The Good Immigrant

you have just one task each day, one battle, and that is you against the blank page

Windows’ offer us a chance to look closely at a view of the world we may not have previously seen.

she argues that books can act as both mirrors and windows for children.

While being black can be a shared experience, not all black experiences are the same.

Words matter. Words are important.

Here’s the truth of the matter. I find racism boring – really dull. I wish it didn’t exist, and have spent most of my life trying to help to counteract many of its worst effects in society. Contrary to the belief of some of the digital pitchforkers who jab away at the bottom of each of my blogs, I genuinely wish that I never had to write about it again. Unfortunately, however, that is a luxury that I do not have.

I remember, during the 2012 Olympic Games, the Mail, having taken offence at a scene from the opening ceremony, which featured a happily married mixed-race couple, wrote the next day that ‘[the ceremony] was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up’.75 And to my surprise, because I am normally a fairly temperate soul, I lost it.

I started being myself at 22, because that’s when I had my first drop of alcohol. I don’t mean to say that drink liberated me, in some profoundly spiritual way: I simply mean that I felt comfortable enough to get drunk. Because, until my friend passed me that first fateful shot of tequila, I had tried my very best to keep control. As ridiculous as it might seem, I believed that since my white peers had grown up seeing so many negative stereotypes of black people their entire lives, I had a duty to counteract as many of them as possible. That meant never getting drunk, never getting that Afro I had long wanted, never taking the joint when it was offered. And, in truth, I was a little scared about what my intoxication might reveal. I was afraid that, beneath my straight-laced veneer of the Good Immigrant, there seethed a boorish, brutal womaniser. And, of course, no such monster emerged. I was merely a slightly louder, slightly merrier version of my sober self.

‘I don’t see you as a migrant, Musa. I see you as a friend’.

Lawrence’s death annihilated the lies we told ourselves – that if we were just good little black boys and girls, that if we just stayed away from the bad crowds, no harm would come to us. Lawrence was a budding architect who spent most of his final hours playing video games with his best friend; it didn’t get anymore innocuous than that. Yet that didn’t stop him from encountering a gang of white youths who found his mere presence so offensive that they spontaneously set upon him and stabbed him to death.