Narrator: Imagine being fourteen years old, sitting with your friends on a warm autumn day. You feel safe, accepted. Then, one of them turns to you with a look of pity and says, "Don't worry, we don't see you as black." The others nod in agreement. For them, it's an act of kindness, an offer of inclusion. But for you, it feels like a traumatic erasure of your very identity. This single, jarring experience lies at the heart of Afua Hirsch's powerful book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. Hirsch uses her personal journey as a mixed-race woman in the UK to dissect the profound and often painful contradictions of a nation that prides itself on being post-racial, yet constantly forces its non-white citizens to confront their otherness.

Narrator: Afua Hirsch argues that one of the most significant barriers to racial progress in Britain is the well-intentioned but ultimately damaging ideal of being "colour-blind." This concept is powerfully illustrated by the memory of her school friends trying to comfort her by denying her blackness. What they offered as a compliment—an escape from what they perceived as the negative state of being black—was, for Hirsch, a profound invalidation. It taught her a painful lesson: that to be accepted, she might have to abandon a part of herself.

This paradox extends to a question that has followed Hirsch throughout her life, one familiar to many people of colour in Britain: "Where are you really from?" Despite being born and raised in Wimbledon, her appearance marks her as different, prompting a constant inquiry into her origins. Hirsch explains that this question is both a symptom and a cause of alienation. It’s a symptom of a society that hasn't fully defined what it means to be British beyond whiteness, and it’s a cause because the more one is asked, the more one feels like an outsider. It creates a vicious cycle where a person’s British identity is perpetually held in question, forcing them to feel they must be something else.

Narrator: Hirsch contends that Britain suffers from a form of historical amnesia, particularly regarding its role in the transatlantic slave trade. The national narrative overwhelmingly focuses on the country's role in abolition, creating what Hirsch calls the "Cult of Wilberforce." William Wilberforce, the famous abolitionist, is celebrated with statues and plaques, his name cemented in the national imagination as a saintly figure. Yet, this celebration conveniently overshadows the centuries during which Britain built its empire and immense wealth on the backs of enslaved Africans.

This historical erasure has a profound psychological impact. Hirsch recounts a story of a WhatsApp group chat with other black professional women. When one of them shared a collection of sepia portraits of elegant, dignified Victorian and Edwardian black women, the group reacted with shock and disbelief. They had grown up with a history that rendered them invisible, believing that people who looked like them simply didn't exist in that era of British history. The discovery of these images was a powerful moment of resetting deep-seated insecurities about their exclusion from the past. It revealed how selective historical narratives can create a false sense of not belonging, while obscuring the rich, complex, and long-standing presence of black people in Britain.

Narrator: The book powerfully demonstrates that conversations about race in Britain are incomplete without understanding the deep intersection of class. Hirsch illustrates this through the lens of her own life and her relationship with her partner, Sam. Hirsch grew up in the privileged, predominantly white suburb of Wimbledon, attending private school and later Oxford. Sam grew up in a working-class black community in Tottenham. Their differing backgrounds created starkly different realities and perspectives.

A vivid anecdote captures this divide perfectly. Early in their relationship, Hirsch took Sam to a gathering of her friends—mostly black and mixed-race Oxford graduates—in East London. Sam, arriving to pick her up, was bewildered by the scene of quiet intellectual discussion and plant-based food. He later told her, "You lot, sitting there with your herbal tea, all round in a circle, nah! That blew my mind!" For Sam, who viewed the world through the lens of economic struggle and social mobility, his friends with their elite educations should have been "blitzing this life" and making money, not engaging in what he saw as privileged navel-gazing. This moment reveals the cultural and class chasm that exists even within the black British experience, showing how privilege, opportunity, and identity are perceived in vastly different ways.

Narrator: Hirsch moves from the historical and social to the deeply personal, examining how black bodies are perceived, fetishized, and policed in contemporary society. She investigates the disturbing phenomenon of racial fetishization through a visit to a swingers' club in Dunstable hosting a "Black Man's Fan Club" night. Here, white women and their partners come specifically to have sexual encounters with black men. One of the men at the club, Leslie, explains the appeal by rattling off a list of stereotypes: that black men are naturally more dominant, have better rhythm, and are physically built differently. This encounter exposes how historical myths about black hypersexuality, rooted in the slave era, are not only alive but have been commercialized, reducing black men to a set of racialized stereotypes.

This policing of bodies extends to black women as well. Hirsch notes the immense pressure to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards, from the billion-dollar skin-lightening industry in West Africa to the lack of hair products and stylists for Afro hair on the British high street. She also points to the career of tennis superstar Serena Williams, whose powerful, muscular physique has been a constant target of racist and sexist commentary, contrasting sharply with the celebration of her thinner, white counterparts. These examples demonstrate a persistent societal discomfort with black bodies that don't conform to a narrow, white-centric ideal of beauty and acceptability.

Narrator: Ultimately, Brit(ish) is a story about the search for belonging. Feeling alienated in Britain, Hirsch embarked on a journey to find a place where her identity could feel whole. She moved to Senegal and later lived and worked in Ghana, her father's homeland, hoping to connect with her African heritage. However, the reality she found was far more complex than the idealized vision she held. In Ghana, she was still an outsider—a "Brit," a "rich" person. Her experience was punctuated by moments that shattered her romanticism, most notably a violent robbery on a beach that left her and her husband traumatized and feeling profoundly vulnerable.

This journey forced Hirsch to confront a difficult truth: there was no simple return. Her identity was irrevocably shaped by her British upbringing, just as it was by her Ghanaian heritage. She could not simply shed one for the other. This realization is made even more complex by the discovery of her own family's history, which includes not only Ghanaian ancestors but also a Dutch slave trader from the 18th century. Her search for a simple origin story revealed a messy, contradictory, and deeply human past. It led her to the conclusion that for someone like her, belonging cannot be found by escaping to another place, but must be forged in the difficult, in-between space of being Brit(ish).

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Brit(ish) is that a society cannot heal from a wound it refuses to acknowledge. Afua Hirsch’s central argument is that Britain's insistence on "not seeing race" is a form of denial that prevents any meaningful progress. It silences the lived experiences of millions, invalidates their identities, and allows the subtle, structural legacies of empire and racism to persist unchallenged.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge. True belonging isn't about assimilation or forcing complex identities into neat, palatable boxes. It is about creating a society where every citizen has the freedom to be fully themselves, to embrace their heritage in all its complexity, without being asked to choose a side or justify their existence. The question Hirsch poses is not just about her own identity, but about the identity of Britain itself: will it finally have the courage to confront its past and build a future where being "Brit(ish)" is an identity that truly has room for everyone?