The Good Immigrant Quotes

“To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don't really belong to either.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Integrate well. Move upwards in society. Be praised – until people worry that you’re doing too well, and then they remember that you’re foreign." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Musa Okwonga, the poet, journalist and essayist whose powerful ‘The Ungrateful Country’ closes the book, 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." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“I do think it’s interesting that this idea of being a model minority is tied up with essentially being quiet,’ she says. ‘Just sitting back, not complaining about stuff, and getting on with making money. Being quiet is considered a really good quality.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“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.”
― Chimene Suleyman, The Good Immigrant

“I had long since realised that if there was greatness in Britain, then it lay in its everyday citizens, and not in its institutions.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“I see coming back to my village as significant, thanks to my privilege of being able to leave. 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.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Your shade is not skin deep. Your shade isnot just about your heart and soul; your religion and spirituality, your elders and your history, your connection to a country, to geography and to a time and place. 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.”
― Salena Godden, The Good Immigrant

“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recalls that the stories she wrote as a seven year old in Nigeria were based on the kinds of stories she read, featuring characters who were white and blue eyed, they played in the snow, the ate apples. According to Adichie, this wasn´t just about experimentation or an active imagination, because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.
We learn so many things from reading stories, including the conventions of stories such as good versus evil, confronting our fears and that danger often lurks in the woods. The problem is that, when one of these conventions is that children in stories are white, english and middle class, than you may come to learn that your own life does not qualify as subject material.
Adichie describes this as "The danger of a single story" a danger that extends to stories which, whilst appearing to be diverse, rely on stereotypes and thus limit the imagination”
― Darren Chetty, The Good Immigrant

“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. This continues now, mostly unquestioned, with the sexual objectification of women, rounded fat bottoms and full lips all across the media industry. But once the canned laughter dies down or the fashion shoot is done and dusted, and you stop and take a cold hard look at the root history of these jokes and stereotypes, it all comes from a shade so bleak and so ignorant, that it has a sub-human subtext to it –brown people for sale in a human pet shop window.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“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,”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“We’ve never really been split, never been cut in half, we’ve just been silent about how we’ve been empowered because we haven’t always felt it, have been too busy being good immigrants, not making a fuss, and quieting down when people felt uncomfortable.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“His Indian/ British accent was a map of where he’d been and what he’d seen. He travelled from our village in Bahowal to Delhi, to Southall, to Calgary. His voice mirrored those journeys, a living imprint of his memories, and revealed the things he didn’t about himself.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“You cannot have meaning without knowledge of the environment from which it stems.”
― Chimene Suleyman, The Good Immigrant

“If cultures were to survive in England it would be on the shoulders of bastardisation”
― Chimene Suleyman, The Good Immigrant

“To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t really belong to either.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“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." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Sometimes I got angry with the singing chanting white kids and tried to hit them or throw things at them. As a result of this, as well as singing chanting white kids calling me a chink or a Jap and hurling allegations at me about the cleanliness of my knees, my world suddenly seemed to fill up with red-faced white adults shouting loudly at me that I needed to learn not to lose my temper when white kids were calling me a chink or a Jap.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“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.”
― Varaidzo, The Good Immigrant

“One of the many online arguments I've had about the importance if language, how language can hurt, has been about 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.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Racism in society often works through a divide and conquer strategy, more often than not it is also intertwined with classism as well as other forms of oppression. Structural racism can divide a community that would be stronger together, by keeping individual groups entrenched in their own class —in this case, caste discrimination.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“In 2013, 2.4 million heterosexual interactions on the Facebook dating app ‘Are You Interested?’ were analysed and showed that ‘all men except Asians9 preferred Asian women’. 10 ALL. The fetishisation of the Asian female body is highly problematic. Sexual submissiveness, sexual voracity, and voicelessness is a particularly tricky and damning combination.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“When I was 10, a man who worked with my father called for him on the house phone. When I answered he said, ‘Oh, I must have the wrong number. How can a child that speaks like you have a dad that speaks with that ridiculous foreign mess?’ The mess was not that my father pronounces ‘hatred’ to sound like ‘hatriot’. Rather, that there is a whiteness that exists to be so tone-deaf it cannot make out our words, nor our lamp-fixtures, gods, nor our names –where all are as good as the dog-whistle without the Labrador.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“There is no ‘Aum’ without Indian dharmas, as there is no ‘Allah’ without Islam, nor ‘Pull-up!’ without UK Garage, or two hands coming together to form a W without Wu Tang. That is to say: You cannot have meaning without knowledge of the environment from which it stems.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“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?”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Oriental’ has connotations of bamboo and flutes and red sunsets. It should only really be used to describe carpets, as the word has an inherent exoticism that I’m not sure a boy growing up in Wiltshire can ever fully embody. In the US ‘Asian Americans’ have rejected the term ‘oriental’. Here, the Chinese (at least) have positively embraced it, because we appear to be a pragmatic species and aren’t known as the ‘model minority’ for nothing.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don't really belong to either. It is about both consuming versions of blackness, digging around in history until you get confirmation that you were there, whilst creating your own for the present and future. 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.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, The Good Immigrant

“Here, my mother’s mother would stitch clothes behind a sewing machine with Turkish women who had only wanted from life the privilege of work. Some decades later I was rolling a mat out, as one rolls the carpet of gentrification over our ancestors’ footprints, onto the floor of a room of exercising white bodies.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Let us sail to the colourful island of mixed identity. You can eat from the cooking pot of mixed culture and bathe in the cool shade of being mixed-race. There is no need for a passport. There are no borders. We are all citizens of the world. Whatever shade you are, bring your light, bring your colour, bring your music and your books, your stories and your histories, and climb aboard. United as a people we are a million majestic colours, together we are a glorious stained-glass window. We are building a cathedral of otherness, brick by brick and book by book. Raise your glass of rum, let’s toast to the minorities who are the majority. There is no stopping time, nor the blurring of lines or the blending of shades. With a spirit of hope I leave you now.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant

“Advertising companies, big corporations, banks and politicians need to maintain this, to control the division of people through racism and shade, throwing shade of difference and indifference, good immigrant and bad immigrant, refugee and benefit scrounger.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant