The Good Immigrant

by Nikesh Shukla

Now, I don’t think everyone reads to see themselves, and I don’t even necessarily think that you can see yourself in my specificity, but I know that sometimes the right book, or film, or painting, or essay, or article, or poem, or TV series, or theatre production can make you feel less alone, like you matter, like you have agency. (Aside: I also don’t really believe that books can teach us empathy, but that is another story for another time.) And for years, young people hadn’t felt that. I know this from talking to young people up and down the country through my work with schools and the youth projects I’ve been a part of. Young people of colour felt like their stories didn’t matter and, by extension, that they didn’t matter.

This constant anxiety we feel as people of colour to justify our space, to show that we have earned our place at the table, continues to hound us.

For people of colour, race is in everything we do. Because the universal experience is white.

You need to know this. Because of your skin tone, people will ask you where you’re from. If you tell them Bristol, they’ll ask where your parents are from. When they know you’re half-Indian, one person will try to impress their knowledge of your culture on you.

I know he’s still smarting from when I pulled him up on a snarky tweet about diversity in publishing and his ennui towards it. His response was to say that there was a debate of merit worth having. I told him that it wasn’t a debate for me, it was my life. I can’t change my skin tone. White people debate it. We live it.

By conforming, I felt like I had a place in the world, and the feeling felt good.

It’s a tree falling in a forest conundrum: if a white kid raps all the lyrics to ‘Gold Digger’ and there isn’t a black person around to hear it, is it still racist?

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

With family and friends I am Chimene – layered in cultures and afforded the romance of such a name. With the state I am Shimen – conciliatory and afraid that my difference is a thing of difficulty for the British.

Violence is only as visible as we are.

In forms, the plurality of our immigrant narratives is boxed up as ‘Other’ but we are here. I see 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.

We’re not seen as human, because we never get to be complex individuals. Our defining characteristic is generally our foreignness.

It’s easy to cling to a position of privilege when it acts as protection from the ever-present danger of being seen as outsiders, but playing to the myth of the ‘good immigrant’ does not lead to real equality, or even acceptance. Breaking out of the ‘model minority’ box and looking beyond that status towards humanity and freedom is the long game.

I know that language can be painful, and so too do a generation of immigrants who have arrived here through different pathways. For them, language is the great battle to fight, and for many it’s a war you always feel like you’re losing.

Language acquisition is of course a result of age, prior education, resources, and access, rather than a simple time-plus-effort equation.

I realised that this was where I understood myself, in snatched conversations, in connections, in the beauty of the throwaway details that it’s my job to discover.

Knowing when to speak and knowing when to silently observe is a code that thousands of immigrants before me have learned to manoeuvre to their own end. For me, it will always be on the page where I find my voice most comfortably. I celebrate those who are more articulate than me, standing proud, and proclaiming their additional identities.

It is part of our endemic racism that we immediately attribute the experience of otherness to somebody who fulfils what otherness is supposed to aesthetically be.

There were just enough Caribbean immigrants in the area for him to have allies and understanding, but not too much competition when it came to novelty.

Most of us like to imagine our individuality is reflected in our style and reveals nothing about the system we are inextricably linked to, but of course it does.

Of course, nothing can be called ‘British’ without including the huge array of cultural influences that make Britain what it is, but sometimes that is not what it feels like.

The holding room also had that familiar audition room fear. Everyone is nervous, but the prospect of solidarity is undercut by competition. You’re all fighting to graduate out of this reductive purgatory and into some recognition of your unique personhood. In one way or another you are all saying, ‘I’m not like the rest of them.’

Western colonialism stunted many societies’ ability to advance by enforcing regressive views on race, gender, and sexuality.

Your shade is an industry, your shade is a token, shade is a passport, shade is a cage and shade is a status. You tick: Other.

Paddy Field Brown is Poverty. Greasy Chip White is Skint. Black Panther Beret Black is Super Bowl Uproar. Shot Teenager is Chalk On Bloody Concrete. Crack White is Baby Momma’s Bitch. Geisha is Pink Cherry Blossom. Ping Pong is Ladyboy White. LA Orange is Porn Slut. Tangerine Queen is Essex Teak. Cardboard Grey is Benefit Scrounger. Rat Tail Beige is Food Bank. Cheerleader Pink is Under-Age Pop Tart. Fox Hunt is Tory. War Crime is Blood Diamond Red. Arab Oil is Gold Dust. Drowned Brown is Refugee. Immigrant Brown is Better Media Coverage. The giant shrugs. He throws some people in the other bucket and some in the sea to die.

I am compelled to ask: why is it that the only options ever offered are ‘tokenism’ (this internet-person’s objective, overwhelming concern) or total, yawning absence? How is it, that in 2016, there are only these two stark choices?

Is it harder to have faith when you’re in another land, I wondered? Or, in a search for meaning and purity in a place that can often resent you, does your faith harden in reaction?