Who do you identify with? A misguided attempt to be inclusive is reducing identity to skin colour.

    When I was a little girl my favourite Disney princess was Snow White. Not only was it the second film I’d even seen on the magical big cinema screen but in the 80s she was the only Disney princess with black hair like me. When my movie viewing expanded I loved to dance around pretending I was Brigitta from The Sound of Music. She also had black hair which was even woven into my favourite plait hairstyle. With a German mother, beloved German grandparents and yearly holidays in a Bavarian Alpine idyl, I identified with the very similar Austrian culture celebrated in The Sound of Music. It is undeniable that we are naturally drawn to what is similar to us. Yet not once in my childhood did it occur to me that being brown skinned child should preclude me from going to a fancy dress party as the princess who famously has ‘skin as white as snow.’

   When recently accepting the award for best actress at the screen actor’s guild awards, Michelle Yeoh said ‘This is not just for me, it's for every little girl who looks like me. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64781317 Naturally one might have expected Yeoh to reference being the first Asian actress to win that award and her Malaysian heritage. But her words are symptomatic of something more pernicious. There is now a widespread belief that people primarily identify with and are most inspired by those of the same race. Indeed sometimes this sometimes also extends to being the same gender and, (the other woke favourite!), being part of the ‘LGBTQI + community’. Of course the undeniable historic discrimination against various types of people has meant that some individuals pushing past those barriers have rightly been seen as inspirational role models. However in education there has long been a trend to assume that ethnic minority pupils can’t get as much out of literature written by ‘dead old white men’ as white pupils. This misguided view is also prevalent amongst those striving to ‘decolonise the curriculum.’ Put simply some believe that non white children can’t benefit from Shakespeare or Dickens, or even studying the Tudors, because these works and people don’t speak to them. Headmistress of the Michaela Community School, Katherine Birbalsingh has been one of the strongest voices opposing this view. In an article discussing the threat of removing The Bard himself from the curriculum Birbalsingh said, ‘It’s right to teach Shakespeare. The ideas in Shakespeare are universal.’ https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/may/22/uks-strictest-headmistress-fears-schools-will-stop-teaching-shakespeare It is the move away from the universal and what is common to us all that defines modern so called ‘identity politics’. Moreover the characteristics that delineate ‘identities/groups’, within which one might find one’s primary role models, are limited to race, gender and sexuality. Human experience not particular to these categories - E.g. educational background, family dynamics, travel, illness, tragedy or even interests like love of music and art - are excluded from relevance. In the overwhelmingly tolerant UK of 2023 I would argue that the silent majority of people likely feel more connected to someone because of something other than the colour of their skin.

    Ironically it is often in pursuit of ‘inclusion’ of minority racial groups that the most societal division is caused. There is clearly a prevalent desire to prove how ‘anti racist’ a company is by making sure that their adverts are full of non white people. However this is also part of the view that black and brown skinned people are unable to identify with an advert that has an all white cast. This has lead to advertising world in which the vast majority of UK families are mixed race, probably to give everyone someone to ‘identify with’. However the most recent available Office for National Statistics data on ethnicity within UK marriage and cohabiting mixed sex relationships is taken from 2018 and it records 87.89% as white couples. That is 13,196,882 white couples out of 15,015,145 in total. In contrast only 3.89%, (583,521) were mixed race with one white partner and 0.36% (53,334) were mixed race without a white partner

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/adhocs/12186ethnicitywithinmarriageorcohabitingmixedsexrelationshipuk2018

Yet certainly in TV adverts the ‘average’ couple and family is mixed race with one white partner. So comprehensive is this trend that when I watch TV in Germany it always initially shocks me that the adverts overwhelmingly feature white people. I caught myself almost pondering whether this wasn’t in fact indicative of some kind of latent German racism. My straight talking German mother quickly brought me to my senses!  Even though Germany doesn’t keep official data on racial demographics it is safe to it is vastly majority white country. In fact it has far less immigrants from predominantly black countries than the UK. At least in my German Heimat common sense still largely rules the day. Self proclaimed ‘anti woke’ Bavarian President Markus Söder prefers bonds of national culture and traditions to immutable characteristics. The death of our late Queen has showed that identity politics hasn’t managed to completely extinguish patriotic bonding in the UK. Whilst there are those, usually with the most shrieking social media voices, who see this as dangerous many of us see this as preferable to forging identity based solely on melanin.

      It is understandable that in situations such the tragic of largely black on black inner city knife crime the need for role models of a certain skin colour might seem necessary. However it’s also likely that a black barrister born and bred in Islington would have a lesser chance of identifying with those black perpetrators and victims than a white working class man born on the same council estate as them. We should be striving to remove skin colour as a barrier not reinforcing it by reducing a complex human to that one part of who they are. I grew up with my Mum telling me about the racism she had experienced due to being in a relationship with my dark brown Peruvian Dad. This included white people on a bus moving away from them as they sat holding hands. She also joked that people often asked her if she was my and my sister’s nanny. We have thankfully moved on from that. Although in many ways we seem to be going backwards, ironically under the guise of trying to move forward, to be ‘progressive.’ Racism still exists and can only really be understood by those who experience it. But that is the same for all human suffering. Indeed suffering of any kind bonds people together, something I myself have sadly experienced due to my mental illness. But I wasn’t somehow psychologically damaged by the lack of ‘dark brown Dads’ in adverts or the predominance of white children on kid’s TV. We have to ask ourselves if children today are in fact being told to see colour when they naturally wouldn’t, bizarrely in the name of ‘anti racism’ and ‘inclusion’.

   Human beings are tribal creatures and are endlessly seeking human connection. When at Oxford I researched fellowship in late medieval England and I put forward a way of seeing human interactions that favoured networks with nodal or focal intersection points. Rather than thinking of ‘communities’ as groups it seemed to me that late medieval identities were forged at communal meeting places on a relationship network web. Even if you depict groups as overlapping, the resulting Venn diagram soon becomes confusing and indecipherable. Also the very action of drawing a group boundary creates the sense of enclosure. In 15^th century England being a member of a church, a family and a village sat alongside being a trader at the local market, a trade guild member and lordship allegiances as co-existing identities. In 2023 we should also be thinking of ourselves as connecting and identifying with a whole variety of people in diverse situations. In this way, even if certain aspects of ourselves sometimes take priority, (for example prioritising nationality in a time of war), we never forget that we are bound to humans outside of that identity in multiple other ways. Shared difference can be important in forming certain connections. However difference between people should be seen as wonderfully multifaceted and must never be allowed to undermine our common humanity.