Afua Hirsch is the journalist who famously called for Nelson’s Column to be pulled down in a Guardian article last summer. She describes Nelson, “without hesitation”, as “a white supremacist” because he used his seat in the House of Lords to speak in favour of slavery.
The #RhodesMustFall movement, in which Oxford students campaigned for the tearing down of statues of historical figures that serve as public monuments all over Britain, is one that Hirsch has vigorously championed, and many of its assumptions underpin this investigation — part memoir, part polemic — into the multicultural state of play in Britain.
Hirsch’s origins are most definitely multicultural. Her mother came from Ghana, her father is the son of a Yorkshirewoman and a German-Jewish refugee. Together, her parents scrimped and saved to create an enviable middle-class lifestyle for their daughter. In Hirsch’s own words, she grew up in a “lovely, spacious house, [with] a garden with fruit trees and swings, summer holidays walking in the Alps, a private education”.
Hirsch’s experiences as a mixed-race girl in the 1990s, however, were not always so pleasant, and were sometimes deeply distressing. She recalls her anguish at one incident in particular, when she was barred from entering a boutique in Wimbledon Village, the leafy southwest London suburb where she grew up. The store manager’s reasons were that “it’s offputting to other customers”, and that “black girls are thieves”. “Tell her she is not welcome,” he barked at Hirsch’s friend. It took Hirsch almost 20 years to summon the confidence to shop in that Wimbledon boutique.
In Brit(ish), Hirsch uses her own experiences to make a passionate case for the wider #RhodesMustFall movement. One of the book’s key themes is that, while the most overt expressions of racism are not so prevalent in Britain today (though they are too depressingly frequent even now), there are still all sorts of everyday humiliations to contend with. One of these is described by Hirsch as “The Question … where are you from?” Having been asked this myself, I fully understand Hirsch’s annoyance. The implication is: “Well, you sound like you are British, but where did you really come from?”
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Now, if the question that’s asked is simply “where did your family originally come from?”, I take that to be neutral and fairly harmless. But when one is asked directly “where are you from?”, it’s easy to see how offence can be caused. In Hirsch’s case, she has lived “in five different countries as an adult”, but nowhere has she been asked “The Question more than right here where I started, where I am from, in Britain”.
Hirsch’s writing is powerful, and ranges across a good number of subjects, from the EDL, the BNP and Enoch Powell, to British imperial history and the growing phenomenon of mixed-race families. Brexit, perhaps unsurprisingly, makes an appearance.
It would be easy, of course, to point out that Hirsch herself has lived a life of some privilege. She studied the best-known undergraduate course (PPE) at arguably the best-known university in the world, Oxford. She loved the education that Oxford gave her, but also felt some unease at the “elite, privileged, traditional Britishness” it represented.
Many people, not always from ethnic-minority backgrounds, have made much the same point about Oxford. The entire plot of Thomas Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, revolves around issues of class and a sense of not belonging at Oxford, unsubtly veiled as “Christminster”. (To be fair, Hirsch does acknowledge this by highlighting books such as Owen Jones’s Chavs that have emphasised the plight of Britain’s traditional white working class.)
She also touches on issues of sexual harassment. She describes her own experiences as a barrister, and being asked to undertake some research for a QC who had form for “groping black women”. “He has a thing for them.” Hirsch agreed to do the research, but made sure she was “never alone with him with the door closed”.
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Beyond the personal experiences, there are lots of pertinent observations in Brit(ish). There are nuggets of history and eye-opening details about the slave trade, the American South and Hollywood. Hirsch discusses established black British actors such as Idris Elba and David Harewood, who struggled to gain recognition in Britain and have said they had to go to America to have their talent recognised.
Brit(ish) covers almost every aspect of life as an immigrant in Britain. But the paradox, of course, is that Hirsch is not an immigrant. She has always been British, as she admits. Her attempt to portray herself as a victim, given the amazing opportunities she has had, might be jarring to some readers. The book’s timing, too, could not be more pertinent, three months ahead of the marriage of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle, an American woman of mixed racial heritage.
Despite the persuasive arguments, Hirsch overplays the idea that Britain is a racist, dystopian nightmare. Brit(ish) is a fiery essay, but it is salted with self-pity. It’s hard to avoid the impression that it’s a letter of protest written by “a poor little rich girl”.
Cape £16.99 pp367
Kwasi Kwarteng is the Conservative MP for Spelthorne and the author of Ghosts of Empire