FIRST PERSON
V LAST DECEMBER, I bought a 7ft Christmas tree from a local grocery store in North London. I asked the owner if one of his staff could help me load it into my car. He volunteered one of his strong-looking relatives. As he hoisted the tree over his shoulder and strode off, I asked where he was from. “From Turkey,” he said. Given that many of the groceries nearby are owned by hardworking Kurdish families, I asked, smiling, “Are you Kurdish?”. “Not Kurdish!”, he said. “Kurdish very bad people. We don’t like Kurdish people. Very bad, bad people.”
Suddenly he looked at me directly and, noting my dark olive skin, demanded to know if I was Kurdish. “I’m not Kurdish”, I told him, choosing not to mention that my maternal grandfather was indeed Kurdish.
My attempt at rapport-building with the young Turkish man had clearly gone badly. Still, I wasn’t shocked at his sentiments, but I was a bit surprised at him voicing them in the pleasant and enlightened environs of Crouch End in late 2019.
I don’t know for certain if it ever will be thus. But I do know that it was ever so — or at least it has been during my half-century lifespan in a London full of micro-populations that often tolerate each other at best, and, at worst, engage in actual gang warfare.
I grew up on a council estate in Hackney. We were a Jewish family (yes, a very poor Jewish family — my folks never got the memo), and our estate was mostly white English and Irish, with a mix of many other minority groups. Racism was rife. I was spat at and called a “dirty Jew”. My brother got beaten up a few times, and we had swastikas painted on our front door.
Two streets away was a large Orthodox Jewish community. The hatred I often saw meted out to them was blatant. “Dirty rich Jews” was heard so regularly that I began to wonder if my parents were hiding money somewhere.
It’s also where I learned to be selective in revealing too much when strangers asked me where I was from, or if I was Greek or Turkish. “I’m English”, I would sometimes reply. “You don’t look English”, my interlocutor would say. The more he or she insisted I wasn’t English, the more stubborn I became. If I said my dad was from Aden, my questioner would say he’d never heard of it, and if I said it was now part of Yemen, he would say he’d never heard of there either. But I would always be asked if I wanted to go back there, with the implication that I didn’t belong here.
What is interesting is that — with the exception of the swastikas – much of the spitting, beating up and name-calling was not from white English people. Some of it was. But, increasingly, it would come from people who could, like me, be categorised as “BAME”.
Categorisation is something I have always railed against. All my life I’ve absolutely hated having assumptions made about me, and being pigeonholed on the mere basis of some idiot knowing one single characteristic about my “identity”. And now, unsurprisingly perhaps, I equally hate identity politics and identitarianism. Ever since I can remember, when asked to tick the box on forms to specify my ethnicity, I’ve added “human” to the list, drawn my own little box next to it, and ticked that.
As I entered my teens, I hung around mainly with black teenagers. My first boyfriend was black. The only overt criticism I got was from black girls. A few times I was told I was the wrong colour to be going out with a black boy.
One time, a Jamaican girl, who was a few years older than me, and known to be very angry and violent, marched up to me and threatened to beat me up. I was terrified. A few months later, while walking along the street, I was suddenly shoved hard from behind and fell to the floor. It was the Jamaican girl. Although I had been terrified ever since she first threatened me, the suddenness of her attack provoked something within me and I really went for her. Suffice to say, she never bothered me again.
So I’ve experienced a lot of racism in my life from people of all hues. I’ve been hissed at by black girls when I’ve tried to sit next to them on a bus. I’ve been refused service by a black man in Ridley Road market in Dalston – he actually said to me, “I don’t serve white people”. I’ve been spat at by white neoNazis. I’ve even been told to “f**k off back to Malta” by a policeman — which I thought was impressively random. And I’ve heard people, mostly BAME, slagging off “them Jews” to me, not knowing I myself am Jewish.
My father, who is very dark-skinned, has been called a “f**king Paki”, mugged, “steamed” and attacked by a variety of different-looking assailants. Violence, ignorance and hatred seem to be admirably multicultural. My dad, whoever he was assaulted or abused by, would just shrug his shoulders and, in his heavily accented English, say: “These bloody stupid ones.”
What I learned during my teenage years was this: Turkish people didn’t like Greek people; black Caribbean people didn’t like black African people; Northerners didn’t like Southerners; people from North London didn’t like people from South London; and, of course, in the words of Tom Lehrer’s song National Brotherhood Week, “everyone hates the Jews”.
What I am struggling to understand is why white people are getting all the blame for racism. One thing all of us estate kids had in common was that we were at the bottom of the heap. We were the kids who got kicked out of school (I was expelled three times); the kids who got pregnant in our teens (my sister did at 17); the kids who left school with nothing. The white kids on the estate were no more privileged than us BAME kids. They had no more or no less power. Money and social class have always been the key determinants of success, not ethnicity.
As someone from an ethnic minority, Britain does not seem to me to be a “systemically racist country”. On the whole, it is a bloody brilliant place for us bloody foreigners. Of course, there are white British racists. Loads of them, in fact. But I’ve received just as much racist abuse from non-whites. And I’ve also suffered racism on my travels, from Egypt to Italy. Racism is a worldwide problem. There are “bloody stupid ones” everywhere, and they come in every colour, hue and shade.
Misha Mansoor is a writer based in London. This article originally appeared in Spiked!
The white kids were no more priviliged than us BAME kids