Will Brehm  0:33
Gary Younge, welcome to FreshEd.

Gary Younge  1:02
Thanks for having me.

Will Brehm  1:04
So, can you explain, to our non-UK audience listening today, what the Sewell Report is -the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities- that was headed by Tony Sewell?

Gary Younge  1:18
Well, yes. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, a relatively newly elected, very conservative government kind of ushered in  in actual part on a Brexit wave – which I would call one of the most progressive waves- fell under some pressure to respond in some way. And the most predictable and least productive way to respond to anything is to commission a report.

Will Brehm  1:54
[Laughs]

Gary Younge  1:54
You know, there are no end of reports into racism in Britain, which is one of the things people said was, “You don’t need to actually. You could just respond to the 10 or 11 reports that have been issued about inequalities in race and criminal justice and so on and so forth, if you actually wanted to do something”. But instead, they commissioned a new report headed by a person called Tony Sewell. This was already, to many, problematic because Tony Sewell has a history of saying or writing things that at one or at the time, he used to have a column in a [Black] newspaper here, of being sexist or homophobic, and of having a very particular quite conservative, with a small C, take on Black life, which was all about victim culture and Black boys misbehaving and being feminized by single mothers and a kind of notion of sort of bootstrap cultural politics, you know. Or in this case, not do your bootstraps up but pull your pants up, young man, and get to it.

Will Brehm  2:30
So, it’s very individualized?

Gary Younge  2:40
Very individualized, and revolving around that the problem is our culture, not the system, not an institution, let’s not claim victimhood. All of that kind of stuff is a kind of globally known route to take with minority Black culture. Which didn’t chime with – I mean, certainly, there’s an audience for that within the Black community – but didn’t chime with most of the voices that we hear who talk about race, and most of the studies that wrote about race. So, already there was a kind of discounting of what this would do. And the notion that “Well, if you really cared about this issue, you’d have got someone who, most Black people would have some kind of confidence in, and this isn’t the person”. That was a common view, and a lot was said in that regard. The report then came out, and I would say was, in some ways, predictable. It was precisely what the government wanted. So, they commissioned a report that they wanted. It’s like marking your own homework, really. And it said, there is racism, because they couldn’t not say that. There is a problem. But they denied the fact that it was systemic and said, “Well, institutionalized. Sometimes people say that and sometimes people don’t but they don’t really know what they mean by it? And then really took a lot of effort to try and make things complicated where they either weren’t or where people had raised those complications many times before. So, while, African kids do better than Caribbean kids in school. So, how can we say that there’s institutional racism in education and people – there’s been a lot of work on that. And the fact that well, it’s a different pattern of migration; nobody’s saying that African and Caribbean kids are the same; racism is just about color. Nobody is saying it’s not complicated. Indian and Bangladeshi kids, he didn’t mention them so much. but they do very, very differently. Actually, the difference between Indian and Bangladeshi kids is even more different. And so, it’s kind of like, “Well, you people look the same. So, there can’t be racism”. Which, of course, is daft.

And one would only have to look at America and the notion that children who are Black from Caribbean or African migrant background do fare better than children who are from African American backgrounds. It’s not difficult to understand why. There’s a history of discrimination. So, when Obama comes to America, when he’s addressing the 2004 Democratic Convention, and he says, my father came to America, a magical place. When his dad came in 1959 it wasn’t magical for African Americans. But you can see that it would be magical if you were Kenyan. So, children from African countries are more likely to come. Africa has a much bigger middle class. The way that you would migrate from Africa in the last 20-30 years is very different from how my parents migrated as nurses and bus drivers. Anyway, not complicated, but made to look like “Ah-ha see! Can things really be like that?” and certain very weird stuff about slavery, which they then took back about kind of, “We can’t just look at slavery as being about theft and dehumanization. We also must” -it was something very odd that they retracted about kind of celebrating something about the way that we became British or I mean, it’s difficult to remember for a reason. Yeah, slavery was not just about profit and suffering. In the face of humanity of slavery, African people preserve their humanity and culture. This includes the story of slave resistance, which is –

Will Brehm  3:27
It’s like taking a very static notion of culture.

