Afua Hirsch

From Afua Hirsch - co-presenter of Samuel L. Jackson's major BBC TV series Enslaved - the Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the uncomfortable truth about race and identity in Britain today.

You're British.

Your parents are British.

Your partner, your children and most of your friends are British.

So why do people keep asking where you're from?

We are a nation in denial about our imperial past and the racism that plagues our present. Brit(ish) is Afua Hirsch's personal and provocative exploration of how this came to be - and an urgent call for change.… (meer)

“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.… (meer)

Afua Hirsch, daughter of an Englishman of German-Jewish descent and a Ghanaian mother, grew up in Wimbledon in rather affluent and educated surroundings. Her skin colour did not really matter when she was a kid, but growing up, she became more and more aware of the fact that she does not really belong: she isn’t white as the others and she isn’t black either. Being “mixed” did not double her identity but create a gap. For years she has been searching for her identity, for a place of belonging. “Brit(ish)” is the result of this process and a sharp analysis of what “black” and “white” actually mean in Britain.

I found Afua Hirsch’s book quite informative and interesting. She creates an easily readable mixture of a personal report, her feelings and experiences, combined with journalistic facts and figures which underline and support her theories. Thus the book gives you a deep insight in this highly complex and definitely neglected topic.

Afua Hirsch addresses several aspects which reflect the concept of “otherness” pretty well, amongst them origins, bodies and places. The simple question “where are you from” becomes highly difficult if you feel like being British but are perceived as being different and foreign. It becomes even more complicated when you go to another country, in Afua Hirsch’s case Senegal, where you are identified as absolutely British. The sense of not belonging to either group makes it especially hard to build an identity. Added to this a cultural attributions society makes to certain groups, e.g. the black being uneducated and criminals – which might run counter to one’s own perception. Afua Hirsch describes it as

“a permanent and constant consciousness of feeling at odds with my surroundings, of being defined by skin, hair, an unpronounceable name, and the vague fact of a murky background from a place that was synonymous with barbarity and wretchedness, I was that awkward, highly noticeable outsider (...), everywhere.”

The examples she provides of what happened to black people in Britain are stunning, we as Europeans like to believe that we are less prejudiced, more open-minded and “colourblind”, particularly in comparison to the USA, but reality tells a different story. In Britain, the concept of class adds to the racial differences and complicates the situation even more.

What I personally found most interesting was the contrast between the American blacks and the British. How they identify themselves, how they bond and develop a kind of group identity or sense of belonging overseas whereas the British never became a common group since they did not share an experience like segregation in the US.

Even though the book is neither journalistically neutral nor a pure personal report, it is absolutely worth reading to get an impression of the topic. I would absolutely agree that there is a white spot on black British history which needs to be filled.… (meer)