In conversation with Afua Hirsch
“If people are excluded, they will make extreme choices. And you address that by listening to them and creating solutions for the things they need.”
Writer, broadcaster and best-selling author Afua Hirsch speaks with RSA Journal Editor Leah Clarkson about assimilation and experience, the enduring power of race in shaping British identity, and why confronting uncomfortable history is key to meaningful inclusion.
Leah Clarkson: Welcome to the RSA, Afua. Often in your work you draw attention to the toll of exclusion, which is the theme of this edition of The Journal. I want to go back to your upbringing in a very white Wimbledon of the 1980s and early 1990s. Can you tell us a little bit about the duality of your upbringing?
Afua Hirsch: I think there are two concurrent stories of duality. The first is being visibly ‘other’ in a very white environment. Where I lived was particularly homogenous, especially for London. My world was not diverse, and I experienced the reality of being othered and having a name that made people ask questions, and a hair texture and a type of food that we would eat at home and a cultural background that drew negative attention.
But I also experienced a world in which people kept telling me they didn’t see race – that we’d moved past race. So there was a kind of gaslighting that I was living, without really any tools with which to even articulate it, let alone make sense of it.
Photos by Kate Peters
The second stream was my own personal heritage. My mother’s family came from Ghana and have very deep ties to Britain over centuries. Ghana was one of Britain’s so-called ‘model’ colonies in Africa. They had been colonially conquering and extracting from Ghana for centuries. I had generations of ancestors who came to school in Britain, who spoke English, who worked with British administrators. So, when my family came to the UK in the 1960s, they very much felt part of the British imperial story. And yet, when they came here, they were immediately othered.
My grandfather was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who came to the UK in 1938. He did not have a history of connection to Britain. He came here with no English, no money, no relatives in the UK. And within a generation – by learning English, by working hard, through his talent – he was able to establish himself and assimilate into Britishness.
I’ve never heard anyone ask my father about his immigration status, why he’s in the country, why he has a German surname. I’ve never noticed anyone ask my father’s side of the family, who’ve all been racialised as white, what the impact of their immigration background is. And so, I grew up really perceiving that although both sides of my family came from somewhere else, one side was allowed to be here without having to explain their presence. Whereas the other side, who ironically have this long history of feeling part of Britain, were completely othered and were regarded as a problem.
That duality was something that made me, from an early age, sceptical of the idea that this was just about immigration, because it was clearly also about race. It was clearly about who is allowed to assimilate, who is allowed to be here unconditionally, and who represents some kind of threat to the idea of Britishness, who’s excluded from the identity. And for me, that seemed very clearly based on my Blackness.
Recommended reading
“The most influential book I ever read about the history of race in Britain was probably Staying Power by Peter Fryer. It’s the author’s lifetime work documenting the millennia-long history of black people in Britain and it blew my mind both that it existed, and that, until I was almost 30, I had never heard of it.” Afua Hirsch
Clarkson: There is, in Brit(ish), this heartbreaking moment, where you’re with your friends, and they’re saying, “You’re not Black to us.” A lot of your work is around the psychological toll that that othering takes. I wonder if you could talk about that feeling of exclusion, which happens in so many different ways, especially for people of colour.
Hirsch: It’s been funny writing about that, and how people react to it because at the time, I didn’t see it as a kind of tragic moment. But it felt problematic. I was sitting under a tree with my school friends in secondary school, and I remember them saying so clearly, “Don’t worry, we don’t even see you as Black.” I could see that that for them was a lifeline they were offering me, like a way out of Blackness.
The privilege that I have is that I didn’t want a way out of the Blackness. I was so fortunate to be raised by a Black mother, as part of a Black family that had an identity that was so rich and celebrated. To me, my Blackness wasn’t a problem to be erased. It was something that connected me to a story that I felt very proud of, and an ancestry I wanted to know more about.
In that moment, I experienced another duality, which was my sense of my own heritage versus how others perceived it. If you grew up in the 90s and 80s in Britain, Africa was associated with war, famine, disaster, poverty, and Black people were associated with criminality at worst and inconvenient immigration at best.
There was nothing in the way Blackness was being presented to them that made it desirable. So, I can see why, from their perspective, they thought it was advantageous to be offered a way out of it. And that was an early indication for me that I did not want my identity to be assimilated out of existence.
