Brit(ish) on Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch

Written by Sophia Staffiero
Reading time: 5 minutes

“Acknowledging the presence of black people in history is not, and should not be, a celebration, or an attempt to prove that black lives have meaning and legacy. A version of history that includes black protagonists is just facts.”

p.83

Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish) is an insightful exploration into race and identity in Britain, told from her perspective as a women of mixed Ghanian and German-Jewish heritage. The book, made up of eight chapters, is structured through a interweaving narrative of memoirs and broader commentary on what it means to be Black and British in our contemporary society. Delving into the themes of origins, bodies, heritage, and class (just to name a few), Hirsch’s work is an essential read for the understanding of how the Black British experience(s) has historically been, and is presently, informed by a constant, racialised narrative.

Housed within her book are crucial discussions on what means to be British, who dictates this, and who is allowed participatory access to British identity. Thus, at the very core of this book is the looming question, where are you from? What merges as an answer is an extensive discussion on the origins of British racism, our inability as a society to accept our deeply problematic and racist past, and the consequences for a whole new generation of mixed-race children living in a supposedly ‘post-racial’ Britain:

“While we are busy trumpeting the ‘post-racial’ implications of the rise in the mixed-race population, many mixed-race children themselves will self-identify in some way as ‘black,’ either through choice or as a result of the racial misrecognition of others. Often this begins as the consequence of the negative, surprising, experience of racism, but then grows into a more positive phenomenon, which you might call ‘black consciousness.”

P.159

Much like Emma Dabri’s skillful weaving of personal and societal experiences in her book Don’t Touch My Hair, Hirsch achieves an accessible read which is rooted in her own experiences without the detriment to the objectivity of her arguments (often backed with data and references) or her ability to zoom out and position her personal experiences within the wider framework of British society as a whole. Moreover, her style, which is as evocative as it is informative, greatly aids her in her mission to present both her research and experiences with clarity and in-depth understanding and labours to peel back the layers of discussion to leave no doubt as to what exactly she is expressing.

As a individual who is of mixed-heritage, I experienced through Hirsch’s personal narrative that non-describable feeling of being ‘seen’ and ‘understood.’ She so elegantly and acutely captures the in-betweenness which many mixed individuals are familiar with. The pulling between multiple identities, the simultaneous desire to conform and belong, paralleled with an awareness of the almost innate impossibility of this, yet, an even greater desire to not just simply be ‘tolerated.’

“For me, living in Ghana ultimately created more problems of belonging than it was able to solve. But I can’t resolve these problems by falling back on my British identity either, because Britishness has not yet fully rejected it roots in ideological whiteness, and the pain that has inflicted on blackness. For someone like me, Britishness contains the threat of exclusion. An exclusion only made more sinister by discovering – after so many years of searching – that there is nowhere else to go.“

P.214

Hirsch’s book is not one that intends to compete with white history, it is one which challenges the very notion that history is normatively white and everything else is an alternative to the ‘mainstream’. Her book is therefore in part a reinstatement of the huge contribution that black people’s history makes to our collective history, a reclaiming of our narrative, and a call for Britain to finally acknowledge its harmful past which has seeped into our present. It’s a call to not pigeon ‘black history’ to a month, as ‘a subcategory added to the syllabus in the interests of political correctness‘ (p.309). It’s a call for recognition and for doing a hell lot better, and it’s one which I strongly believe we can all learn from, whatever that might look like for us.