Date: 27 Jul 2000 10:09:24 EDT
Subject: Re: My culture, right or wrong?


I will try to write a response to Eric Dickens' long post (but not longer, I
vow, than it takes me to drink my first cup of tea).


There is a line in Gurinder Chadha/Meera Syal's film *Bhaji on the Beach* in
which the group of women have just found out that one of the young
second-generation women is pregnant and that the father's black. There's a
general gasp of horror from the  "aunties", and one elderly Indian immigrant
woman says, attempting to explain away her racism, "It is not color, it is
culture." 


The point is, it IS color. And my immediate response to Eric is that it however
much one might like to think that it is not race but ethnicity, the fact remains
that, whether one likes it or not, it is race. 


Just as in Rushdie's *The Satanic Verses,* Saladin Chamcha tries to be more
English than the English--he's fair-skinned, has got a posh accent, is  a Proper
Englishman in every way--but still experiences the racism and hostility that the
most working class and culturally "other" of his fellow-immigrants do, no matter
how much he tries to distance himself from them. Some immigrants blame the
hostility faced by  fellow immigrants on their strong accents and refusal to
assimilate to the mainstream culture, but while I suppose people far from home
everywhere like to get together with people of a shared culture, one of the main
reasons racially marked immigrants don't assimilate more quickly is racism from
the mainstream culture: they simply aren't allowed to, no matter how hard they
try to remove traces of their accent and blend in.


Fed up with the racism, postcolonial immigrants and their children in Britain
from the late 70s  on were starting to say, we're fed up with trying to fit in,
to be invisible, to remove all traces of our cultural differences and STILL
experiencing racism and exclusion.  Face it, they say to the British, we are
British and we've come to stay. And you're going to have to revise your idea of
what British is--or what English is, now that all the other Britons have become
Irish or Welsh, or Scots--to include us. But from now on we're going to meet you
on our terms, and not go into all kinds of contortions to meet you on yours,
which by your definition we can never meet because of the color of our skins,
our difference. NOT our ethnic difference, our racial difference. The British
have embraced many aspects of South Asian culture--eating curry, doing yoga,
bhangra and fusion music, so much more--but many still remain deeply racist.


Now, in terms of numbers of immigrants, Eric suggested that the early immigrants
may have faced more hostility because of their obvious cultural differences and
their fear of jobs being taken, etc., but now that they are part of the
mainstream culturally they are achieving mainstream success. 


I think it's probably more the other way around. The early South Asian
immigrants in the 30s and 40s were curiosities, seen as no threat due to their
small numbers. Culturally they were very isolated because there was no Asian
community (and even later when larger numbers began to come they were mostly
men, so they remained isolated until wives and families started to join them).
Also, many middle-class immigrants came with elevated ideas of English culture
and values from the image of Englishness that they had absorbed from their
reading of English literature. So they assimilated, mostly without doing any
violence to the British sense of itself. Many British people took pride in
bringing a black man home to tea--and I would dare bet that in fact working
class people were as open, perhaps more open to them (See, by the way,
Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and MacInnes' City of Spades). It
was only later (in the 70s) that racist attacks started to take place, when the
post-war economic  boom had subsided, larger numbers were visible, and rightwing
politicians like Powell (and later Thatcher) were using the racially marked
immigrants as scapegoats. In the late 70s Thatcher nostalgically evoked an
upper-class idea of England that was dead and gone (as Kureishi discusses very
well) but in fact British culture today is dramatically different from what it
was in those rosy Edwardian times  that we relive in soft-focus in the
Merchant-Ivory films. And in fact it's English people who have to get their
minds round that fact, and adjust their idea of what their culture includes, at
least as much as the other way around. To repeat: it's British racism that makes
immigrants like George in *East is East* all the more aggressively Muslim--as a
defence mechanism. And it's not simply a question of needing time to "get used"
to the color difference and of eliminating the racist "fringe element" from the
streets and the police force. Enoch Powell wasn't all that much of a fringe
element: He was a Conservative Party MP who tried to distance himself from
"fringe elements" like the National Front and the British Movement. Racism runs
deep in British society, and part of the the task of decolonization for white
Britons is to recognize it in themselves and their ordinary fellow-Britons and
to fight it, not to go on denying it. The title of Eric Dickens' post evokes
Orwell's nationalist essay, "My Country Right or Wrong." But Orwell, too, was in
denial. And something Hanif Kureishi does quite decisively in his essay, "The
Rainbow Sign" is to counter this denial in Orwell's picture of the gentle,
tolerant English (in his essay "England your England"). 


Having poured all that out, of course ordinary English people are as decent and
accepting of others as people are everywhere. And British culture, especially in
London (which is a place unto itself)  has undergone tremendous change in the
postcolonial period; a novel like the dynamic and optimistic *White Teeth* by
Zadie Smith gives us hope for the 21st century. But now my tea is quite cold. 


Josna Rege


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