Gary Younge  3:34
Well, yes. And also, well, yes, they were resisting for reasons. One would understand that one would celebrate the resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. But you won’t want to say “Look, we can’t just tell the holocaust as being a story about large numbers of people being massacred, and there being a genocide. There was a story of resistance”. It’s like well, yeah, thanks. Not that you wouldn’t want to celebrate the Warsaw ghetto in the resistance in its way, but you’d rather that it didn’t happen, right?
Will Brehm  8:33
Mhmm.

Gary Younge  8:34
But what was really stunning about it. Some of it was predictable. And it did, as you say, kind of individualized, the entire thing, which is a bit like saying, the whole of the last year of Black Lives Matter was all about Derek Chauvin. And now Derek Chauvin has been convicted, we’re good because he was a bad apple in the barrel. This was about two people. Now one of them is dead, and the other one has been put away for murder. So, justice has been done. Which of course, nobody who went on those demonstrations was demonstrating about Derek Chauvin. Derek Chauvin was emblematic of a broader problem, which was why the video could go viral in the first place because it spoke to so many other examples. And of course, while the case is going on Daunte Wright is killed not 15 minutes, 20 minutes drive away. And less than half an hour before the verdict is delivered. a young woman in Columbus, Ohio was killed, which shows this is not just about Derek Chauvin. So anyway, it was about kind of, let’s not talk about institutions, let’s not talk about systems. Let’s not talk about institution so much. Let’s not talk about systems at all. Let’s talk about culture and behavior and you know, “Gee, this stuff is so complicated. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about some of it at all”. But what people were really surprised at, that I was surprised at, was how shabby they did it.

Will Brehm  10:10
Hmm. What do you mean shabby?

Gary Younge  10:14
Well, quite often, they would quote the first line from a report saying -I’m gonna make this up but it was like this- you know, “You cannot say that race is the sole factor in this”. And they would use that line, and then the next line would say, “But it is the overwhelmingly dominant factor in everything we know”. And they would leave that out. And so, all sorts of people who they interviewed came back to them and said, “Either I didn’t say that, or my work doesn’t say that. You can’t say that”. You know, it was –

Will Brehm  10:53
A lot of cherry picking.

Gary Younge  10:55
Well –

Will Brehm  10:56
Like just taking out the words that fit the narrative they want and not finishing the sentence of people that they interviewed, or the reports that they’re quoting from.

Gary Younge  11:14
Yeah, but it was worse than cherry picking. It was like they chopped down the tree and said, “Oh, look, I found a cherry”. And they did that a lot. So, I have some examples here.

Will Brehm  11:24
Sure. Yeah, I’d like to hear one.

Gary Younge  11:28
They cite a study in the British Journal of Criminology, quote unquote, suggesting that drug crime patterns change when “stop and search” is taking place in an area. If you look up the original study, it says, “The effect of stop and search is likely to be marginal at best. While there is some association between stop and search, claims that this is an effective way to control and deter offending seem misplaced”. So, they just took the first bit “There is some association between stop and search and crime” but left the second bit out, “Claims that this is an effective way to control and deter offending seem misplaced”. Deaths in police custody, they quote a report that was for the previous conservative government, “racial stereotyping may or may not be a significant contributory factor in some deaths in custody”. But then it omitted the very next sentence which said, “However, unless investigatory bodies operate transparently and are seem to give all due consideration to the possibility that stereotyping may have occurred, or that discrimination took place in any given case, families and communities will continue to feel that the system is stacked against them”. So, in other words, to find proof of racism, you must first look for it. [And then well, they kept doing it].

I think about three years ago, I interviewed Richard Spencer, a very kind of – well, got a lot of publicity on television – and I was asked about it afterwards. And I said that I expected more sophistication from my racists than I got from him. That I expected him to be – for there to be more artifice, and more sleight of hand and it was just a very unsophisticated form of racism that he was pushing. And this was just – I expect from a commission like this, just a bit more deafness in their sophistry. And so, it was really kind of easy for people to disparage. Now, it’s impossible to know if the effect of that disparagement moved widely around, or whether it was a lot of people like me talking to themselves. But it was unrelenting – the disparagement – and the number of people who – there was already concerned about the number of people who were experts in the field and weren’t called to testify. But then when the ones that were called and did cooperate, then said, “Well, this is just nonsense”, then they really had a problem. But it was severely, not just criticized, but undermined by its own hubris. But I think there was a different problem, a broader political problem.

Will Brehm  13:40
Which was?