Clarkson: The other aspect of that is about how we teach about race. Having also grown up in the 1980s, I think there was this idea that we don’t see race, that we just are all colourblind. Hopefully things have changed a little bit in terms of what we’re aspiring to. How should we teach people to think about and talk about otherness?
Hirsch: It comes down to quite a basic premise for me, which is the idea at the centre of imperialism – that Britain has a monopoly over civilisation, over progress, over ingenuity; that Britain had an empire because it was the best, because it was civilised. And that people who were colonised were lucky to be colonised because it gave them proximity to this superior culture, and that people who came to Britain above all, chose it because they bought into British superiority.
My education very much promoted that idea. The people who invented things were white and tended to be British because I was growing up in Britain. The people who advanced culture, science, art, the progress of humanity – were white. The people who created desirable ideals, institutions, the rule of law, democracy, were white. And we should all aspire to those ideals. It’s becoming easier to see how destructive these ideas are.
And that’s part of the reason for so much of my work. Because they’re not true as a matter of fact, as well as a matter of narrative. They’re motivated by a basically white supremacist project. I don’t really see how you can expect Black people growing up now to choose a different identity or heritage if it’s presented to them as inferior. Why would you do that?
I had this living example of an African identity that was so desirable, and in so many ways aspirational, and in ways I could tangibly see offered an alternative to many of the problems that Britishness was facing, especially social alienation and loneliness and the emptiness of consumption.
I could see that there were alternatives in my heritage that were being ignored or erased or degraded by that mainstream narrative. But if people don’t have access to that alternative worldview, then why wouldn’t they choose this one? And that’s how our education system has worked. It’s been really to mould people into this idea that it’s the only option.
Clarkson: I was quite surprised to read in Brit(ish) that Emmeline Pankhurst was a racist and a big supporter of empire. I thought to myself, ‘This is the excluded also excluding.’ And there are people in our society right now who are also being excluded, who feel that. How do you see that playing out over time?
Hirsch: History really does repeat itself. The co-option of people who have the most to lose into the system that’s destroying them is a very familiar pattern. And that’s exactly how I see current politics playing out. The people who are voting for extreme right-wing policies stand to lose the most from those policies. It’s not rational, but it is emotional.
So, it doesn’t give me any pleasure to look back at Brit(ish) and see how much of what I saw 10 years ago, when I was writing that book, has become true; has played out in a way that I was cautioning. The core of the message of my book was that if people are excluded, they will make extreme choices. And you address that by listening to them and creating solutions for the things they need.
Britain can’t compete in this globalised world if it alienates and excludes so many of its most innovative and talented and energetic members. You’re competing with countries that have narratives of inclusion, that are able to mobilise all of their talent in service of winning. And this country was doing the opposite. I could see that we would pay a cost for that. The cost turned out to be even worse than I thought. Instead of starting to address that now, in many ways, we’re doubling down and leaning even more into extreme forms of alienation.
Clarkson: Is there anything that could reverse that process? What might start to put us on a better path?
Hirsch: I do think it has to exhaust itself because, ultimately, people need solutions, and we don’t have any from this current generation of politicians. For me, the erosion of gatekeepers in the media is something that I personally welcome. We’re seeing a decentralisation of who gets to tell the story, shape the narrative and share the facts and who gets to do the investigation.
“The privilege that I have is that I didn’t want a way out of the Blackness”
If you’re a young Black person growing up in Britain, your idea of your Britishness and your culture and your creativity is not coming from three big media organisations. It’s coming from all of these creators who are navigating it in their own way.
The energy around that is phenomenal; it’s creating, if not the meaningful changes and solutions we need, at least a vibe shift that is disrupting the status quo. That is something that I feel really positive about.
Clarkson: I feel like there’s this tension between that energy that you’re speaking about, especially with younger generations, and how they’re embracing representations of themselves that they’re able to create. But also the toxicity, the ability of people to get at you… do you think we are breaking more towards the positive in our social media and our ability to harness narratives?
Hirsch: It’s hard to create a cost-benefit analysis because it’s quite chaotic. If you take an optimistic view of humanity, that we have the capacity to use information to make rational choices, then that’s a good thing. The flip side, of course, is that everybody is under a level of scrutiny and faces personal attack in a way that’s deeply uncomfortable.
