Afua Hirsh's search for people, place and belonging is something that I think you can relate to in some way without being mixed race or having a recent family history of migration. I found this book very helpful in empathising with people of racial minorities and recognising my own privilege as a white person. However, there were points where the thread of the argument Afua was making or the point of an interview she was conducting seemed to peter out and I missed any conclusion drawn.
“Where are you from?” Τhat is what Afua Hirsch calls The Question. A question that she has been asked since she was a little girl. Nothing strange, you would say.
Afua Hirsch is British. Her parents are British. Her friends are British. She grew up in leafy Wimbledon and was privately educated at a school where no one else looked like her. Hence, The Question.
People of colour, says Hirsch, have been asked this question for decades now. Even, strangers, when you say you are British, they insist on asking, – No, where are you really from? Where are your parents from? They don’t understand why you find these questions intrusive. There is always an unsettling sense among white British that if you look like Afua you can’t just be British. It was this sense that made Afua to start questioning the very core of her own identity.
Afua Hirsch …
“Where are you from?” Τhat is what Afua Hirsch calls The Question. A question that she has been asked since she was a little girl. Nothing strange, you would say.
Afua Hirsch is British. Her parents are British. Her friends are British. She grew up in leafy Wimbledon and was privately educated at a school where no one else looked like her. Hence, The Question.
People of colour, says Hirsch, have been asked this question for decades now. Even, strangers, when you say you are British, they insist on asking, – No, where are you really from? Where are your parents from? They don’t understand why you find these questions intrusive. There is always an unsettling sense among white British that if you look like Afua you can’t just be British. It was this sense that made Afua to start questioning the very core of her own identity.
Afua Hirsch is a journalist, a barrister, a human rights development worker and a writer. She has an interesting family background. Her paternal grandfather was a Jewish refugee from Germany in the WWII, her paternal grandmother was British and her maternal grandparents were political exiles from Ghana in the 1960s.
BRIT(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging tackles a wide range of issues. It is part memoir, part historical exploration, part cultural and class analysis. Hirsch goes deeper than just exploring the root of her identity. She explores the idea of Britishness, the role of the British empire – arguably the most important event in British history – as the largest and most efficient carrier of slaves to the New World, and the reasons why people like her grandparents came to Britain.
“The trouble with the British, observed Salman Rushdie, is that they don’t know their history, because so much of it happened overseas.”
Britishness is an identity in crisis, argues Afua Hirsch. The country has changed from the people that come from its former colonies; it has the fastest growing mixed-race population in Europe. But it has not developed a language that could help indicate the nature of discourses surrounding identity in British public life. There are people who say that they don’t see race or colour. They are deliberately trying to distance themselves from racism and prejudice, thinking that by dismissing whiteness or blackness, they are are also dismissing race as system. But they are not; it is like sweeping the problem under the carpet.
“…… what is unique about Britain,” she writes , “is the convoluted lengths we are willing to go to avoid confronting the problem. We will not name it, we avoid discussing it and, increasingly, we say we can’t see it. We want to be post-racial, without having ever admitted how racial a society we have been.”
This book is at once deeply personal and incredibly public. It is a book written to make you think. Regardless the background and racial identity, it invites people, to think about their history and the world they live in and whether their own behaviour and the way they perceive things make some people to feel feel out of place in the country where they were born and live.