Gary Younge  13:42
We’ve had this year when lots of different bodies and organizations – so, when I said at the beginning, they could have written this at any time. But this isn’t any time. We’ve had this year when quite a lot of Black people have been emboldened. Quite a lot of white people have been [conscientized]. A lot of local councils have had reviews of their statues, and their paintings, and their public art. Lots of schools are talking about their curricula. Lots of books about race are being sold and that this might be wishful thinking but I think the country was going this way and they were trying to drag the conversation in a different way. And the conversations that we’ve been having for a year had moved up several notches and this was trying to take us down several notches. And you’re not going to do that with one blow. But it did speak to – it signaled the direction that the government would like to take.

Will Brehm  15:25
Yeah

Gary Younge  15:26
To me, that was worrying. And the other thing that it did, which I actually think liberals, and there are some of this in my book, Who Are We, liberals and progressive have to take some responsibility for this. It leveraged the notion of representation to say, “But these are black people, and Indian people, and Asian people who have done this”. So, it can’t be that this is kind of racially problematic because look, look at the people who’ve done it, they’re Black. Which, I think Boris Johnson has more senior, non-white people in his cabinet, than there’s been before. And so, you see the limits of representation as a form of anti-racism. And I remember because I can get quite gnarly about this, quite uncooperative, when Obama was standing in America, and my son had just been born. He was born the weekend that Obama announced.

Will Brehm  16:27
Wow!

Gary Younge  16:28
And people would say, “This will be a really great thing for your son”. And I would say “Why?” you know, and I meant it “Why?” A black man is going to be president. Okay, so if Condoleezza Rice was going to be president, would you be saying that? No!

Will Brehm  16:42
Yeah.

Gary Younge  16:43
Okay. So, why then?

Will Brehm  16:45
And what would people say? Is it just because the hope of Obama would change the whole system?

Gary Younge  16:50
Well, people got kind of -There are certain things in Britain -Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn- there’s certain things that drive people crazy. You know, they don’t even want to answer for how crazy they’re being. And Obama drove people crazy. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. So, they’re kind of “Come on! It’s gonna be a Black president. It’s gonna be wonderful. It’s not Condoleezza Rice, it’s Obama”. And I said, “Okay, well, why is that good for my son? He has a very small chance of being president and a really big chance to go to jail in this country. So, is Obama gonna, do you think, limit his chances of going to jail? Because he can’t really increase his chance of being president really can he? And the truth is that kind of I knew what they meant, which was the power of symbolism and it’s a certain kind of symbolism. But it’s important to interrogate it. And if you don’t then you can swap photo opportunities for equal opportunities, and you can end up with something that looks different and acts the same. And that’s what we got with this report – bringing it back to something kind of urgent? And I do think that some groundwork was laid for that with a certain politics of representation among progressives, that didn’t take it that step further, and say, “We want more women and Black people in Parliament who advance the interests of women and Black people”.

Will Brehm  17:29
Not those in power already?

Gary Younge  17:32
Yeah. We want it to act differently, as well as look differently.

Will Brehm  17:36
Yeah. And that’s an interesting insight. And in your book, you bring up this whole idea of the urging to look different, while promising to behave the same as being a central thrust behind this push for diversity, right? Having different representation of people in different positions of power, supposedly, but never really changing the structures of power that be. So, I guess, what is the larger issue here? Is it something about how we actually assign meaning to the differences that exist in society? Is that one of these larger issues that that we should -instead of focusing on Obama as the figurehead, we should be actually thinking about how do we actually understand and assign meaning to differences in our society, in multicultural society?

Gary Younge  18:32
Well, how do we assign difference to it? How do we understand the power within it? And what is the connection between that symbol and substance? So, to be fair, because the story I tell is one of – I remember somebody writing to the Guardian when I was making points like this and saying, “You’re such an Eeyore Gary, you’re such a downer”. And, you know, I can live with that. But it’s about taking the thought about two steps on and saying, okay, the celebration makes sense. What precisely are you celebrating? And people don’t like you asking what they’re celebrating while they’re celebrating, right? Because it gets in the way of celebration. But we had [it here] with [Sadiq Khan as a London Mayor]. And that kind of a joy, which I did – It’s not like I didn’t share in some of the joy about Obama winning, although it was overwhelmingly because he was the Democrat. And that meant the end of it. I mean, otherwise, Sarah Palin was going to be Vice President and that would have been awful. And the fact that he was Black did have something to do with that celebration. But when people set off with, “I’m really disappointed in Obama”, I said, “What did you think he was gonna do? Because maybe it’s your fault that you assumed too much”. So, I think that I see my role in those moments, apart from being a party pooper, as just pushing people a little bit to say – you know, when I said, why, why is this good for my son? If somebody had said, “Well, because symbols are important and so to have a Black man, and the child of a migrant, and a child of a Muslim in this place, who can’t be any worse, given that one person is going to win out of two. It can’t be any worse than the alternative and to replace George Bush, that’s enough.

