Don’t guess my politics based on my skin colour

‘So what are you debating today?” asked the lady doing my make-up before a TV interview last year.

“Brexit. I’m arguing for it.”

“Oh!” She was visibly surprised. “I thought all Brexit supporters were racist!” At this point, her colleague of Indian heritage, emboldened by my declaration, outed herself as a fellow Brexit supporter. The Caucasian make-up artist was flabbergasted.

I found it amusing that my pro-Brexit stance seemed to challenge two of her world views: that I couldn’t be racist because of my ethnicity (let’s park that one for now) and that all Brexiteers must be racists. The latter had me thinking about how we look at race, and by extension racism, in this country.

Racism, in modern Britain, is now perceived as the worst possible sin. To completely discredit a person, brand her a racist. Equally, for the demolition of an idea to be complete, it has to be written off as racist, shutting down the possibility of any argument in its favour. The Remain narrative played on this sentiment during the referendum and clearly achieved a degree of success, as evidenced by my experience with the make-up artist – just one of many.

I’d much rather live in a country where the establishment is stacked in favour of minorities than against them, so I am very proud of all that we continue to achieve as a country in combating racism. My only worry is that, in a bid to be racially sensitive, we can be too quick to define people by the colour of their skin, failing to judge them by their human qualities and so perpetuating a “victim and perpetrator” narrative based on historically established norms instead of scrutinising the specifics at hand.

The emergence of various sex gang scandals across the country (Rotherham, Oxford, Newcastle) shows the grave dangers of this approach. In all these instances, the authorities appear to have failed to look beyond the ethnicities of those involved, when really there were simply two groups of people: the victims (children) and the perpetrators. Culture or race should have been completely irrelevant in the authorities’ decision to step in. But perhaps they were afraid of being branded racists? And if they had been, who would dare come to their rescue? The Sarah Champions and Amina Lones of modern Britain fight a lonely fight and are silenced. And so vulnerable girls continue to be abused as we divide ourselves along narrow racial lines, distorting the universal rules of right and wrong.

In a bid to right the historical wrongs of Britain’s past, are we creating an artificial divide among the ethnic minorities and the white population of this country? At what point do I, a British-Bangladeshi woman, become British enough so that just as I take pride in the success of my adoptive country, I also share the burden of its guilt?

Every one of my white British friends shares my impassioned anger at the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when a crowd of people who had gathered to celebrate a festival were fired upon by the British Army, killing nearly 1,000. To be enraged at the injustice of the slaughtering of unsuspecting men, women and children gathered to celebrate a festival does not require one to be of the same ethnicity as the victims, it just requires one to be human.