Afua’s family heritage is a mix of Ghanaian,
Yorkshire, and Germany Jewish – making her well placed to explore
“Race, Identity, and Belonging” (the book’s sub-title).
Part of this is the
“belonging” - finding herself perhaps too black too be British,
yet in Ghana too British to be Ghanaian.
Within this is a
reflection on her mispronouncing her own name, which resonated as I
mispronounce my name – resulting in a moment of acute cultural
humiliation when I overheard someone at our University Welsh Society
correcting my friend’s pronunciation because she said my name just
like I do…
I was also caused to
reflect on this after a recent Church training event where I meet a
20 to 30 new people who without fail upon hearing I had a non-English
name asked me where I was “from”. A couple of people followed
this up with the top ten facts they knew about my presumed country of
origin, and one clearly couldn’t process the answer “I’m from
North London” as their conversation kept coming back round to which
bit of Wales I was actually from.
Sat here with a
massive amount of middle-class white privilege I am not suggesting
equivalence in experience but it brought home for me the power on
unconscious bias and the subtle power of assumptions that “other”
people.
Ending the book in
response to those that say they ignore race she writes “Blindness,
it seems fairly obvious to point out, is not a good strategy for
seeing what is there. Race is there, as lived experience, as the
basis for the most dramatic economic and human shifts in history.
Colour is there, and while people work on their myopia to avoid
confronting awkward truths, others are finding their identities
shaped by it. Identities are not becoming less important in our
globalised world, they are becoming more important than ever. And
Britishness is an identity that is excluding a growing number of
people who, like me, should be among its core constituents.”
To be colour blind
it to perpetuate white privilege...
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