Will Brehm  21:41
Hmm.

Gary Younge  21:42
But they kind of weren’t saying that. They were saying things like, “It shows that America has changed”.

Will Brehm  21:46
Yeah, when in fact, it has not changed that much, if at all.

Gary Younge  21:54
Well, the very moment which they were saying it was changing the other direction, because there was an economic crisis and African Americans are losing – like, the difference between Black and white was actually growing even as they were saying it.

Will Brehm  22:15
Yeah. It’s a really interesting insight to look beyond the sort of symbolism of individuals. So, you said your son was born in Brooklyn in 2007. You’ve recently moved back to London. How do you understand your son’s position now? I mean, it’s not America. There hasn’t been a Black Prime Minister. How do you understand his identity? How do you understand his role in this new structure? Or, you know, potentially somewhat similar, but probably slightly different?

Gary Younge  22:40
Yeah. I can only talk for what I see because he’s 14, so he doesn’t really talk to me. I have an eight year old daughter as well. If I talk about just both of them, just having children?

Will Brehm  22:55
Yeah, sure.

Gary Younge  22:56
There are a range of ways in which it’s quite interestingly different. I don’t do better or worse in terms of black racism, because they’re all bad. But it is notably different in ways that were unexpected. So, in their primary schools – when we left America, my son was in elementary school. He hadn’t had a Black teacher ever. In both of their primary schools, they have had Black headmasters or headmistresses. Most of their teachers have not been white. The schools that they go to have more Black kids in them than the schools that they went to in America. Now, obviously, we lived in Chicago for all of his school time. And we could have lived in the South Side, although my wife, who’s from Evanston, her family were from the North, so we wanted to be close to her family. So, there was that. But it was also true that when we looked around to the South Side, a lot of the schools didn’t look safe. And the areas didn’t feel safe, and didn’t look like a place that we really were keen on living in if we’re honest. Not because there aren’t wonderful people and brilliant things going on there but – and so we lived in Uptown, north of the city, which wasn’t a remotely schmancy area, but there aren’t that many, overwhelmingly Black schools in that bit of Chicago. And the ones that were we didn’t like. The school that he went to was overwhelmingly Hispanic, not overwhelmingly, but I think more than half of them were Latino. So, there was a Black presence in the school. It wasn’t like we just plunked him in a white school. But all of which is to say that navigating the racial dynamics of Chicago or Brooklyn. He never went to school in Brooklyn, but we would talk to people about like, it would be nice for him to go to a school where there’s a critical mass of Black kids, and they don’t have metal detectors and just that vibe. And people would say, “Oh, you want to go to PS4”. And they would name the same two or three schools. And I’m like Brooklyn’s a big place. And the fact that you can name two schools should tell you something, right. And whereas, when we came here, he went to the school that we could get in because he was eight and so the schools right here were kind of filled up. So, it was a school that he could go to. It was pretty random -it was completely random, actually.

And my daughter goes to the school we’re zoned for. And so anyway, that speaks to a range of things that aren’t anything about education, actually. Well, some of it is. In Chicago, an awful lot of white kids go to kind of effectively seg. academies really. But here in Britain, we have a lot of social housing, or, we still have social housing, considerable amount of social housing, which isn’t just parked out in some isolated place, which means that that ensures a certain degree of a mix, a social means, which also speaks to a racial mix, there is still a kind of broad confidence in public education. It’s not understood to be in crisis or onslaught. Once you go up a bit, it does get a bit more tricky. We have they’re called academies, which in America would be Black Child school and that’s a problem in a way that the kids are treated. And if you look at the levels of expulsion, all of that, you know it is much worse. So, I’m not saying Britain is a Nirvana, I’m just talking about my experience so far. So that that was one thing. And you know, I don’t worry about my kids being shot here. You know, which is a kind of load off. It doesn’t mean there aren’t other things to worry about but I don’t worry about that.

