1 week Ago By Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
This is In Conversation with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.I was recently asked by someone I admire what my “primary identity” was.
What does that even mean? This Monday, for example: while writing my column on women suffering in prison, I was consumed with feminist passions. On Tuesday, on the Storm Huntley Show on Channel 5, I was a pensioner worried about what the tariffs would do us oldies. And later that day, on a bus, an angry old man was shouting about too many immigrants and I felt the hurt and fury of a perpetually devalued immigrant.
The belief that we all have a “primary identity” is a fallacy. As delusional are simplistic notions of collective identities. Politics based solely on identity lead us to a fractured, calamitous future.
Before I explore that, lets clear some anomalies in the discourse on key social issues. Multiculturalism, integration, diversity and identity politics always refer to Britons of colour and are used as code words by nativists who want their “old country back”.if(window.
adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }Locked into identity politicsI say to them, white Britons too are multicultural and diverse.
What, except for Christmas and Easter celebrations, connects an unemployed family in Nottingham and the Johnsons? Do the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish not have recognisable distinct cultures? They are also locked into identity politics. So long after peace came to Northern Ireland, cultural fault-lines remain unrepaired.No one asks why “Red Wall” voters prefer to stay with their own or why they don’t integrate more with people who are outside their tight worlds.
Instead of moral panics about shared values, Britons are instructed to understand and respect this chosen cultural isolationism. Funny that.I am against unthinking black, brown and white identity politics.
In part this reflects my own personal life. As a brown child growing up in Uganda, my family and community did not want me to belong to that nation. They would say, “We are not like these junglees (savages)” or “Remember we are Indian/Pakistani, not African”.
Locals danced in the streets when Idi Amin threw us out because my people clung to these narrow and racist identities.After landing here in 1972, we endured the ugly identity politics of white working-class devotees of Enoch Powell, the denunciator of “coloured” migration. As Ugandan Asians (all with British passports) landed, some of these Powellites were waiting, carrying placards with messages like “Go Home”, “No Coloured Here”.
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addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }Thatcher’s warning Six years later, Thatcher warned on TV that Britain was being “swamped” by people of different cultures. Three hours earlier I had given birth to my firstborn, a son. What was that if not identity politics?Today we have Nigel Farage, the right-wing media and intellectuals unabashedly promoting white nationalism.
Lionel Shriver, the American novelist who lives in the UK, wrote this in The Spectator in 2021:“The lineages of white Britons in their homeland commonly go back hundreds of years. Yet for the country’s original inhabitants to confront becoming a minority in the UK (perhaps in the 2060s) with any hint of mournfulness, much less consternation, is now racist and beyond the pale. I submit: that proscription is socially and even biologically unnatural.
...
.”“In the big picture, along with the native populations of other Western countries, white Britons needn’t submissively accept the drastic ethnic and religious transformation of their country as an inevitable fate they’re morally required to embrace without a peep of protest.”For her information, the 2021 census figures show 81 per cent of people in England and Wales self-defined as white.
Here writ large is white identitarian politics which only wants to incite panic and discord.Scrutiny is important Once communities – any community – becomes defensive and self-regarding, it cannot extend empathy to those who are different or accept legitimate concerns about their own lives or beliefs. Too many minority communities live in enclosed, unreflective pods and can’t bear to be scrutinised.
Muslims get very offended when I object to veils; Hindu fundamentalists rage if I call them out; Zionists brand me an antisemite because I oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere; white racists call me a racist when I highlight white British racism. This zero-sum game has no winners. It leads to futility and division.
When I first became an activist in 1973, I was part of a broad front fighting racism, leftover colonialism, sexism, domestic violence, later homophobia. We were together – black, white and brown. When Asian women were killed by cruel in-laws, we multiracial egalitarians protested outside their homes.
When in 1993, Joy Gardner, a Jamaican mum and mature student, died after being gagged with 13 feet of adhesive tape by the police, we vociferously condemned the police and government.if(window.adverts) { window.
