The Good Immigrant

by Nikesh Shukla

it hammered home the knowledge that the universal experience is white.

once said to me that 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.

don’t know whether my normal voice, where I feel most comfortable, most safe, even feels like me anymore. I’ve splintered into personas. This is the trick of living publicly online with increasing watch and scrutiny by others.

White people debate it. We live it.

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

By conforming, I felt like I had a place in the world, and the feeling felt good. The real lesson is learning to hold on to that feeling no matter what your hairstyle is.

Sometimes she is none of these people. 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.

Standardisation is the backbone of the Empire, after all. But survival is forgiving.

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

This was clear to people like my parents, who understood this to mean that simplicity and effortlessness were of themselves the root of Anglicisation.

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

the rotation of names are as much the rotation of souls.

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.

Know that brown and black children are not allowed freedom from maturity.

Our ancestors were terrified. Do not forget that. Allow them the humanness of fear.

use yellow because I’m not black, nor white, nor brown, and I feel I need a little flag to fly – and goodness me, what’s this the band’s playing?

A South East Asian woman I know said that the feeling of being objectified seems core to being an Asian woman.

Look up American performance-maker Kristina Wong. Her grotesque but smart comedic work both disrupts the objectification of the Asian female and experiments with sexually objectifying the stereotypically emasculated Asian male.

Violence is only as visible as we are.

Is yellow too pale a colour to shout about?

give you 1970s Great Britain: a place that many believe was a land of joyous liberty before the totalitarian oppression of The Political Correctness Brigade committed the heinous Stalinist crime of actually making it a bit difficult to take the piss out of ethnic minorities, gay or disabled people, and only ever regard women as either battleaxes or sex objects.

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.

But this was the 1970s, remember, when we watched publicly subsidised paedophiles on TV.

This is why I became an actor. It started because I wanted to pretend to be a mutated bipedal turtle. It became a way of escaping from the drudgery of everyday life and now I’ve come to see it as a responsibility.

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.

This was a surprise. If you’re not expecting to see your own face, it’s always a surprise. I have no idea how twins get anything done around each other.

Anyway – the message here is context is key and Steve Carell is great.

(I can’t quite bring myself round to the idea that I have ‘fans’, I prefer to think of them as people who tolerate, rather than actively enjoy, my humour).

Dissecting political whiteness is paramount to understanding how racism operates in Britain. So often positioned as invisible, neutral, and benign, whiteness taints every interaction we’ll ever engage in.

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

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.

Respectability politics puts all of its faith in racist gatekeepers (telling us that we must change to appeal to their inherent, good-natured humanity), and puts none if its faith in black people living under the weight of poverty and discrimination, scrabbling, trying to make a life anyway they can.

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

In 2013 the BC Project published a report on the Chinese community’s relations with the police, and 43.8 per cent of those who did not report a crime selected ‘do not think the perpetrator will be caught’ or ‘do not see any point in reporting’, as reasons for their inaction and apathy.

Be quiet. Stop complaining. Let us have our fun. Don’t be so sensitive. You’re normally quiet, aren’t you?

Perhaps in the telling of these tales, of being the antagonist battling against omission and absence, we can become protagonists, writing ourselves into a richer, multilayered narrative – beyond a single story.

Speaking to Nabila, she told me she had never written about an Indian heritage and/or Muslim character before. Nobody had ever told her she shouldn’t. But at the same time, nobody had ever explicitly given her permission.

I consider how the sea has inspired a thousand clichés, about never feeling quite whole, of experiencing an identity cut into neat, disembodied pieces.

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.

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.

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.

This is what so many second-and-third generation immigrants experience visiting their homeland. We fine-tune the ability to find the nuances funny, deflecting the crushing weight of displacement and diaspora drama that becomes part of our everyday.

To put it mildly then, it is insulting, reductive, counter-productive, lazy, disingenuous and deeply, deeply, deeply, problematic to attach a single label – one of Western invention as a shield against racism, one as porous a description of skin pigmentation, as ‘black’ – to a group of people so vastly varied and numerous.

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 jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor. You are intermittently handed this Necklace of labels to hang around your neck, neither of your choosing nor making, both constricting and decorative.

‘Caste’ itself was a British construction, showing up on Indian census forms in 1871.51 This helped create a hierarchy of castes that worked to give Brahmins more privilege and societal advantages through their misunderstanding of the complex varna.

It was Britain who formed the second point on the transatlantic slave trade triangle (the path African slaves would travel in order to reach America) and most recently, the death of Sarah Reed – a London black woman who died in 2012 after a brutal beating while in police custody – bears many similarities to the fate of Sandra Bland, who died under mysterious circumstances in a Texas prison cell in 2015.

Your skin is a living organ. Your skin is the casing for your sausage-meat soul. And the armour for your muscles, bones and flesh. Skin is the protective layer of the interior of you with the exterior world, but it is always wrong. You are too white or too black. Too light is bad? Too dark is bad? I get confused. I am in the middle here. Hang on a minute, what shade am I to you?

We weren’t taught about the Maroons at school. They were renown for inventive guerrilla warfare and fierce courage, living by the Maroon mantra that called for them to fear no death: ‘To never bow head or knee, to hear only their own voice, to stand in the shadow of none and to be masters of their own destiny.’

There is a dream, a grand idealism, that mixed-race people are the hope for change, the peacekeepers, we are the people with an other understanding, with an invested interest in everyone being treated equally as we have a foot and a loyalty in many camps, with all shades. We are like love bombs planted in the minefield of black and white. It is as if our parents intended to make us, with courage, and on purpose, as vessels of empathy, bridges for the cultural divide and diplomats for diversity and equality.