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“Let’s face it, Britain has long struggled to accept the imperial explanation for its racial diversity.”
Britain’s imperial past was a taboo subject when @Sathnam was a child in Wolverhampton. Now, he says, we need to face up to it https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sathnam-sanghera-on-the-british-empire-growing-up-i-was-fed-the-idea-that-i-was-a-novel-social-experiment-ng3fccbdm?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1610799136
Britain’s imperial past was a taboo subject when @Sathnam was a child in Wolverhampton. Now, he says, we need to face up to it https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sathnam-sanghera-on-the-british-empire-growing-up-i-was-fed-the-idea-that-i-was-a-novel-social-experiment-ng3fccbdm?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1610799136
“The idea that black and brown people are aliens who arrived without permission, and with no link to Britain, to abuse British hospitality, has been the defining political narrative of my lifetime,” says @Sathnam
“In my working life it continues in the way I'm told to ‘go home’ on social media (if you want to pay my train fare, I’ll take up the offer); in being referred to as a ‘second-generation immigrant’ (how can you be any sort of ‘immigrant’ if you were born here?)”
“The narrative that brown people imposed themselves on Britain is so powerful that I absorbed it myself, as a young brown Briton. My education taught me nothing about the history that would've explained why Wolverhampton was one of the most racially diverse places in Britain”
“At Wolverhampton Grammar School and Cambridge I supposedly had one of the finest educations available, but when it comes to British history it left me with little more than a superficial knowledge of the world wars, the Tudors and the Peasants’ Revolt”
“In fact, looking back, it’s almost as if teachers went out of their way to avoid telling us about the British Empire,” says @Sathnam
“Indeed, the millions of words I’ve since read on the Empire have made me appreciate that my schooling was at times indirectly colonial.” Read more: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sathnam-sanghera-on-the-british-empire-growing-up-i-was-fed-the-idea-that-i-was-a-novel-social-experiment-ng3fccbdm?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=sathnam_sanghera&utm_medium=branded_social
