 Front cover | |
| Author | Afua Hirsch |
|---|---|
| Subject | Autobiography, politics, history |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
Publication date | 1 February 2018 |
| Pages | 384 |
| ISBN | 9781784705039 |
Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging is a 2018 book by the journalist Afua Hirsch. The book is part-memoir and discusses black history, culture and politics in the context of Britain, Senegal and Ghana. It received mixed critical reception.
Hirsch grew up in Wimbledon, London with a white English father and Ghanaian mother who had emigrated to Britain. She describes them as working hard to provide her with a middle-class upbringing. She was privately educated. Her classmates and the characters she saw in fiction were predominantly white. Hirsch writes that though people around her claimed to not notice race, she was treated differently because of her race, such as with security guards at shops giving her more scrutiny, and taught that "being black is bad". Hirsch attended the University of Oxford, where she felt alien because of her race. As a young adult, she worked in Senegal. She became a barrister and then a journalist.
Hirsch talks about the Black Lives Matter movement and criticizes the frequency with which black men are killed by law enforcement. Hirsch objects to the United Kingdom policy of "stop and search", finding it overly harassing to black men. She recounts incidents from her journalism career relating to race, such as meeting with far-right English Defence League members and attending a club in which white men watched as their white partners had sex with black men.
The book also describes the history of slavery in Britain and its colonisation of Ghana.
According to The Bookseller , the book had sold 36,000 copies by October 2020. [1]
Martina Evans in The Irish Times wrote that the book "teems with fascinating and uplifting as well as tragic stories". Evans praised its "dense, eye-opening" chapter on British and Ghanaian history and "writing that really shines" in its description of both countries. [2] Bernardine Evaristo in The Times Literary Supplement wrote that Brit(ish) is "a free-flowing book of ideas, experiences and analysis that reach far beyond the personal. The past and present are in conversation with each other as Hirsch interrogates the roots of racism and dismantles myths." [3] Colin Grant's review in The Guardian concluded: "The power of her writing matches that of other important black writers". [4] Nikesh Shukla in The Observer praised the book as "warm, informative and occasionally heart-wrenching". Shukla believed it was "a countrywide conversation-starter" and "a deeply personal look at who she always knew she was, but didn’t feel ready to say yet". [5]
David Goodhart in the London Evening Standard wrote that there was an "interesting book struggling to get out" but argued that "Hirsch's fluid definition of racism encourages victim status among minorities". Goodhart criticized a near-lack of "acknowledgement of progress" and that Hirsch "offers no answers except that white people need to check their privilege more", but found that there is "plenty to agree with in her critique of the evasions and embarrassments over race in Britain". [6] Kwasi Kwarteng in The Sunday Times summarized that "despite the persuasive arguments, Hirsch overplays the idea that Britain is a racist, dystopian nightmare." [7]
British may refer to:
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Sunny Singh FRSL is an Indian-born academic and writer of fiction and creative non-fiction. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Inclusion in the Arts at London Metropolitan University.
Akwasi Addo Alfred Kwarteng is a British politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 6 September to 14 October 2022 under Prime Minister Liz Truss and as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from 2021 to 2022 under Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Spelthorne since 2010. Kwarteng is a member of the Conservative Party.
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
Afua Hirsch is a British writer and broadcaster. She has worked as a journalist for The Guardian newspaper, and was the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News from 2014 until 2017. She is the author of the 2018 book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, receiving a Jerwood Award while writing it.
Rupa Asha Huq is a British Labour MP, columnist and academic. Elected as the Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Ealing Central and Acton at the 2015 general election, she was formerly a senior lecturer in sociology at Kingston University.
Reni Eddo-Lodge is a British journalist and author, whose writing primarily focuses on feminism and exposing structural racism. She has written for a range of publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Voice, BuzzFeed, Vice, i-D and Dazed & Confused, and is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is a 2017 debut book by British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge that was published by Bloomsbury Publishing.
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism is a 2018 book written by Robin DiAngelo about race relations in the United States. An academic with experience in diversity training, DiAngelo coined the term "white fragility" in 2011 to describe what she views as any defensive instincts or reactions that a white person experiences when questioned about race or made to consider their own race. In White Fragility, DiAngelo views racism in the United States as systemic and often perpetuated subconsciously by individuals. She recommends against viewing racism as committed intentionally by "bad people".
The Good Immigrant is an anthology of twenty-one essays edited by Nikesh Shukla and first published by Unbound in the UK in 2016 after a crowd-funding campaign endorsed by celebrities. Written by British authors who identify as BAME, the essays concern race, immigration, identity, 'otherness', exploring the experience of immigrant and ethnic minority life in the United Kingdom from their perspective. Contributors include actor/musician Riz Ahmed, journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge, comedian Nish Kumar and playwright Vinay Patel. The compilation inspired the American sequel The Good Immigrant USA, published in 2017, which featured BAME authors from the United States.
Nikesh Shukla FRSL is a British author and screenwriter. His writing focuses on race, racism, identity, and immigration. He is the editor of the 2016 collection of essays The Good Immigrant, which features contributions from Riz Ahmed, Musa Okwonga, Bim Adewunmi, and Reni Eddo-Lodge, among others. With Chimène Suleyman, he co-edited the 2019 follow-up collection called The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect On America.
Lara is a semi-autobiographical novel-in-verse written by Bernardine Evaristo. It was originally published in 1997 by Angela Royal Publishing and won the EMMA Best Book Award in 1999. Drawing on family life, childhood and an inter-racial marriage, Lara explores the struggles of London living in the 1960s and '70s, travelling through seven generations of predecessors, spanning over 150 years to follow their lives in England, Nigeria, Ireland, Germany and Brazil. In 2009 a new, revised and expanded edition was published by Bloodaxe Books, with a photograph of the author's parents on their wedding day in Camberwell, London, 1955, as the cover.
Theatre of Black Women (1982–1988) was Britain's first black women's theatre company. It was founded by Bernardine Evaristo, Patricia Hilaire and Paulette Randall upon leaving the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, where they had trained as actors and theatre-makers on the Community Theatre Arts course from 1979 to 1982. The course was a progressive, innovative drama course aimed at producing individuals who would be equipped to create their own theatre and be a force for change in society. The company, based in London, was forced to disband in 1988 when Arts Council funding ceased.
How to Be an Antiracist is a 2019 nonfiction book by American author and historian Ibram X. Kendi, which combines social commentary and memoir. It was published under Random House's One World imprint. The book discusses concepts of racism and Kendi's proposals for anti-racist individual actions and systemic changes.
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire is a 2019 British book by the rapper Akala. Part memoir, the book provides race and class analysis of a variety of historical eras, in addition to contemporary British society. It received positive critical reception, in addition to nominations for the Jhalak Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and saw renewed attention following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd in America.
Queenie is a new adult novel written by British author Candice Carty-Williams and published by an imprint of Trapeze published by Orion in 2019. The novel is about the life and loves of Queenie Jenkins, a vibrant, troubled 25-year-old British-Jamaican woman who is not having a very good year.
Mixed White and Black African people in the United Kingdom are a multi-ethnic and biracial group of UK-residents who identify with, or are perceived to have, both White and Black African ancestry.
Chimene or ChimèneSuleyman is a writer from London of Northern Cypriot descent, who has written on the politics of race and immigration in media including The Guardian, The Independent, the BBC and NPR, and co-edited The Good Immigrant USA in 2019.