Black or white, Britons have more in common with each other, then with any ethnic group elsewhere around the world.

The Times

Tomiwa Owolade

Gerry Gajadharsingh writes:

“I thought the article below was refreshing, and timely, given the recent incidents, reported in the media over the past few weeks, regarding accusations of racial discrimination, against the Royal household. Our world is in an incredibly difficult place at the moment, and we could do without groups of people with their different agendas, causing even more turmoil because they perceive they’ve been slighted in one way or another, by another person or organisation. Tolerance seems to have gone out of the window, what happened to respecting other people’s points of view? Just because you feel you are “right”, or your particular story is the “truth”, it’s “your truth” but it depends on the context, and it also depends on understanding as many facts about the situation as possible, so that you really have a more informed point of view? As Queen Elizabeth II said before she died “some peoples recollections may vary”!

As an immigrant, born in Trinidad to a Trinidadian father and an Irish mother, I’ve been living in the UK for over 50 years. I am brown and with the name Gajadharsingh, I’ve never had an issue if people ask me where I’m from, I’ve never taken it to be a racist question. I think people are inquisitive, and I think that’s a good thing. As Owolade says “It is not self-evidently wrong to want to know where a person is from”.

I think language, culture, nationality and local identity (I live in rural Wiltshire amongst mostly Caucasian people), is much more important than the actual colour of my skin.

There is no doubt that the UK was a very racist place in the 60s and 70s, when I first came to the UK, living in London and going to school in London, when you were a little brown boy was not always fun! But credit where credit is due, and it is very rare for me to come across overtly racist situations in the UK these days. And by the way, it is much more common for me to observe so-called “racist” situations in the many countries I visit around the world, then it is in the UK.

Societal change takes time, but everyone seems to be in such a rush at the moment. If society tries to move too fast with imposing change on the general population, you simply risk antagonising many people, and you end up with a situation, where half the population seems to be against the other half. This may well cause a serious risk to democracy. This seems to be happening in America and possibly now in the UK.”

 

Black Americans have more in common with white Americans than they do with black people across the rest of the world. From the way they talk to the norms they follow, from their history to their culture, a black person in New Orleans or New York resembles a white person in those cities more than he resembles a black person in the north London borough of Stoke Newington. African-Americans are not Africans. They are Americans.

This insight is common sense. But it struck me vividly only when I met black American people in Africa for the first time this month.

My older brother was getting married and his bride is a black American woman. She brought her family and friends from America to Nigeria for the wedding.

When I was having lunch with one of these Americans in a hotel restaurant and the Nigerian waitress got the order slightly wrong, the American leant into me and said: “I don’t think they understand me over here.” Nigeria’s official language is English.

There are more black people in Nigeria than in any other country in the world. The divisions in the nation are not racial; almost everyone is black. There are divisions between rich and poor; between the various ethnic groups that constitute the country.

An American, even if he changes his name from Brandon Orton to Balogun Oyinlola, is inescapably a foreigner when he visits this land. The same is true of other black people outside Nigeria.

Marlene Headley changed her name to an African one to affirm an African identity. In fact, she was born in Kilburn, north London, in the 1960s to two immigrants from Barbados. She is British.

When she was 18, she moved to Hackney in east London to study community studies. She discovered an African dance group there and was enraptured. “To hear Africans with strong accents,” she writes on her website, “[to] learn about the food and the drumming touched my heart and took me to a place I had never been.”

And so, this became a place to which she seemed willing to go. “My connection with Africa became my lifelong story,” she adds. “It’s identity, because ours was robbed from us. Over time, black people have been forced to try and be something they are not.”

This last sentence suggests that black people in Britain are Africans stuck in Britain. That they are not British and should stop trying to be.

But when Marlene Headley was asked where she was from by Lady Susan Hussey at a charity event in Buckingham Palace last month, after Headley had changed her name to Ngozi Fulani and adopted African-style dressing, she did not say she was from Africa. Why? Because she is British.

She is not African. Ngozi Fulani is a made-up name. Ngozi is an Igbo name, and Fulani is the name of a West African ethnic group; I doubt anybody else on earth is called Ngozi Fulani.

Even if she chose a name that made sense, she would still be British. She was born and bred in Britain. She has never lived anywhere else.

It is not self-evidently wrong to want to know where a person is from. Curiosity is the greatest virtue I value in a person. The condemnation of Hussey makes sense only if we accept that Fulani (or Headley) is British. She is disingenuous in both claiming an African identity and invoking racism when someone takes this identity at face value. We were offended on her behalf because we accepted, she is not a foreigner; asking where someone is from would be a benign question if that person were not from Britain.

We ought, therefore, to distrust anyone who celebrates a universal black identity, anyone who assumes that a black person is attached to the multiple cultures of Africa simply on the basis of skin.

Black people are like white people; they are shaped as much by their nationality as by their race, by their local environment as much by the colour of their skin.

This is something that the reactionary right doesn’t get — they think black Britons are essentially foreigners. But many on the liberal left indulge this nonsense too when they assume that a black person in one continent is necessarily attached to a black person living in another.

The British historian David Olusoga is guilty of this. He argued in the recent Netflix documentary series Harry & Meghan that what makes Meghan’s exile from the royal family so terrible is that she is an icon for black people in Britain and the rest of the world. As he put it, an “even bigger disaster is that at the centre of the argument for the monarchy in this country is the Commonwealth. She was a woman who looked like most of the people in the Commonwealth.”

This is poppycock. How can a mixed-race woman from California stand in for people in countries as widely different from each other as Antigua and Kenya, Bangladesh and Barbados? Meghan resembles such people in only the most superficial way; she doesn’t share their languages, their customs, their religions, their histories.

Nothing connects her to them except for the fact she is a bit dark. She is an American woman, not an icon for black and brown people across the world.

Fulani and Hussey finally reconciled last Friday morning. Nine days before Christmas, all seemed right between the two women.

As a statement from Buckingham Palace put it: “At this meeting, filled with warmth and understanding, Lady Susan offered her sincere apologies for the comments that were made and the distress they caused to Ms Fulani.” The statement adds: “Lady Susan has pledged to deepen her awareness of the sensitivities involved and is grateful for the opportunity to learn more about the issues in this area.”

But this is not the Christmas spirit of beautifully sewing things together. This is the sterile language of race PR: “deepen her awareness”, “sensitivities involved”, “issues in this area”. It is so lacking in genuine humanity.

Our obsession with race is making us less attached to each other. And if we are not attached, why is asking a black British person “Where are you really from?” so offensive?

It is only offensive once we accept this truth: black British people have more in common with white British people than they do with black people across the rest of the world.

Tomiwa Owolade is a contributing writer at the New Statesman