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adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l2"}); }The academic and Guardian columnist, Kenan Malik, agrees with this analysis: “Until recently, those confronting inequality and oppression did so in the name not of particular identities but of a universalism that fuelled the great radical movements that have shaped the modern world, from anticolonial struggles to campaigns for women’s suffrage. These struggles expanded the meaning of equality and universality.
”Fractured and atomisedThat front crumbled as society became fractured and atomised. Minorities then unwisely embraced communitarianism. Although governments encouraged the disintegration, we did this to ourselves.
And thereby we lost the presence and power we had gathered.Meanwhile, white identity politics becomes more assertive. Brexiteers exploited it and Reform does the same, brazenly.
Its leaders – all millionaires – claim to represent “true working classes” and blame migrants for the misery of those who have little. Spooked Tories and Labour are doing the same.But look beyond that and you see a reverse trend.
Black Lives Matter, a mass response to the murder of George Floyd by American policemen, brought together people of all ethnicities and class across the world. The killing of Palestinians, considered by human rights groups to be genocide, is having the same galvanising effect. At a dinner for Eid, a bloke from my Shia Muslim community asked me: “Why [do] you care about Palestinians? You are not one of them.
Why not do good work for our community?” I didn’t need to say anything. Younger guests took him on and I knew then that identity politics is losing its hold, and that common humanity is starting to bring decent people together again to fight for a fairer world.Moving forwardHave I Got News for You on the BBC had me fuming.
All those jokes about Donald Trump, the impersonations, everyone laughing too loud. Stop it, I wanted to shout. He’s no joke figure, no clown, no thicko.
#color-context-related-article-3617867 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN The political and cultural cowardice of Trump and StarmerRead MoreThis monstrous US President endangers the stable world order, international law, post-war institutions. He is driving a new era of American colonialism. He wants to own the world.
He continues to send supplies of lethal arms to Israel. His tariffs will wreck world trade, as old as the hills. His decision to send illegal immigrants to hellish prisons in countries outside the USA, as well as the infamous Guantanamo Bay, will end in deaths.
So too the withdrawal of USAid.By the time he’s finished no one will be laughing. Westerners – Brits in particular – used to laugh a lot at jokes about Idi Amin.
Private Eye had long-running, regular gags on him even as he was killing thousands of civilians. Lessons are never learned. The next time you laugh at something Trump says or does, stop and think.
This is a grim chapter in world history. It requires us to be grave, not silly.if(window.
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adverts) { window.adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l3"}); }A conversation I had this week One of the events I chaired at the Oxford Literary Festival was a sort of Question Time, with a panel of four guests.
One of those was the lifelong Tory newspaper man and author of several books, Simon Heffer. Later he sat next to me on the train back to London and we chatted all the way. He wears elegant bespoke suits – his demeanour is that of a man who belongs to several private members’ clubs.
He knows an awful lot of wealthy people. I am not of his class and he is not of my world.But here’s the odd thing: we like each other and talk easily about various matters.
I remember years ago, asking him on Radio 4 why he hadn’t talked to black Britons when penning his biography on Enoch Powell. The conversation which followed was civil. That’s the thing.
Tories like him, Ken Clarke, and Iain Dale, a dear friend, are not crude right-wingers like many in the Tory party today. They may disagree with my left-wing views but don’t see me and others on that side of the political divide as fools, traitors or enemies within. Alas, the new breed don’t have that finesse or intellectual depth.
If Robert Jenrick ever sat next to me, we would scrap noisily and one of us would have to move.Yasmin’s pickI’ve been reading Lionesses of Tehran, by female Iranian author Marjan Kamali. My daughter read it for her book club.
It’s set in the period when the Shah toppled a popular elected leader with the help of the West. The story is about two girlfriends from different classes, their dreams and guts. I got to understand that country a little bit more.
Captivating..
