The Good Immigrant

by Nikesh Shukla

There was one thing I’d never considered about mixing red and yellow: a drop of yellow into red paint won’t do much to change the colour, but one drop of red into yellow and the whole pot is tainted for ever.

Are these examples of racial abuse, misguided sexual advances, an assertion of male power over female, or a combination of all of the above?

It’s a point of pride to me that I stay resolutely oblivious of much of contemporary culture. I try to pretend this is because I’m too cerebral to be concerning myself with all this nonsense, but in reality it’s probably a manifestation of my own intellectual insecurity.

British black history, positioned across the Atlantic, was as real to me as The Simpsons, and that was a tragedy.

‘I have been welcomed and accepted in this country, and – uncool as this may sound – I feel grateful for this,’ she says, towards the end of the article. It seems like a very low bar for gratitude.

In the background of all of this were the independent women of Destiny’s Child and the guiltless hedonism of Sex and the City, which we weren’t supposed to watch, but knew how to keep it secret.

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.

to racists, all Indians are the same.

We have learned to belong in the un-belonging. Spirited and colourful souls, of all shades. We tick: Other.

Lawrence’s death annihilated the lies we told ourselves – that if we were just good little black boys and girls, that if we just stayed away from the bad crowds, no harm would come to us.

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. I realised this when having a pub meal with a friend. Out of nowhere, he launched into an astonishing rant against migrants, and, when I pointed out that my parents and I were no different from those he was denigrating, he told me that ‘I don’t see you as a migrant, Musa. I see you as a friend’.