Adekoya says he could rise above the racial abuse he encountered in Poland because of the Nigerian sense of superiority his father had drilled into him. “Nigerians firmly believe they are a special people endowed with a unique intelligence, resilience and creativity that predestines them for greatness. This is the gospel I was raised in and I was a firm believer.”
But this shield does not protect all black people. Indeed, in his reflections on so-called “colourism” Adekoya argues that the opposite is often the case. The curse of colourism is the tendency of black people in poorer, non-white, parts of the world to esteem lighter skin, which mixed race people with a white parent tend to benefit from, often with a guilty conscience.
And his answer to this is controversially pragmatic. “Colourism will not be eliminated by well-meaning intellectuals telling people it is a bad thing; it will be eliminated when the white world stops being so much richer and more successful than everyone else. Then regular black and brown folk will stop looking up to it so much and start admiring their own kind. But this will only happen if their own nations become rich and successful. I do not like that this is the way it is, but this is the way it is. Wealth and success is what impresses the world today. The road to the end of white supremacy lies in economics, not sociology, history or semantics.”
This is a powerful insight and if the economic success of Africa in the past decade is replicated in the next five then we might be able to test the hypothesis. But what if Nigeria does not become as rich and successful as Denmark in the next 50 years, even as it heads towards becoming the most populous country on earth? Are black people around the world, including in the North American and European diasporas, condemned to battle a collective inferiority complex?
This is surely too pessimistic, at least for black minorities in the US and Europe. Two ethnic stereotypes have changed dramatically in Britain in my life-time. The Irish and the Indian. The Irish shift follows Adekoya’s logic: as Ireland moved from being a poor, rural country with relatively low levels of education, to being a highly educated, post-industrial one, richer than Britain, the old stereotype of the slow-witted Irish became untenable.
The Indian stereotype has also changed dramatically as British-Indians have marched into the professional middle class in their millions and yet the reality of India has not changed that much, the country has patches of great wealth and a growing middle class but it is still home to the largest number of truly poor people in the world. Indian success in the diaspora has changed the image of Indians, not the rise of the Indian economy.
Surely that success can be replicated by black minorities in rich countries too. A critical mass of successful black professionals is already emerging in many places and that looks a better pathway to generalised black confidence than a well-governed Nigeria with a booming economy, a decent welfare state and nuclear weapons.
Half-Indian/Half-Irish Sunder Katwala, the head of the British Future think tank (and the only interviewee to be identified), is an optimist on this and says that “Britain is doing much better on race than on class”. But the reason why this does not seem more apparent is because “there is now a split between academic, media and political environments and the lived experience of the rest of the country… the problem is that the race discourse is dominated by people who spend all their time on it, we don’t hear enough from people who just get on with their everyday lives and are not defined by race.”
This is not, however, a complacent book celebrating a post-racial country; it rather reflects a messy reality in which about half of ethnic minority Britons think their colour has held them back in life, while the other half think it hasn’t.
Every mixed-raced child is a sort of gamble on the world becoming a less tribal place. And Britain’s mixed-race story is also unavoidably about the partnerships and marriages across ethnic boundaries. Adekoya observes his own parents’ difficulties with dispassionate sympathy but this is one area where a few more facts and figures might have been helpful. I wanted to know whether partnerships and marriages across ethnic lines are more fragile than those within them? And if so are they becoming more robust as society becomes more tolerant?
Adekoya does not have all the answers but, looking ahead, he sees the mixed-race identity becoming less defensive and freer to draw on multiple identities without feeling pressured to choose one. He also thinks that mixed race people have something valuable to offer in today’s atmosphere of racial polarisation.
“Growing up mixed race is a life experience that lays the groundwork for an inclusive open-minded attitude towards others… The circumstances of our mixed heritages and upbringing makes delving into the perspectives of others come somewhat naturally to us because it is what we had to do to fit in growing up.”
Barack Obama had a special talent for making different kinds of people feel comfortable around him because of his biracial life experience, says Adekoya. By the same token, Adekoya himself seems poised to become one of the most important and subtle new voices in Britain’s never-ending conversation about race.
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