Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch - a review

David Goodhart11 January 2018

This is a fierce polemic about the racial biases of British society interwoven with a memoir of the confusions of a mixed-race young woman, of Ghanaian and Jewish heritage, growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.

There is plenty to agree with in her critique of the evasions and embarrassments over race in Britain, which are often expressed as well-meaning colour blindness. This is a relatively open society but is far from being a post-racial one, either at the top or bottom.

In places, there is an interesting book struggling to get out, in the contrasting experiences of Hirsch and her working-class black British partner or the gulf in attitudes across the Ghanaian generations. But it is not a subtle or rigorous work, and is written in a style that has been called “expressive but not persuasive”.

I should declare an interest. Like Hirsch, I have been writing about race and immigration for many years and we have disagreed publicly. I am sceptical of what the African American writer John McWhorter calls the religion of anti-racism, of which Hirsch is a high priestess.

This is a case study of disaffected identity, shaped by a sense of exclusion that she positively seeks. Yet, on her own admission, her privileged start (private school and Oxford) and career success as a barrister and journalist, are a story of class trumping race.

And she weakens her own case by citing too much evidence of racism that sounds wrong or out of date, invariably arguing from anecdote, not data. So, apparently, Britain demands gratitude and assimilation from immigrants; black women are penalised for wearing their hair naturally, and we teach children about William Wilberforce but not the Atlantic slave trade (not true since 1988).

Author, Afua Hirsch

Of course, centuries of colonialism, slavery and the relative failure of the African continent has left scars on both white and black minds. “Whiteness” is a social default that non-whites have to adjust to in many small ways, but is it still an ideology of supremacy?

Do black people have it harder than other minorities? Probably, yes, but there is no clear discussion of this in her book nor of why black Africans have tended to do better in Britain than black Caribbeans who, conversely, are more successful in the US.

This is the problem with focusing so relentlessly on white racism: you deny agency to the many non-white groups that have arrived since 1950 with distinctive histories, priorities, attitudes to education and so on, and so cannot explain why some have flourished (East African Asians, Chinese, many Indians, some Africans) and others less so (Caribbeans and Pakistanis).

The religion of anti-racism also prevents any sort of minority self-criticism, yet black street culture must bear some responsibility for disproportionate levels of violent crime and single motherhood in black Britain.

Hirsch’s fluid definition of racism encourages victim status among minorities, and among whites creates either the evasions she complains of or resentment at being made to feel embarrassed over innocent attachments (including to national symbols such as Nelson’s column, which Hirsch wants pulled down).

A balance is required between a country’s desire to see itself in a good light and honesty about misdeeds of the past. Yet Hirsch constantly judges the distant past by the standards of the anti-racist present. Moreover, there is almost no acknowledgement of progress: the decline in racial intolerance, the rise of mixed-race Britain, the expanding minority middle class.

She offers no answers except that white people need to check their privilege more. But if young black people suffer now from negative stereotypes that need not be the case forever — consider how the image of Indians and Irish people has changed over recent decades.

Change will not come from the “society is to blame” approach of Hirsch and many white liberals. It is to the more creative parts of the minority elite — black and Asian conservatives and free-thinkers such as Trevor Phillips, Kemi Badenoch MP, Shaun Bailey, Munira Mirza and Tony Sewell — that one must look for direction.

Yes, they say, there are racial biases but we shall overcome, as others have in the past, not by asking for favours but by focusing on self-help, high expectations, educational success and holding Britain to its promises.

I agree with Hirsch that we want a more honest conversation about race but this book just replaces colour-blind dishonesty with victimhood.

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