Will Brehm  22:56
It is quite amazing that in America, you really do have to be concerned about that.

Gary Younge  26:44
Yeah. And the last book that I wrote, because Who Are We is coming out in a different edition, but the last book I wrote was called Another Day in the Death of America, it’s about all the kids that got shot dead in one day.

Will Brehm  27:34
Yeah.

Gary Younge 27:34
And I just finished it. And we arrived in Britain, and I went to see a friend in Derbyshire. He lives in the Dales and my son would have been eight, his kid would have been ten. We never allowed guns in the house, like toy guns or real guns, but we didn’t allow him to play with toy guns. But that just meant when he went to somebody else’s house and they had toy guns, he would go straight for them and play with them, because that’s what he wanted to do. So, that’s fair enough. So, there’s this moment, where him and the kid who’s living there go rushing out with their guns, like *Mimics rapid gun fire* you know, and they go running out. And me and my wife – my wife’s African American- and me and my wife look at each other. And I’m about to run for him. And I said, “It’s alright. Actually, it’s alright. Because nobody thinks it’s a real gun. And nobody has a gun”. So, when he comes back in, I’m going to tell him, we’ll have that conversation but he’s not in any immediate danger. But that’s when you realize that you’ve been carrying around with you the whole time. That that is where you’re-

Will Brehm  28:45
There’s a bit of trauma isn’t there?

Gary Younge 28:50
Yeah! Oh, yeah! But kind of, because it’s such a constant thing. A bit like you go to a football match, and people are singing the most sordid -in Britain soccer match- and people are singing the most kind of sordid, sexualized songs. And you don’t think anything about it, because that’s what they do at football matches. So, you’re just used to it. And there’s this way in which you just get used to it. And then it becomes part of your general anxiety, like traffic.

Will Brehm  29:20
And you only recognize it once you’re not there.

Gary Younge  29:28
Yeah, yeah. A fish doesn’t know it’s in water until it’s out.

Will Brehm  29:31
Exactly. Yeah.

Gary Younge  29:34
Yeah. So, it’s been quite different. I realize that I’ve told you two ways in which England would seem better. But my general experience hasn’t been that we escaped the racism of America for a greater system. It’s just been different. And it’s been different in unexpected ways. One would expect if you lived in Chicago or Brooklyn that your kids would have a Blacker experience in school than they could ever do in London. But that’s not actually true because, as it turns out, while there was more diversity in America, there is also much more segregation. So, the chance of you living in a place that is actually diverse is actually quite limited.

Will Brehm  30:22
Yeah, I’ll give an example of where I went to high school in America. It was in New Jersey, near Trenton, New Jersey. And it was championed as one of the most diverse schools in the state. And it was 70%. white. And that was seen as really diverse. And it just blows my mind. And in America, it’s all about how they draw the school zones which attach to more or less property taxes.

Gary Younge  30:56
Right. Yeah.

Will Brehm  30:58
Whereas in the UK, I guess you don’t necessarily have that. I mean, there’s other issues in terms of how you get children into schools that I think can get rather complicated, particularly, once you get into the secondary level.

Gary Younge  31:09
Once you get into secondary level, it can be complicated. At primary level, there’s a school you’re zoned for usually and the zoning will expand if there aren’t enough kids for a certain class. Then they’ll just move out now. But where we live, the schools kind of more or less at the top of the road. And it would have been weird if she hadn’t got into that school.

Will Brehm  31:38
You walk past that-

Gary Younge  31:39
Yeah. You would have to walk past that school in order to go to some other school. But that’s where the kind of residential segregation and social housing becomes a big thing. Because you can have lots of different people of different incomes even if the area that I’m living in is being gentrified, which it is, there is a limit to how fast that can go because there is a significant number of people of a certain class who can live there.

Will Brehm  32:15
Yeah. I want to turn to one of the issues that you seem to be very interested in which is showing how there’s not really neat classifications of identity. You like to find those very messy, sort of gray areas, let’s call them. And in your latest radio documentary on the BBC, Thinking in Color, you really look at this idea of ‘passing’. And about Black people who passed as white people, white people who have passed as Black people, and you really get into some of these more nuances and show how identity is not so for lack of a better word, black and white. Why are you so interested in that sort of liminal space? What do you see in those sort of complexities?

