Best Quotes from Brit by Afua Hirsch with Page Numbers

Each of its four, innocent-seeming letters has its demons.

Names can do that; they plant a seed that influence how your sense of self will grow, and what it will become.

It was an early warning that the new world I am entering may not be the perfect motherland I’ve imagined.

Who am I to judge this still young West African nation...?

I’m full of hope, but I am driven by disappointment too.

The Question is: where are you from?

The more you get asked The Question, the more confused you feel about the answer.

I was that awkward, highly noticeable outsider.

When I read Barack Obama's memoir, I found this was not an isolated experience.

Had I known the true proximity of African stories to British stories... it might have changed the way I saw myself.

If my experience is anything to go by, most of you – apart from a few academic and historian – are unfamiliar with flattering, pampered image of black and brown people, residing in this country in the distant past.

None of us have ever seen anything like it.

It was only when presented with an alternative view that these buried parts of our psyche came spilling out.

It made me wonder what other selective accounts of the past we might have absorbed, to create this apparent belief that the past was not about people like us.

Now, thanks to the work of pioneering historian like Hakim Adi, David Oluoga, Imtiaz Habib, Miranda Kaufmann, and Peter Fryer who over recent decades have tirelessly researched and revived the forgotten role played by black people throughout British history, a piece of this history is now taught in almost all schools.

Why were we – even those of us who had most to lose from doing it – buying into a lie?

I have always wondered how we have managed to contort our memory in such a way as to celebrate abolishing something, while forgetting how fundamental a prior role we played in developing it in the first place.

There is no clean break from slavery, no moment where those who had been slaves suddenly began to be prosperous owners of land or assets.

Britain’s act of abolition in 1807 curtailed the supply of new African blood to slave owners in the Caribbean, worsening conditions for many of the slaves already there.

The impact of slavery on the African continent, from where so many millions – often the strongest and most able – were kidnapped, is harder to delineate.

'Beauty was not something to behold; it was something one could do.' – Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

'If we’d have sounded black, I’m not sure we would have been allowed in.'

'People are usually respectful, but it can get hairy by the end of the night.'

'It’s not like a normal club where everyone has a poker face on. No one’s judging.'

'The moment you walk through the door, it’s interpreted by everyone as some kind of giant leap toward sexual consent.'

'All bodies are not sexual, all hair is not sexual.'

'You’re supposed to do what everyone else does, and avoid standing out, causing a commotion, and certainly don’t try to take over.'

'The number of things that have been said about black men in this country for the most part have been about as negative as you can possibly get...'

'We are not here to be fetishized.'

'Time has moved on. And racism has evolved.'

‘I had to go the extra mile. That’s the whole point.’

‘I think race-matching should be a priority... I don’t think people really realize how important this is.’

‘These children have been let down and rejected. With me they know I genuinely care about them, and I want them to be happy here.’

‘If you have swum through the sewage that the world has thrown Africa’s way, and reached the other side, where you own your blackness, and are proud of it… you can’t help but feel a little suspicious of other people who embrace white identities.’

‘Living with multiple heritage is an asset. It’s a bit like being multilingual.’

‘But providing children with the cultural identity they need to thrive is an art, not a science.’

‘I think growing up with a black family would have been a massive part of me being comfortable in myself.’

‘As a parent, I’m loath to lecture others on how to get it right, although there are some cases which quite obviously got it badly wrong.’

‘I know my self-esteem was very low.’

‘Society sees me as a black woman – don’t you realize?’

Identity became a place.

I moved to West Africa, a search for fertile soil in which to plant and grow a new identity for myself.

I believed Africa was born in me.

It was the confluence of these lifestyle choices that I found mesmerizing.

The experience of a parent – their dream, their pain, their hope, and disappointment – shape the lives of their children.

What circle was I trying to close? What space was I trying to fill in?

I began looking back for the first time.

I had a desperate need to know about my past, my family, and my cultural and political inheritance.

There is no escaping your identity.

I realized… that the world I’d inhabited at Oxford had slipped away before I’d been able to appreciate it.

"I don’t really believe in race. I don’t really believe in colour. But I do know what I see."

"It began with a secret world. A cloistered world, hidden away behind its Tudor walls, a large, spacious and gloriously ancient campus."

"In a world where no one thought the way I looked was what a barrister was meant to look like, this uniform gave me legitimacy, and let everyone know that I was a professional just like all the others."

"It’s impossible not to notice a similar phenomenon in the British media... the pattern of minority ethnic participation shows little contribution to heavyweight roles and subjects of a serious nature."

"To me, it’s non-negotiable that newsrooms should reflect the cultural, racial, class, religious and gender make-up of the nation."

"We’re writing to escape. If you listen deep into the lyrics, there’s probably a lot of cries for help in there."

"This world is just not for us. The world is hard. But even so, we need to keep pushing forward."

"The narrative that you see on the television, in film and at the theatre shapes nothing less than your sense of your own life, your very perception of yourself."

"I’m normalizing TV. I am making TV look like the world looks. Women, people of color, LGBTQ people equal WAY more than 50 per cent of the population. Which means it ain’t out of the ordinary."

"The more black directors there are in the film industry, the more films will be made which deviate from the usual single black character narrative."

"The New Black is a story of survival and resilience, woven through the fabric of history and identity."

"For all four of them, moving to the UK was not a question of ‘integrating’ or ‘assimilating’, although they did both, it was a matter of life or death."

"You could not have asked for a more loyal, grateful or aspirational group of immigrants."

"They worked, paid taxes, raised their children, in a world free from the kind of terror that had touched their early lives."

"Gratitude, hard work, assimilation – this is very much the kind of behavior we now require of immigrants in order to find them worthy."

"Britain has an amnesiac streak when it comes to acknowledging the immigrant blood in her veins."

"It is a two-way street; it’s not just an issue of new arrivals congregating and living next to each other, it’s also an issue of white flight and why that is happening."

"Many immigrant families arrive not with a headful of plans to live separately, but with the ambition to create a better life than the one they had before."

"What’s important are not the specifics of whatever immigration policy our political leaders enforce. It’s the sentiment that lurks beneath it."

"A nation that singles out the youngest, brightest, most energetic and enthusiastic among them, and tells them they do not belong, is a nation that is getting something badly wrong."

"You are beyond. Broken-off, like limb from a tree. But not lost, for you carry within your bodies the seed of new tree."

"I would thank them politely and just carry on. But the struggle of my life has been to come to terms with my identity."

"It was not so much a name as a project."

"You have to work it out for yourself. I think I have. And I’ve written about what I have learned in this book... so that others don’t have to start from scratch."

"My greatest wish for her is that she will define her own identity and find her own sense of purpose."

"Identity remains. But partly because we realized, we can’t endorse a vision which expects us to accept the fact that we inhabit a world as prejudiced as the one we grew up in."

"I have to believe in a future world in which a name like her, with its rich West African intonation, and Britishness will not be mutually exclusive."

"You can’t dress like that in this country, Daddy! If you want to dress like that, you’ll have to leave."

"Our identities are not diktats that can be dreamed up in Whitehall, dismissed by the self-styled ‘post-racial’ and ‘colour-blind’ commentators who so often hog the debate in the media; they cannot be policed by anyone at all."

"This conversation is long overdue: a conversation begun in a spirit of honesty, not defensiveness, or fear, or blindness."