating to survive. We could protect each other better if we swam together in unison, we could protect each other from great white sharks dominating everything. We could, but we are like fish, as fickle as fish…The shade of your skin is not the whole content of you and your work. The shade of your skin should not be the measure of your worth. The shade of your skin is not your only audience nor should it be a limitation…May the size of your heart and the depth of your soul be your currency…All over the world, wherever they end up, whatever the shade of their skin, refugee brown or immigrant brown, who is protecting the kids from the predators, traffickers, from rape and murder?”
As a ‘brown girl’—part-Iraqui, part-Iranian, part-British—with a funny (slightly unpronounceable) name, you are much less likely to be a doctor or lawyer or farmer or librarian or a hairdresser or even a villain with a good heart and far more likely to be something—terrorist or wife of a terrorist—that has sadly become synonymous with the Middle East. Being unwhite also seems to mean that people make assumptions about what you can do. Stereotypes are still being maintained in the twenty-first century, the era of diversity!
As a person of Turkish origins and being born, educated and brought up by the streets of London—north, east, and south—it seems to you that if cultures were to survive in England, it would be on the shoulders of bastardisation. But there is a whiteness that exists to be so tone-deaf it cannot make out Turkish words, nor Turkish lamp-fixtures, gods, nor Turkish names—where all are as good as the dog-whistle without the Labrador!
If you are a small, yellow-skinned female, you are taken as one hundred percent ethnically Chinese. But actually, you feel the tensions between your Chinese ethnicity, your ex-colony Malaysian homeland, your British citizenship, and your “American Dream” aspirational immigrant outlook. You realise that while you are technically East Asian in terms of ethnicity and descent, you are not East Asian in the way some people might want you to be. In England, you are reminded often: You are yellow. Chinese. Both East Asianness and Chineseness are ascribed to you by the white as also black and brown people. Skin colour versus citizenship. It is not black and white. In the UK, ‘East Asian’ is replacing the word ‘oriental’ as the politically correct way to refer to people from the countries in that region. Asian females are sexually objectified as ‘hotties’. Chinese folk across the UK are abused, not only frequently but repeatedly—Chinese takeaway workers are sitting ducks. Chinese people experience higher levels of fear and violence than any other minority group in the UK. There is police indifference towards racial abuse suffered by Chinese people who are subject to ‘positive racism’ in the name of a ‘model minority’—sensible, quiet, shy and reserved and hardworking in Britain. British Chinese are looked at as outsiders and there is systemic prejudice against them in academia too—“You have to be better than you should be in order just to keep up…you have to be better just to stay par.” Although the Chinese are taken as ‘good immigrants’, they do not experience real equality, or even acceptance—“Breaking out of the model minority box and looking beyond that status towards humanity and freedom is the long game.”
Demeaning sexism is conveyed in the word ‘gold-digger’ when a coloured woman is after a white alpha male. And apart from the most frequently used n-word (nigger), there are other racist words. The slur ‘slope’ is used when referring to a Burmese man. Orientals including half-Chinese are called chink or jap. Yellowface is a form of theatrical makeup used by performers to represent an East Asian person. The golden rule that all minority ethnic people learn when they are growing up in Britain is that they are simply not supposed to get angry about any of this.
As a third generation Nigerian immigrant girl, you notice ‘respectability politics’ as a dehumanising antidote to the monolithic representation of black people as lazy, uneducated and stupid— “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 of its faith in black people living under the weight of poverty and discrimination, scrabbling, trying to make a life anyway they can.”
Immigrant communities are berated for not adhering to ‘British values’ and for their (especially muslim women’s) poor language skills. The tabloid media demonises refugees on a daily basis and there is too much rhetoric encouraging the immigrants to prove their allegiance to the country’s best interests. Language is the great losing battle to fight and even when you get the language, unless you shed your accent, you are continually reminded of your difference. For Indians, their accent has almost become a universal in-joke.
So many second-and-third generation immigrants are anomalous in both worlds—their British homeland and their original homelands. They might feel good all the same thus: “Being aware of inadequacies or seeing your own strangeness through different eyes, gives us a wholeness that allows us to see the world with humour, nuance, and complexity.”
When children of colour in primary schools that serve multiracial, multicultural, multifaith communities, are asked to write a story, they write a story featuring characters with traditional English names who speak English as a first language. This does not imply that children are colour-blind. It merely reflects the lack of children’s literature that reaches across cultural and ethnic borders to touch them all as human, and as such, they cannot see themselves at all in the books they are reading and so they think that stories have to be about white people. The same marginalisation holds good for stories from film and television.
The term ‘black’ was used by African Americans as both a political and socially conscious alternative to ‘negro’ (or the much darker nigger). It was an act of defiance, self-identification, and as a way of distancing themselves from the ‘African’ label, which had abundantly negative connotations at the time. Nowadays, it is used for darker-skinned people of sub-Saharan descent everywhere. Black men from all 54 African countries live in England, and even a conservative estimate would put at least 1,000 different types of them in the country. “Whenever we beg for nuances, for our differences to be articulated, for more diversity and accuracy in how our communities are described, in the characters written for black actors on stage, on television, or in film our voices are either silenced or ignored.”
“The fetishization 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.”
The everyday shit of living in black skin and aspiring to be a versatile actor is well put forward thus: “Whiteness…exists as the basic template. And that template covers all human experience, by the way: the ability to be special or ordinary, handsome or ugly, tall or short, interesting or dull as ditchwater. On the other hand, our presence in popular culture (as well as in non-stereotypical ‘issue’ roles) must always be justified. Our place at the table has to be earned. We must somehow show we are worthy of inclusion in representations of the culture that we live and breathe in. Does that black woman deserve to be on that show? Give the exact reason that Chinese-British man is in this scene. Explain the series of decisions that led us to having this mixed-race boy in this film. Please show your working for maximum marks.”
