Essay On Rushdie's The New Empire Within Britain

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Between racism and acceptance. Between old and new. Between the EU and the U.S. In all things Britain performs this balancing act. An act that often, more often not, than to edges into hypocrisy. They proclaim “Chicken Tikka Massala is now a true British national dish,” all the while alienating and pushing out the Indian population that created said dish. They are all too happy to wholly accept white immigrants,but push against non-white immigrants. Purely on the color of their skin. Continued reference to the “pink world” is no doubt a call to the skin color of Britain’s national identity. This phrase was used, not only in Alibhai-Brown, but also in Rushdie’s “The New Empire Within Britain”; “pink conquerors," “Great Pink Age.” This pink world is a world where the seemingly all-encompassing ‘You’ or ‘They’, in actuality refers to only white Britain. This exclusion from the political mainstream (among other exclusive practices) makes progress towards a cohesive cultural identity all the more impossible. Some are more explicit in their hatred and rejection of the citizen other, while the more common middle class folk are less so but still just as piercing in their “[asking] you always where you come from.” “Creators, developers, and changers of public life and attitude are the political leadership, media and educators.” With limited access to political policies aimed at them non-white populations are already at a disadvantage when it comes to changing national attitudes. And the education system has two parts of learning; the actual classes and the social interactions. School has its fair share of “terrible cases of racial bullying but also as many natural friendships across racial and religious boundaries.” These school friendship can grow beyond school and into the family sphere. The sphere of public perceptions that these non-white populations have had the most success in is the pop and sports industries. They are the one platform where other ethnicities have found a, albeit slim, chance at being “able to gain entry, win adoration, and get promoted as British successes.” The same cannot be said for other areas of media, who are only just beginning to make that transition. The skew of media towards the white populations is not only morally wrong and unrepresentative, but it is also inconsistent with good business sense, as “black families have institutionalized racism more children on average than white families and therefore buy more food, nappies, clothes.” The ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ mentality is a dangerous way to classify a populations. It demonizes one side while romanticizing themselves and their history . The “homogeneity of British identity,” is seen as the ‘norm’ that many wish to return to. This supreme era of Britishness only “lasted from the Victorian era of imperial expansion to the aftermath of the Second World War…The diversity of modern Britain expressed through devolution and multiculturalism is more consistent with the historical experience of our islands.” They wish to promote this Anglocentric view, “encouraging the idea of ourselves only as an old, royalist country, so that tourists may visit [them] …show more content…
The word degrades those it clings to, yet those native Black (or Indian or Paki etc.) britons who deny the word “are announcing their acceptance of white perception which see third world immigrants as a blight upon this nice landscape.” The struggle comes in balancing perceptions in neither idolizing the west or persecuting the south and east. It is like you cannot be both. You are either British, completely rejecting all cultural heritage of the country your parents came from, or you or (insert immigrant country here…Indian, Pakistani, etc). People change their names for being “too disagreeably ethnic… refuse to describe [themselves] as Asian [etc.]” These non white immigrants (many not even immigrants…maybe their parents or grandparents were) are never truly seen as British. Their ‘home’ is always thought of to be whatever land their skin tone hails from. Powell sees immigrants as an “alien element,” having no right to be here, fit only for re-immigration. And even many immigrants themselves support these strict immigration laws. Why does living among people different from themselves make white britons “strangers in their own country?” To “become more English [is to become] even more

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