The Good Immigrant

by Nikesh Shukla

Check out sites like Media Diversified, gal-dem, Skin Deep, Burnt Roti, Rife Magazine.

the biggest burden facing people of colour in this country is that society deems us bad immigrants – job-stealers, benefit-scroungers, girlfriend-thieves, refugees – until we cross over in their consciousness, through popular culture, winning races, baking good cakes, being conscientious doctors, to become good immigrants. And we are so tired of that burden.

Blackness was something more convincing, more tangible. It spread out across my features in big lips and long forehead and hair that grew out rather than down. It filtered through me like a beguiling beckon, drawing security guards towards me when I entered a store and tricking my teachers into thinking I could outrun anyone. The world saw blackness in me before it saw anything else and operated around me with blackness in mind.

It’s not uncommon for black women not to have learned how to care for their natural hair until well into adulthood. Instead, we learn that Afro hair is difficult and that it doesn’t grow. We learn that it looks unprofessional and that it will prevent us from getting jobs. Hairstyles designed to keep Afro hair neat and healthy, like locs and braids, are often considered too wild and wacky for professional settings.

There is no need for customer care in black salons. Not when you’re paying for miracles.

Nobody knows the transformative power of a new hairstyle like a black woman. All too often, aspects of our personality become attached to the way we wear our hair.

For myself, and I don’t doubt for many others like me, learning to look after our natural hair is also to learn the lesson that our hair does not define us, and it shouldn’t determine our sense of belonging either.

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?

My authentic self stays black. She stays black when people are present and she stays black when people are not.

Because 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.

I have seen this sense of property in the eyes of men who step to their girlfriends, who walk into children’s bedrooms uninvited, in the policemen who slam a brown or black body against a wall for a half-smoked zoot – no, often less. It is 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.

Occasionally one can join in with the rest of the majority populace and vent one’s spleen about politics or inflation or the bus being late, but we soon learn we’re supposed to be ‘reasonable’ about racism.

It is up to you to make your own version of blackness in any way you can – trying on all the different versions, altering them until they fit.

A much-discussed example is J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series. The books are seen by many as arguing for inclusivity and tolerance, tackling challenging themes such as racial purity and oppression. These themes are explored through fantasy figures such as wizards, giants and elves. At the same time, amongst the teachers and pupils at Hogwarts, there are very few people of colour and no clear explanation of why that might be. So a story that has so much to say about racism on an allegorical level at the same time depicts people of colour as marginal without exploring their marginalisation.

When people bemoan this generation constantly craning their heads downwards on their phones, I can’t help but think of all those heads looking down, avoiding trouble, not wanting to draw attention to themselves or their differences. Of my granddad and his friends keeping their eyes fixed on the floor – perhaps people just didn’t notice it back then.

‘They never got to get mad and no one was held accountable,’ Millie said. ‘This is why crime is so violent in South Africa, why we are the rape capital of the world.’

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.

As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder, it’s taken off you and swapped out for another.

The reason for this is simple. 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.

We laughed, not because he was joking, but because he was deadly serious. It was the perfect encapsulation of the minority’s shifting and divided self, forced to internalise the limitations imposed on us just to get by, on the wrong side of the velvet rope even when (maybe especially when) you’re on the right side of it.

The work of today’s existing generations fighting against caste discrimination cannot go unnoticed either. Yashica Dutt’s Documents of Dalit Discrimination and the work of other activists like DarkMatter is vital in moving forward into a future that betters the lives of the lower castes and in turn enhances the lives of all castes.

Indulging casteism is not going to earn upper castes the privilege that white Brits have by design. It is clear that the continuation of caste is not beneficial for anyone in the Indian community and especially within white institutions. Looking down on lower castes or classes and using them to navigate your way to the top does not guarantee you will achieve a white person’s status in this white supremacist world. Uniting against white oppressors can only be achieved by eradicating these quasi-sectarian oppressions.

Your shade is an industry, your shade is a token, shade is a passport, shade is a cage and shade is a status.

Do you mind me asking you a question: where do you come from? You tick: Other. I pull up a chair and wait to be processed. I wait here while you print off your labels, and consider me for your boxes marked black as in black-black or black as in brown-black, or brown as in half-black or brown as in half-caste. But hang on a minute. Surely if I am from two colours, two races, I am two shades, and therefore not half-caste, not half anything, but whole, I am double-caste. But half sounds shadier. Half is best because half means less. You lose. You are half a person. We don’t want you getting all empowered, now do we.

As you grow older, as a mixed-race person, you become a chameleon, you are born with natural camouflage. When you travel everyone assumes you are some version of Latino or Spanish. In the first minutes of meeting you, people have to figure out what shade you are and this is your superpower, it buys you valuable time.

The shade of your skin is not the whole content of you and your work. The shade of your skin should not be the measure of your worth. The shade of your skin is not your only audience nor should it be a limitation.

As a woman may write in the voice of a man, I don’t see why a writer cannot imagine the voice of another shade and culture, that is what imagination is all about. Whatever shade you are, as a writer, you have just one task each day, one battle, and that is you against the blank page.

Whatever shade you are, bring your light, bring your colour, bring your music and your books, your stories and your histories, and climb aboard.

Whiteness – or, you know, white people – exists as the basic template. And that template covers all human experience, by the way: the ability to be special or ordinary, handsome or ugly, tall or short, interesting or dull as ditchwater. On the other hand, our presence in popular culture (as well as in non-stereotypical ‘issue’ roles) must always be justified.

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?

I found that first death is the evil mirror universe version of first love – life-changing, raw, an experience that will superficially come again but will never be felt in the same way.

Traditions are just nonsense that binds, and whilst the nonsense might take on a different hue, the binding is universal.

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?

‘Loitering’ became a code word for ‘being dark-skinned in broad daylight’.

As ridiculous as it might seem, I believed that since my white peers had grown up seeing so many negative stereotypes of black people their entire lives, I had a duty to counteract as many of them as possible. That meant never getting drunk, never getting that Afro I had long wanted, never taking the joint when it was offered.

And here’s the problem. There’s only so much you can do to convince your fellow citizens that a multiracial society is A Good Thing, especially when they perceive that it’s hitting them too hard in their pockets. It’s remarkable how so many of the country’s economic problems were blamed, not on the misfiring calculations of the financial sector, but instead on the ills of mass immigration.

It wasn’t inherently racist to impose limits on admission – after all, if a nightclub is full, it’s not racist to say that no-one else can come in. What is racist is when you begin denying admission to people purely on the basis of their race and culture – which, incidentally, is something that has been happening in London nightclubs for years.