Gary Younge  33:54
It’s a good question. I mean, if we go back, my Obama story is partly because I like to irritate people. I like to kind of get into it a bit. And you know, what do we mean by that? Passing has always been intriguing to me for a long time because when I was growing up, I remember learning about the Holocaust and about Northern Ireland. It should have been ages between about 10 and 13. And thinking, I don’t get it. How can anybody tell? Because to me, discrimination was about color and what you look like. And so, I was like, but if you were Jewish, why didn’t you just say I’m not Jewish? Like they can’t see you’re Jewish. This is a 10, 12 year-old mind working. How do they know who to kill in Northern Ireland? Just say I’m Protestant, they all look the same. And learning over time that like, yeah, Northern Ireland, these three questions will do it for you: 1) what’s your name then, if that doesn’t work, 2) where do you live? If that doesn’t work, what school did you go to? By the end of it, you’ll know whether that person is gonna get a bullet or not, if that’s what you’re doing. That with Jews, you can’t run away from your history, your history forms your culture, and that kind of, actually, it’s not about what you look like, exactly. Anyway, you know, probably took years to get to the end of that thought, but I was intrigued by that. So, then passing really kind of is at the sharp end of that right?

And even of the things we were talking about before about looking different and acting the same. What makes you Black? Is it the color of your skin? Or is it something more than that? You know, is there a way of being Black where you don’t look Black? And I actually did a talk about the margins and the mainstream once for the V&A, Victoria and Albert Museum, and it was about how the borders define what’s inside. So, actually kind of being really clear about the borders is quite important partly because the borders, when we think of countries, that’s where the conflicts are usually. And the borders define who’s in and who’s out. And that those definitions are usually accepted by people because they don’t want to be as irritating as I am or can be, without kind of a huge amount of probing until they’re tested. So, in that talk, I said, this is a story of two white girls. And it was Sandra Laing, who’s South African, born to two white Afrikaner parents who were faithful to each other – as far as anyone could know anything, they were faithful to each other. And she comes out dark. And she’s reclassified between white and colored like three or four times. And Bliss Broyard, who’s born to Anatole Broyard and grows up in Blue Blood, Connecticut, to what she assumes is two white parents. And then on his deathbed, she finds out that her dad has been passing, and then she sort of reexamines what does that mean for me? And what did it mean for him? And when I used to teach at Brooklyn College, I would say, “So, which one of these girls is Black and which one’s white? Or are they both Black or are they both white?

Will Brehm  37:10
And what would your students say?

Gary Younge 37:11
Actually, quite often, they would hover around the like, “That woman was messing around! That wasn’t her child”. And you’re like, if you could just keep it together for a second that maybe she wasn’t doing that. So, there was a lot of that.

Will Brehm  37:32
What do you think?

Gary Younge  37:35
Well, I mean, what they would do is the discussion would kind of evolve. So, with some prodding and some prompts they would look at Sandra Laing and have the pictures. And they would say, “Well, there’s no way you can say she’s white”. And then I would say to them, “But isn’t someone with two white parents white? Like, if you were born white and both your parents are Black how does that happen?” With Bliss Broyard, it was more like “She’s a white girl”. That was more of the kind of vibe, that she’s a white girl her dad had a little bit color but he wasn’t doing much with it. She could kind of get back into it if she wanted but she would have to do the work.

Will Brehm  38:37
Yea, right.

