‘Who decides what it means to be called black or Asian?’
RUPA HUQ’S KWASI KWARTENG REMARK HAS PROMPTED RACIAL IDENTITY DEBATE
IT IS 2022, and a leading black Conservative British politician is told by an Asian Labour MP that he is not really black at all, or rather that he’s only “superficially” black.
Why? Because essentially, his politics are in disagreement with hers. He’s right wing, she is left wing. He went to Eton, then Cambridge. She was privately educated, then went to Cambridge. His family originates from the continent of Africa, hers from Asia.
Clearly in making that comment, in that moment, she showed that she considered herself to be the arbiter of definitions of blackness, even though she is not arguably black herself. Or perhaps she does define herself thus – I don’t know.
Back in the 1970s, and 1980s, politicised Asian people sometimes did identify as black, which became a unifying umbrella term for brown people bonded by our experience with racism in majority white Britain.
But it’s not something that has persisted, or at least, I’ve not noticed it.
The leading black politician of whom I speak is, of course, the MP, Kwasi Kwarteng who holds the post of chancellor – the third highest position in the cabinet.
The Asian Labour politician is Rupa Huq, who has since offered her sincere and heartfelt apologies to Kwarteng. But her remarks were described by the Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer as racist, and precipitated her suspension from the party, a move which was, in my opinion, an extreme and unnecessary knee-jerk response.
I believe her comment was a silly throwaway one, not a racist attack. And let’s not forget that Rupa Huq as an Asian person will also have experienced racism herself.
So let’s investigate her concept of someone being superficially black, an oxymoronic turn of phrase, when race is indeed superficial. Why? Because human beings are scientifically 99.9 per cent genetically identical. And while the stray variant determines some genetic conditions, as well as our external appearance, skin shade, features, and physical attributes, it also determines how we are perceived – and that one per cent might as well expand to the full 100 per cent.
In a majority white society, darkerskinned people are perceived as different. We are othered. And this is, as we say, our lived experience – a term bandied about when we discuss race these days. It really is a case of the dominance of sociology over silence.
To be clear, blackness is not a burden. That’s not how I see it. I celebrate my racialised self, which is, in my case, complicated by being born to a black father and white mother, in a world where I am generally perceived as black. Nor can I choose to self identify as white; which I do not want to do, by the way. And even should I try, let’s see how far that gets me, right?
I see my blackness as my strength, my foundation, and the source of my politics and creativity, while also acknowledging my biracial heritage within that. I’m a realist who is interested in working with these racial labels, while also challenging and interrogating them, peeling back the layers of their meanings and significance. Sadly, we are not living in a utopia, where we can eschew these nomenclatures because equality of treatment and opportunity exists.
I’m pretty sure that as a dark-skinned black man, Kwasi Kwarteng, born in 1975, has had his fair share of racist encounters, regardless of whether he’s interested in having this conversation; regardless of his political beliefs and positions on race and assimilation; regardless of whether he aligns himself with other black people personally or politically; regardless of whether he wants to downplay systemic racism; regardless of his role in the media, as a defender of the conservative government’s de facto racist treatment of black people in the Windrush scandal.
Kwarteng is still nonetheless, racialied as black, fact. And this reality will surely have had some kind of impact on his life, which would be anything but superficial from his experiences in majority white Eton and in the Conservative party and government. And this in spite of the fact that the Tories are now leading the way, among political parties, in terms of black and Asian people assuming top government positions in greater numbers than ever before.
People of colour are increasingly involved in running the government, and by default our lives, for better or worse. This is the reality.
Years ago, in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, our political interventions were entirely grassroots until the first four black and Asian parliamentarians gained seats in the historic election of 1987.
Until then, we were excluded from politics with a capital P. Today’s Tory cohort have scaled its heights even if some of them are sometimes accused of turning against the communities from whence they came.
A black person I know refers to Kwarteng as a ‘coconut’, a familiar insult that is hurled at black people who fail to live up to the notions of blackness as prescribed by black people themselves. Yet this term is what I consider to be a demonstration of internalised racism. It’s one of the most egregious features of racism – to reduce people to reductive stereotypes, to homogenise and generalise the qualities of people according to their racialised identities.
What does it say about us when we describe a person as not being really black or Asian, because they do not behave according to our values, cultural codes, or political interests?
If the end game is freedom from oppression, equal rights, anti-discrimination and full participation in our societies at every level, then why would we willingly want to confine black or Asian people inside the narrow parameters of what are essentially limiting thought patterns about our potential, based on our own personal predilections? Who are any of us to stipulate how over a billion black people should exist in the world, in speech, dress, mannerisms, cultural tastes, political affiliations, sexuality, parenting styles, and the rest.
Let’s imagine another scenario to throw this issue into sharp relief. Let’s talk about whiteness, because white people are also racialised as white. Who decides who is authentically white? Or to put it another way, how many times have you heard white people decry someone white as not being very white, or superficially white when they disagree with their politics or cultural tastes or based on whether they think the white person has had a white enough education or whether their voice sounds white enough? It’s all nonsense really, isn’t it?
White people are all things and everything, and fundamentally free from this kind of social policing.
Kwarteng at the despatch box in parliament speaks with the same booming confidence, cadences and bullishness as Boris Johnson. Unsurprisingly, they went to the same school and perhaps he picked up a trick or two sitting in Johnson’s cabinet and listening to his oratorical skills. But when I listened to Kwarteng, I also hear a forceful Ghanian, a fullbodied baritone.
The question is, why do some black people hold other black people to a different, unrealistic and prejudicial standard? What does it say about us when we demand a black authenticity that flies in the face of what we must surely be striving towards in the infinite possibilities of who we can be in the world?
■ This is an edited version of Bernardine Evaristo’s reflection on black “authenticity” on BBC Sounds