This collection of essays by non-white British writers is perceptive,touching and comical but misses an critical truthThe way Nikesh Shukla tells it, the starting point for The Good Immigrant was a below-the-line comment on a Guardian article about the creative writing process. The anonymous kvetcher thought Shukla wasn’t illustrious enough to deserve being featured in the piece. Shukla was annoyed because of how the “fixed anxiety we feel as people of colour to justify our space, or to show that we have earned our position at the table,continues to hound us”. And so, crowdfunded in just three days (including a pledge of £5000 from JK Rowling), and comes this collection of 21 essays: “a document of what it means to be a person of colour now”.
Small-town memoirs,critiques of the cultural assumptions of children’s books, sociological accounts of the impact of caste on diasporic communities, or speculative histories about white T-shirts being imported to this country via Somali and Yemeni dockworkers in the early 20th century: the voices here are younger rather than older,mostly English, those of digital natives or at least those comfortable flexing their identities across the shifting terrain of social media.
The idea that eastern European immigrants' whiteness confers on them any kind of privilege in Britain is unsustainableContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com