Gary Younge  38:38
And my feeling was that they were both and that they were both Black and white. And that in different ways, they challenged the borders, which are kind of always much more porous than we claim. I had an interesting one the other day -this wasn’t about race, but it was about definition- with my daughter’s best friend. Her mom is Spanish and her dad is Polish. Both my daughter and my son were born in America. And I went to pick her up from her friend’s house. And her mom had this really cool t-shirt that I want to get and it just says “immigrant” on it. Which in Britain at this moment is just like it’s sustainment. You know, it’s like yeah, you want a piece of me. And I said to her “I really like your t-shirt. I think I’m gonna get it for the rest of my family, you know, for Zora and my wife, and my son, all of whom were born in America”. And she said, and my wife kind of backed her up on this so I was able to be irritating twice within about 20 minutes, “Zora is not an immigrant”. And I said “She absolutely is an immigrant, she came here when she was two. That’s the definition of an immigrant”. And she said, “Yeah, but she’s been here since she was two, this is the only country that she knows and she has British citizenship”. And I said, “There’s nothing that says you can’t be an immigrant and have British citizenship. Like my mom lived here for longer than she ever lived in Barbados. And she was an immigrant”. I said, “Otherwise, how come if I said I’m the son of an immigrant, you never challenged me?”. And then Zora’s friend’s mom said, “But you’re here, you’re part of the community”. And I said, “But you’re here, you’re part of the community, your kid goes to the school, you’re a nurse”. And both of them, it was like, that is not my accepted definition of immigrant, which is fine. But I kind of held out kind of like “Nah, all of you. You’re all immigrants apart from your daughter. She’s not because you had her here. So, she can’t wear it. Even though her daughter is bilingual. And has got Polish in her, and every holiday, she’s going to Poland or Spain. And we go to America, maybe once every couple of years. But it’s like your daughter is the only person in this conversation – me and your daughter are the only people in this conversation that can’t wear that t-shirt. Which I do think that those conversations are useful, actually. I mean, not always when I combat them in that way, but the definitions matter. And I could give a couple of really good examples where it becomes very material. So, during my upbringing, we had to fight our way into a definition of British because the definition of British did not include Blackness. So, people would say, where are you from? No, but where are you really from? And that was like you find your way – one guy in Scotland said where are you from? Stevenage. Where were you born? Hitchin. Well before then?

Will Brehm  42:30
Yeah, right. You could never have been from the UK.

Gary Younge  42:35
Yeah! You could never be British. And I was on an NPR program after Le Pen came second in the French presidential elections in 2002 and everyone was shocked, that was not normal. Jean-Marie Le Pen, not Marine Le Pen, so her dad. And I was in a discussion and there was this French woman, quite right wing, like Le Figaro or something. Conservative, not Front National. And she kept talking – I made the point that Jacques Chirac actually had said some really racist things. He had complained about the noise and the smell of immigrants and so on. And so, there was a lineage. And she lost her shit and was talking about Jacques Chirac is not a racist, and this and that, and how dare you say that. I said, I didn’t say he was, I said, he said some racist stuff. And then she started talking about les immigres, immigrants. And I said, are you talking about immigrants, or are you talking about people who aren’t white? And she was like, really offended. And she said, you know what I mean? And I said, I fear I do. But I fear that the listeners don’t. And I fear that you’re not kind of fully aware of the consequences of what you’re saying. And it wasn’t a question that she was quite prepared to answer properly. But there are two quite important examples of how the definition matters. Or after 911, when there was a very big thrust, not only from conservatives, also among liberals, against multiculturalism, and particularly Muslim influence. And people would insist that Britain is a secular country. And I would say absolutely not. You are completely wrong. It’s not a secular country. We have an established church. We have bishops in the House of Lords. The Queen is the head of the church and she’s the Head of State, it’s the same person. That is absolutely wrong. And once again, I’m saying you know what I mean. And I said, you don’t know what you mean. I know what you mean. But you don’t. And what you mean is that these people aren’t part of our country and that these people can’t fit in. But what you’ve done is given a misidentification. It’s true that we are kind of culturally very secular. But I said, America is institutionally secular, and far more religious.

Will Brehm  45:27
Yeah.

Gary Younge  45:28
So, you’re gonna need to be a bit more sophisticated about what you’re saying in order to make your point. Because in that sophistication, resides an awful lot of these people that you’re talking about, who were drinking beer and eating bacon one day before, and then the next day found out that they were Muslim, in a certain way, that hadn’t actually kind of mattered to them. And an awful lot of people who were Asian the day before, and now became Muslim. And a religion that kind of you don’t know much about but have decided to take these things and oppose it to secularity, when actually, in a lot of ways we are closer to Iran than America in terms of our kind of constitution, or lack of constitution. So, you’re gonna have to sit with that. And I think some of my insistence on these definitions is because as someone who’s Black and British, and grew up working class, and traveled into the middle class, and was a child of an immigrant, I found myself on the borders of an awful lot of them. People talking about Black people, or working class people, or middle class people, or in ways that were like, yeah, you’re talking about me, Oh, I don’t mean you. It’s like well, cap fits.