As a black immigrant from Uganda, you are stop-searched by police, merely for waiting by a bus stop. You learn that ‘loitering’ is a code word for ‘being dark-skinned in broad daylight’. A gang of white youths who find the mere presence of a black so offensive that they spontaneously set upon him and stab him to death. This is too shocking to you to bear, more than the discrimination of the white police force. The Ku Klux Klan logo is symbolic of lethal white power. Even the calling-card of being an Etonian is not good enough to shield you from prejudice in the upper-class world. It is racist when admission is denied in London nightclubs to blacks like you on the basis of race and culture. The country’s economic problems are blamed, not on the misfiring calculations of the financial sector, but instead on the ills of mass immigration. Britain is shamelessly ungrateful about the capital’s and the country’s lowest-paid work being done by immigrants. The white middle-and upper-class parents cannot accept blacks like you to marry their daughters even when you live a decent, law-abiding life. A happily married mixed-race couple is unthinkable or unacceptable. You find racism boring—really dull. You wish it did not exist, and have spent most of your life trying to help to counteract many of its worst effects in society. You have grown tired of all of this and finally you feel defeated when you see that young black people are still being shot on sight in the USA because they are regarded as inherently criminal due to their skin colour; black people are dying unexplained at police hands; black people are having disproportionate trouble renting apartments in the world’s most cosmopolitan cities or even getting job interviews because of the foreign-looking names on their CVs. You take the advice that the racists in the UK had long spat at foreigners—‘if you don’t like it, then go ahead and leave’—and decide to leave the United Kingdom and embrace the generous Berlin as your new home.
If you are a bit white—part-Danish, part-English via Wales, part-Ameriindian, part-Madeiran Guyanese and largely Egyptian—and wearing a head-covering in honour of your Egyptian ancestry, it is not surprising if a white English man would come up to you and shout: “All Muslims should die”. If you are on a night bus, wearing a faux snakeskin pink biker jacket from Morgan, and come to the rescue of much younger black men abused by drunk young white men, the latter would confront you pointing at your jacket: “You think you’re fucking J. Lo, don’t you?” And by not widely acknowledging the influence immigrant groups and individuals have had on British fashion, the British whites allow the story of colonial superiority in all realms to perpetuate.
The reality of Britain is vibrant multi-culturalism, but the myth exported from there is an all-white world of Lords and Ladies. Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth they export is of a racial melting-pot solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.
British Indians are the largest minority community in Britain, and they and their children continue with the discriminatory practice of casteism even when it is clear that the continuation of caste is not beneficial for anyone in the Indian community and especially within white institutions. Looking down on lower castes or classes and using them to navigate your way to the top does not guarantee you will achieve a white person’s status in this white supremacist world. The racism practised by white British people extends to all, not just those of lower caste. Racial discrimination does not distinguish between Dalits and Brahmins; to racists, all Indians are the same. Even when the politics of respectability encourage variation in the way Indians of different castes or socio-economic status are treated in Britain, the end result is still racial discrimination. So, to repeat, indulging in casteism is not going to earn upper castes the privilege that white Brits have by design. And we should not forget the part the British played in helping to reinforce the caste discrimination in India. The first census in 1871 counted and classified Indian people based on caste, which contributed to the institutionalisation of the caste system under British colonial rule. The British also used other means of classifying Indians as they had with many other colonised populations, including skin colour/shade, head measurements, body measurements, and other objectifying means, designed to help determine physical traits and their supposed relation to caste.
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. There is segregation of people without any chance of social mobility. Advertising companies, big corporations, banks and politicians maintain caste discrimination in order to control the division of people through racism and shade, throwing shade of difference and indifference, good immigrant and bad immigrant, refugee and benefit scrounger. This keeps us in our place, humans bickering, focusing on their differences, distracted, and at each other’s throats, competing and separating. All this is nothing but the divide and rule strategy.
After reading books like these, I wonder if we should force ourselves to live fixated on some identity, whatever it is, or if we should lose internal battles of identity, or if we should transcend identity-quest altogether to be just humankind in order to live in harmony without hurting and harming one another. This is the question we need to address as Jhumpa Lahiri (2021) does. Or, should we as part of diaspora, the brave wanderers, always yearn for home no matter how successful we are at integrating abroad? Or, should we seek no spiritual connection to some ‘homeland’ as the final moment of integration?
At least, to begin with, as a Gujarati Hindu, who considers himself just another face in the multicultural population of twenty-first-century Britain, has put it well, “If we share the gifts that people have carried across continents and acknowledge them as part of the fabric of our society, from the national curriculum to the mainstream media, we could be on the cusp of a paradigm shift in our understanding of the world.” We are all united, after all, by the red-coloured blood in us. This and the universal story of love and life should make us transcend our differentiating obsessions with our particularised stories of culture and traditions of different homelands and different kinds of mixedness or bastardisation.
Storytelling on these lines, after all, is the most powerful way to promote our understanding of ourselves and our togetherness in the world in which we live. The books taken up for review here just do that job, and do it, movingly, very well.
Real as also imagined story creation and storytelling do enhance our cognitive, social and emotional development in the midst of differences.
REFERENCES
Kate Hurst. Undated. The Importance of Storytelling and Story Creation. https://www.pathstoliteracy.org
Nikesh Shukla. Edited. 2017. The Good Immigrant. Unbound.
Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman. Edited. 2019. The Good ImmigrantUSA. Unbound.
Jhumpa Lahiri. 2021. Whereabouts. Knopf.
By Annavajhula J.C. Bose, PhD
Department of Economics, SRCC
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