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How should we define ‘Britishness’?

“We have our ancestors looking over us as we endeavour to take their country back, putting our own people first in our own country. Is that too much to ask?” Paul Golding and his herd of entirely white Britain First thugs think they know what Britishness is, and they’ve decided they’re going to fight for it. Unfortunately, no one else seems to have an answer to that question.

David Cameron recently tried to define Britishness as “freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions”, which doesn’t seem to come to much more than a declaration of support for human rights and a point about British institutions that seems a little circular. Others take a wilder, more fun approach, chucking together Monty Python, PG Tips, Shakespeare and chicken tikka masala. There must be something here, if on a superficial level, but it does feel a bit dishonest in the face of the diversity of the country, across groups of age, class and ethnicity. As for the definition of Britishness that mourns the loss of our genocidal empire, well, that one can make like the economies and collective mental health of colonised countries and collapse catastrophically.

There is such a struggle here. Are you English? British? European? A Londoner? What are British values? How do we fit the royal family in? The Church of England? What’s left? And if you believe there isn’t anything left, that Britain is just a splodge of land with no distinguishing features to its culture, does that really, truly fit the experience of people in this country?

 The problem, the cause of this big impasse, is that we’re still working with outdated assumptions about the nature of cultural identity. One of these is the link between ethnicity, ‘origin’ and cultural identity. It’s always been clear to many British people of colour that there are still misleading and exclusionary links between these things. “No, but where are you really from?” is nearly a worn-out joke in the British Asian community, if not in other communities too. You’ve just met someone new, you exchange names and they ask where you’re from. “Ealing,” I reply, “how about you?” The response far too often fits a neat little formula: “Oh, no, I meant where are you really from?” It’s clear what the disconnect is, and I doubt it would be there if I were about three shades less dark on the Dulux scale.

They rarely, probably never, mean any harm, but the assumption is there. At some level, in some way, the visual parts of my Punjabi Sikh ethnicity – skin colour, the proportions of my face, luxurious thick hair – lead to assumptions about my cultural identity, and that of anyone like me. After all, asking someone where they are really from in this context is really about belonging to a culture – and this is a common, widespread experience. On a sidenote, I’m glad to say that these conversations are rare in Oxford, but it’s worth bearing in mind that many people experience them as well-intentioned but deeply hurtful micro-aggressions, that happening again and again create a real experience of ‘not belonging’.

The whole connection between ethnicity and cultural identity is outdated and irrelevant. There’s a good 13 per cent of the country that isn’t white, most of whom identify as British and most likely are as British as the next person, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Even if we recognise this intellectually, as a country we still haven’t shaken off the remnants of our past mindsets.

The other limiting aspect of our approach to cultural identity is a focus on finding one particular ‘Britishness’, or on trying to reject that concept entirely. We need to understand that cultural identity just doesn’t work in that way anymore – several cultural identities can co-exist in the same person, and identity is something fluid and changeable, dependent on a thousand factors. A good case study of this is this generation of young British Indians. They’re more traditional British Asian when they are around the previous generation, more contemporary British Asian if they’re listening to Panjabi MC, and more vanilla British in a myriad of other situations. There is no fixed identity, and often no particular cultural identity at all other than however much of an identity that person has created for themselves, territory many British Asian novelists have explored.

This new nature of cultural identity, and consequently of Britishness, is most clear in minority communities, but they’re just the flashpoints of a wider change. We’re still looking for a fixed, discrete Britishness, but we just can’t find it, and never will. Maybe the new generation of British people of colour, as culturally rich as we are culturally confused, can offer a hint. Once we’ve rooted out those last subtle old racist assumptions, we should embrace the confusion and complexity that is the reality of contemporary cultural identity. With that done, we’ll hopefully be one step closer to pulling together an understanding of ‘Britishness’. If nothing else, Paul Golding won’t be too pleased about it, and that can only be a good sign.

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