I remember the racism he experienced over the years: people shouting at us in the street, and the time some kids tossed lit fireworks through the letterbox of our shop and it felt like we'd been bombed. He told me stories about men in pubs trying to punch him for daring to date an English girl (my mom). I remember how 9/11 happened—and Iran went from being just somewhere in the Middle East to being "an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world"—and everything got ten times worse. [...]
A bit later, his studies paid off, and he became a math teacher. And then something weird happened. It was like the volume on his otherness had been abruptly turned down and something else had been turned up. Abusive comments became less frequent. Hassle evaporated. He became respected, almost revered. He always swears that even the bricks and mortar of our little semi-detached house seemed to take on new meaning. "Some foreigners live there" became "a teacher lives there." Neighbors who usually struggled to give us the time of day started turning up at the door step with a bottle of whatever was on sale, asking if he could tutor their kids on their homework. In the eyes of our immediate community, he had gone from being a threatening other—the sort of "bad immigrant" who invades in hordes, steals jobs, sponges off the NHS, gobbles benefits, takes a dump on the economy, and is personally responsible for all that is wrong with life in Britain—to being someone worth their time, a "good immigrant."
That's the good immigrant/bad immigrant binary: that all immigrants are automatically deemed bad people until they somehow earn their right to be treated as humans and to sit at the table. It's one of many triggers that inspired the author Nikesh Shukla to put together a new book: an anthology of essays from 21 different BAME writers, titled The Good Immigrant, exploring what it means to be black, Asian, or minority ethnic in Britain in 2016. [...]
This isn't the book on race, as Shukla often makes sure to state. It doesn't try to define "the black experience" or claim to know how every Chinese person in Britain feels right now. It treats race and identity not as segmented discussions of skin color or origin, but as a vast and nuanced spectrum of individual stories, spanning gender, age, ethnicity, upbringing, and environment—all underlined by a sense of hope and optimism. Some stories will make you feel uncomfortable, some will shine an awkward light on the shadowy corners where we all still harbor some form of subconscious ignorance. But mostly it seems astounding that these experiences, everyday otherness felt by the writers, are stories rarely heard.
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