Before I was Asian, I was black. No, I haven’t since undergone some Jacko-style operation, or doused myself in Fair & Lovely. Rather, black was one of the terms my family and I used to describe ourselves.
I
grew up in 80s London, which still echoed with the Anti-Nazi League’s
chant of “We are black, we are white, together we are dynamite”. At her
primary school, my sari-wearing mother was a member of the local NUT
black teachers’ caucus. As late as university in the mid-90s, I was
handed a black prospectus, featuring action shots of a Punjabi pointing
at a noticeboard (sadly, this was to prove an all-too-accurate guide to
student entz).
Discussing that period, those terms and the politics with which they
were freighted, feels like remembering the era before email: so recent,
so different. True, my mother’s old union branch still runs its black teachers section
for “all teachers who face racism”. But the notion that someone of my
background growing up today would refer to themselves as black is,
frankly, fantastical.
Now you are black, or you are Asian – a categorical wall has been put
up. And on either side of that wall other divisions are hurriedly
being erected: you are a Gujarati Hindu from Leicester; he is a
Bangladeshi Muslim from Whitechapel; they are Nigerian Christians from
Lewisham. And so endlessly on, until you end up with what a sprawl of
what A Sivandan terms “cultural enclaves and feuding nationalisms”.
Isn’t this just the inevitable flowering of minor differences in an ever
more diverse society? Quite the opposite. “Black” and “Asian”
identities are just as badly bolted together as anything else. Take that
cosy, cliched history of black britain
that begins with the Pathe newsreel of Empire Windrush docking at
Tilbury. On which decks would have been the arrivals from Nairobi or
Accra? Similarly Britain’s black history month, which ends today, takes
its lead from the US – where the celebration began in 1926. But despite
being an “Asian”, I might have as much in common with a black
Trinidadian Hindu whose ancestors came from Uttar Pradesh as with a
“fellow-Asian” whose parents hail from Multan, via Luton.
When someone like my late father responded to the term “black”, it was
not because he’d forgotten his Tagore, or the films of Satyajit Ray. He
carried that history with greater care and affection than those who
today boast of their Bengali-ness. But “black” wasn’t about pigment or
some flatpack identity. It was primarily a political term, borne of a
recognition among those who’d recently arrived in Britain that they
faced obstacles in common and would try and beat them together. One wore
“black” not instead of “Jamaican” or “Sikh” but alongside all those
other labels of cultural and historical identity, as an anti-racist
affiliation.
Our parents were black because when they tried to get digs, they’d all
see those signs saying “No black, no Irish, no dogs”. They were black
because they’d all struggle to get the jobs, the pay and the promotions
they deserved. And they were black because they all faced racial abuse
and violence.
Of course, one could be black and Indian; one inevitably was black and leftwing. In his new book Racismc Class and the Racialized Outsider,Satnam Virdee charts how groups such as the Indian Workers Association, or Jayaben Desai
and the heroic women strikers at the Grunwick film processing plant,
were constantly building alliances with others on the left, whether in
the trade unions or the Socialist Workers party.
Contrast that with what we have now: a host of ethnic identities all
competing with one another for recognition and government funding for
their own pet projects – not on the grounds of what they do but on who
they claim to represent. This has been encouraged by Whitehall – which
doled out money to the Muslim Council of Britain in the name of
preventing terrorism. And it has certainly been fuelled by local
councils. In his book The End of Tolerance, Arun Kundnani notes how
throughout the 80s, Bradford city council encouraged and funded local
mosques to group together and “provide an alternative voice” for Muslims
in the area. The hope was “they would become allies in a process of
absorbing opposition, at the expense of the younger militants”. It goes
without saying that the “militants” were aggressively secular.
The effect of all this, as Manchester University’s Claire Alexander observes, has been to encourage the creation of “closed-down community identities” – and to shift power and money from an openly political, progressive anti-racist politics to older, conservative ethnic politicians – the activist gives way to the community leader.
This move has bestowed
power and money on certain figures within these ethnic communities – but
it has also enabled successive governments to pretend that racism is no
longer the problem. Instead, if you can’t get on in today’s Britain
today, it’s because of some cultural factors that you and your community
really need to sort out, pronto. This is the same sleight of hand that
you see in discussions of sex and class, too: covering up the systemic
issues and pretending that the problems can be solved by the individual.
Lovely women: lean in! Oi, proles: get off Benefits Street!
And you Bangladeshis: shave off those beards! Don’t worry about whether
the game is rigged, or the rules are wrong: just play up.
Where this ends up is with David Cameron, that community leader for Old Etonians, speechifying in Munich about “state multiculturalism”. “When a white person holds racist views, we rightly condemn them,” said the prime minister who put on London streets vans reading “Go Home”. “But when equally unacceptable views or practices come from some who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious, frankly, even fearful, to stand up to them.”
Except
that racism hasn’t gone away. It may have got more nuanced, as you’d
expect over time. But in work, it still pays to be a white man. On the
streets, the police in England and Wales record over 100 racist
“incidents” every day, and the Institute of Race Relations has tallied up 106 racial murders
between 1993 and 2013. Meanwhile, to be black or Asian is to be far
more likely to be stopped and searched – up to 29 times more likely in
the West Midlands.
The obstacles remain, racism is still with us. Even after decades of
fixating on our differences, ethnic minorities in this country are bound
together by many of the same injustices and frustrations. My identity
comes in many parts: Bengali, Londoner and the rest. But I am also
black, in the same way my parents were. And if you feel the pinch of the
same constraints, you’re black too.
Published/Broadcast by: The Guardian
Date published: Thu 30 Oct 2014 20.48 GMT
Last modified: Thu 30 Oct 2014 20.48 GMT
Author: Aditya Chakrabortty
Entry Type: Opinion Piece
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/30/bengali-black-ethnic-minorities-racism?fbclid=IwAR3icdUnziseH2pJObO0xk6efds_2Z5TKKM_wf_iKtMBg9HVbELTA1JsbBI