The Good Immigrant

by Nikesh Shukla

palatable

My mum had three voices. She had her white-people-phone voice, her Guj-lish talk-at-home voice and her relatives voice.

relatable for most immigrants im sure. Especially ones not born here

ennui

I can’t change my skin tone. White people debate it. We live it.

Chai means tea. Chai tea means tea tea. The number of times you see this on a menu makes you wonder why people can’t be bothered to do their research. Like naan bread too. Bread bread.

The world saw blackness in me before it saw anything else and operated around me with blackness in mind.

autodidactic

Nobody knows the transformative power of a new hairstyle like a black woman.

The Afro is the hairstyle for black radicals whilst locs are for Rastafarians and hippies.

the truth is this: there is no singular way to be black, no universal set of experiences that we all share, no stereotype that can accommodate the vast array of personalities and histories and ethnic

backgrounds that black people possess. And though a guide would have been a gift at times, especially as a confused, adolescent outsider, all of that confusion was just a small part of my experience. There is no one way to be black. Our worst performance is entertaining the idea that there is.

If cultures were to survive in England it would be on the shoulders of bastardisation.

You cannot have meaning without knowledge of the environment from which it stems.

there in the white men and women who do not understand, to the point of frustration, why we still walk with the noose of our ancestors around our necks, as we cannot comprehend how they do not carry the indignity of their ancestors tying it there.

I grew up surrounded by white people. At that school, there was me and my brother, plus two black kids who were also brothers. Their names were Godfrey and Geoffrey and the four of us seemed to cop racial abuse off the entire school all day every day.

Of course, the Golden Rule that all ‘minority ethnic’ people learn when we’re growing up in Britain is that we’re simply not supposed to get angry about any of this. To do so is to invite all kinds of accusations about having a chip on both shoulders and so forth.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to

promote our understanding of the world in which we live and the vessel to tell these stories is our media.

The only thing worse than racism is inaccurate racism.

When you’re young, you translate yourself through

representations of people who look like you.

Respectability politics is the dogged belief that if black people just shape up, dress better and act right, racists would suddenly have a dramatic change of heart, and stop

their racist ways.

To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t really belong to either.

‘Labels can be easily removed. It’s not controlled by the minority community itself, and it’s related to the international political environment,’

‘Anything can change, labels just show how vulnerable the communities are, because today they can be a model minority, but tomorrow they might not be.’

“East Asians are the model minority because they’re quiet and hardworking”, [you imply] black people are apparently loud and lazy.’

‘You want to escape into fiction as well and read about other people, other cultures, other lives, other planets and so on. But I think there is a very significant message that goes

out when you cannot see yourself at all in the books you are reading. I think it is saying “well, you may be here, but do you really belong?’’34

But also because I can simultaneously cherry-pick my favourite aspects of my culture for anecdotes back home and social media, and keep the private, painful reflective ones for myself.

‘419 …’ he added – the moniker for Nigerian con men – ‘… refers to section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code which deals with obtaining property by false pretences.’

#IfAfricaWasABar Ghana would be that guy who gets drunk and starts – for some reason – talking about how much God loves us all. – @SiyandaWrites

It is interesting to note that the classifying seems to be done by those with lighter pigmentation. This is a direct colonial legacy of course, encouraging racial divides and appealing to those with a lighter skin tone to self-classify as white in order to create feelings of superiority and aspirations of assimilation into the politically dominant race, which they are not recognised as being once outside of their locality.

vociferousness

America uses its stories to export a myth of itself, just like the UK. The reality of Britain is vibrant multi-culturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of Lords and Ladies. Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth they export is of a racial melting-pot solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.

caste

ameliorated

The fetishisation of the sexuality of black people comes from centuries of dirty dark shade. It starts with sleazy old jokes that black men have huge cocks, or that black women are hyper-sexual, and it festers to become something toxic and sinister.

if you cannot bring yourself to imagine us as real, rounded individuals

with feelings equal to your own on screen, how does that affect your ability to do so when you encounter us on the street, at your workplace, in your bed, in your life?

One was that I could not change some of my peers’ perceptions of black people merely by being as hardworking and as agreeable as possible; I became the exception that proved their rule.