Review: Brit(Ish) by Afua Hirsch

Growing up White, there were many things I didn't have to think about: being the only person with my skin colour at school; having a 'foreign' sounding name; people saying strange things to me, like, "Don't worry, Becky, we don't see you as White". I never had trouble figuring out my identity and how I fit into society because I just did. England, Britain, is my home and that was never questioned, either by me or by strangers.

So, why isn't this same courtesy extended to all British people, rather than just those with White skin?

This question forms the basis of Afua Hirsch's book. Born to a White, Jewish father and Ghanaian mother, she grew up in Wimbledon, the most quintessential English place one could think of, and had a privileged childhood thanks to her parents making huge sacrifices for it. But that wasn't the whole story. As a teenager, she wasn't allowed in a certain shop because she looked like a criminal (spoiler alert: because of her skin). Her friends told her, "Don't worry, we don't really see you as Black". She lived in a White community and had no idea how to access her culture. And this all just compounded at Oxford, the epitome of the intersections of Whiteness and elitism.

The book, Brit(ish), gives Afua the space to explore the struggles she faced in her own identity as well as the journey on an international scale which meant that millions of Black or mixed-race people in Britain had this identity crisis, or struggle to belong. It questions how Britain has not really come to terms with its history of the Empire, of immigration, and treatment of Black people, and how this helps precisely no one. There are also some stark facts about the slave trade here, too. When Britain passed the Abolition Act, there were 800,000 slaves in the British-held Caribbean islands. Their 'value' was £47 million. The British government agreed to pay £20m in compensation to the slave OWNERS, not the enslaved. To boot, the enslaved had to work FOR FREE for another FOUR YEARS to pay the rest of the debt!

It's these kinds of things that are just not taught in schools (I will certainly be making the change in my own educational setting) and if they were, it would make so much more of a difference than simply sweeping it under a carpet and hoping it never comes up.

Afua Hirsch looks at many things - class, spaces, bodies, and more - and what the Black experience has been in those different ways thanks to the construction of racism. Bodies, in particular, are fetishized or reviled. White people are too defensive to have a conversation about it because they feel personally attacked or accused of racism, when actually we just need to be open minded about the system we live in and are unconsciously complicit in.