Will Brehm  47:01
So, as a final question: in your book, you talk about the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. And you talk about how you can’t cross the same river twice because the river is different and you are different. Now that you’ve come back to London, how are you different after living away for so long?

Gary Younge  47:25
That’s a good question. I’m quite different, I think. I mean, there are obvious ways. I’m older. And that sounds trite but it actually had an impact in terms of – I was back at The Guardian for -I’m now a professor at University of Manchester, but I came back to The Guardian. When I left there, I was 33 but I come back as kind of older more senior and a man. So, this is before “Me Too”. It’s not like I’ve done anything awful but I was very aware. You’re gonna have to watch the kind of jokes you tell. And some of those things that you might have done, which – like I said, there was never a problem. I’m sounding really dodgy here. But like, when you might have thrown your arm around someone, or given someone a big hug, or made some kind of off-colored joke. I don’t think that works now. You know what I mean? And it means you have to shut up. You’re Black but there’s not a barrier to you talking in these meetings. You’re a senior person in this institution and you can speak when you want, other people can’t. So, that was one way in which I was different. My sense of distance is different. Having been in America and flown around, a four-hour drive in America is not so onerous, right? You know, four and a half hours you can be from London to Edinburgh on a train. So, when I think of going to Liverpool by train or something, why not? A couple of beers and some mango fingers and we will make an afternoon of it. So, my sense of distance is different. When I left England, I didn’t have kids. And arguably that is the biggest difference that people will talk about. I mean lockdown has eased off here. Hadn’t really changed my life that much to be honest because I wasn’t going out anyway. So, new restaurants, new bars, new this, new that. But coming back to the age thing, I started to think about -not legacy. Absolutely not. That would be kind of pompous. But kind of beyond what I was saying before about how I relate to younger people. How I encourage people or discourage people, and what my general role might be in somebody’s life or career or whatever. That was not the case when I was 33. But how do you encourage people? That’s about age though too. I came back at a different stage of my careers. Not just about age there, but I was kind of mostly cured of the travel bag.

Will Brehm  50:46
Yeah.

Gary Younge  50:47
I think I overnighted in 46 states in America in my 12 years. There were a few that I didn’t get to. But I saw a lot of America that most Americans don’t see.

Will Brehm  50:57
I haven’t been to that many states.

Gary Younge  51:00
Here is quite a good personal example of how I was different and it relates to the age and distance thing, which feels at the moment, one of the biggest things, I’m not quite sure. And the kid thing, which is actually the biggest thing. Which was, we were going down to see -my brother had hired a place in Spain and we were going to go down there. And my original response was to look up flights, and then I thought, “No, no, no, no, no! We can take the train”.

Will Brehm  51:38
Hmm.

Gary Younge  51:39
Which in America, I would just never think of taking a train beyond certain specific kind of routes, mostly coastal, or like between Chicago and Detroit. Trains aren’t really that useful. And I can introduce my kids to Europe, which was also a weird idea. And I felt a bit like a tourist, I did. Not just because of my kids but we drove the train to Paris, and stayed for a couple of days, got a train to Zurich, stayed for a couple of days, then got a train over the Alps, a special kind of train that’s a touristy train.

Will Brehm  52:23
Wow.

Gary Younge  52:24
And there was a realization that actually -I think my intentions were pure, but also sort of slightly ridiculous. The kids weren’t that bothered, actually. There was no Wi Fi in the Alps train so it was like, “How am I gonna play my game dad? This is just kind of rubbish, really”. And you’d be like, “Look, look, look”. And they’d be like, “Yeah, we get it. There are mountains. Thank you. Now about that Wi Fi”. But for me, this was something I – it was to Italy we were going. We were going to Tuscany. But this was something I really wanted to do and I was prepared to inconvenience my – more than once my son said, “Why don’t we just fly”? And I’d be like, “Because then we wouldn’t have seen -“. And he was like “Ok”. I’ve done it since which gets back to me being kind of quite irritating when I get my mind to it. But I really don’t think I would have done that if I hadn’t been in America.

Will Brehm  53:29
Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad that you are back in the UK and can re-engage with Europe in new ways. And give a small show like FreshEd some of your time. I really do appreciate you coming on the show today and talking about all sorts of things. So, Gary Younge, thank you so much for joining FreshEd and it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you today.

Gary Younge  53:55
Thanks so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

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