In my case, I’m educated, I’m a lawyer, I’m a professional journalist. I’m in so many ways equipped to know how to curate my content in a way that makes it pretty resilient. I am equipped at combative adversarial interaction. Trained, even. There’s a flip side to that, which is I often felt a burden that I have to take those conversations on, because I can.
Over time, I’ve become a little bit less tolerant of doing that for myself. Not necessarily because of how toxic it is, but just because I’ve stopped believing that it’s useful. I think that the kind of performative conflict that just generates clicks… is not educational. It’s reductive. People aren’t really seeking to learn. They’re just enjoying the show. So, I step back from a lot of those conversations.
Clarkson: You’ve highlighted the role of cultural institutions in shaping collective memory. And the RSA itself has a narrative that’s consistent with many of the cultural institutions in Britain in the sense that, for example, it’s very proud to have William Wilberforce among its Fellows, and yet it also has this history of members having supported the transatlantic slave trade. When you think about organisations like the RSA and other cultural and arts organisations, how should we be talking about that?
Hirsch: I think that if you lean into how racially problematic your past is as an organisation, you make it a more inclusive place. It has to start with acknowledging the cultural backdrop, and all organisations have a culture. I can’t overstate the importance of leaning into the hardest and most uncomfortable parts of the history.
“Britain can’t compete in this globalised world if it alienates and excludes so many of its most innovative and talented and energetic members”
For me, there are two additional reasons for that. One is to understand [that] every generation is a generation that will become future history. And we’re all right now asking ourselves a lot of questions of how you navigate things where there seem to be really thorny historical issues. How do you take a stand on allegations of atrocities and genocide? Previous generations were facing the same problems. It’s easy to look back and agree that everyone should have been against something. But at the time, it seemed equally complex and thorny.
We don’t get to understand how those choices get made and how moral stances get clarified if we don’t look honestly at the previous conflicts and dilemmas that people have faced. By glossing over those and making it seem obvious, we dumb ourselves down. That has real implications for the present.
The second reason is that resistance is something that we just don’t understand well enough. At points in the history of this organisation, for example, there would have been people resisting those who were using power to advance things that were oppressive.
I’m interested in what that resistance looked like and what was effective and what wasn’t. How did the organisation evolve and get to the place where now we’re sitting here doing this interview and Fellows are interested in what I have to say? That clearly represents a change from the past. How did we get here and what worked?
Clarkson: Thinking ahead to future generations, are there certain movements, ideas, actions that are happening right now that give you hope, that make you excited, that make you feel like these shifts are really happening or could be happening in a new way?
Hirsch: I’m energised by the ways in which people are becoming very difficult to control. They’re resisting groupthink. They are being critically aware. And that sometimes can be very messy. Sometimes it involves things I really disagree with. But, in general, I grew up at a time when people were more likely to follow, more likely to believe in their institutions, more likely to accept the way things are done. I think that being critical is a force for good.
I also think a lot about the bifurcation between the way we perform ideas and activism, especially on social media and what we actually do in the real world. It’s easy to think of a high-tech future where everyone’s on universal basic income, plugged into a virtual reality system – just spends all their time viewing in cyberspace. But I think we’re closer to that than we realise.
We have an idea about what we’re doing and how much impact it has based on what we say in virtual spaces. But that’s often disconnected from what we do in the real world. Whether we show up at protests, whether we write to our MPs, whether we vote in a way that disrupts power, whether we form new political parties, whether we form grassroots movements, whether we are active in our grassroots and our community, even on a micro scale, that’s how actual change starts.
With thanks to Two Temple Place for providing the photoshoot location: www.twotempleplace.org
Afua Hirsch is a writer and broadcaster, and the best-selling author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging and Decolonising My Body. She is a former barrister and West Africa correspondent for the Guardian, and has presented several documentary series (including Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson in 2020 and the three-part BBC series Africa Rising with Afua Hirsch); she currently holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and Communications at UCLA.
Leah Clarkson is Editor of RSA Journal.
Kate Peters is a photographer based in London, with a selection of portraits on permanent display at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She has worked with British Journal of Photography, Guardian Weekend, TIME magazine, The Telegraph Magazine and RPS Journal.
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