Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with writer Tomiwa Owolade. 11/10/2023
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deep values, the things that we try and stay loyal to as we navigate life, and particularly the deep values of those who have some kind of public voice or platform and who shape and form our common life. I’m really interested in their starting point, their ethical view of the world, if you will, and particularly how understanding these things might help us grow in empathy and curiosity and ability to live together in our very diverse communities. You can listen back to five years’ worth of interviews with public figures from all over the world, different professions, different politics, completely different perspectives. And my hope is that you will listen to people who affirm you in what you think and in your identity and in your beliefs and also people who challenge you. But in so doing, you will begin to see and understand what might be driving people who are not like yourself and who you disagree with. In this episode, I spoke to Tomiwa Owolade. Tomiwa is a journalist and a writer and his recent book, “This Is Not America”, was published in 2023. We had a really interesting conversation about his experiences growing up in Nigeria and then moving to South London, and what drove him to try and write with a bit more granularity and particularity about the Black British experience. There are some reflections from me at the end as usual. In the meantime, I really hope you enjoy the conversation.
What is sacred to you? Tomiwa Owolade’s answer
Tom, we are going to kick off today with a nonstandard opening question. It’s the morning, we both of us still coming to, so it might feel a little bit, you know, heart–mind–soul–spirit coming into gearing up for it. I’m gonna ask you what is sacred to you. And you can take that in any direction you’d like. You could make of it what you like. You can reject the premise of the question. But it’s really trying to get to your deep principles and values. What do you think is sacred to you?
Tomiwa Owolade
The thing that I consider to be sacred is any sense of community. Whether that community manifests itself in terms of family, in terms of religion, in terms of friendship groups, in terms of civic institutions within a city or a town, in terms of a football team. Because what I consider to be sacred is something that takes you outside of your individual self.
Elizabeth
That’s so interesting. Do you have a sense of why that is sacred to you?
Tomiwa Owolade
I think the reason why that’s sacred to me, is because I believe that we live in an increasingly atomized society. And I think this explains why many of our politics feels so divisive and so polarising. I think the reason why much of our politics feels divisive and polarising – and by politics, I don’t just mean politics in terms of Conservative or Labour Party, I also mean politics in terms of some of the most contentious issues in our day: arguments around race, and trans rights, and feminism. I think the reason why they’re so polarising and divisive is because there isn’t enough space in society at the moment for people to find the sacred. So many of our civic institutions are in decline. Religion as a as an organising force in civil society is in decline. There is family breakdown. Friendships today are often mediated through social media, rather than grounded in reality. And I feel that because of that, people try to find what’s sacred in things like their own individual identity, rather than in grander civic institutions.
Roots of Faith and Culture: Growing Up Christian in Nigeria
Elizabeth
Yeah. Well, I’m sure we’ll come back to that and how that kind of anti–individualism strain shows up in your politics. But for now we’re gonna go we’re gonna wind right back and try and get a sense of you at the beginning of your story. And I’d love to hear what were some big ideas present in your childhood, whether religious, or political, or philosophical, and they could have been explicit or implicit. What was in the air when young Tomiwa was growing up?
Tomiwa Owolade
So I was born in Nigeria. And I moved to the UK when I was nine. I come from
Elizabeth
Maybe let’s start with that first chapter, do you mind? The Nigerian nine years: paint me a word picture.
Tomiwa Owolade
Yeah, so I grew up in a Christian family. Church of England, officially. But if you if you grew up in a Church of England West African family, there’s always an evangelical spice to it, an evangelical dimension to it. The average Church of England – and by Church of England I mean Anglican, the average Anglican West African church – is very different to the average Anglican church in England. So there’s always a slightly evangelical twang to it. So the atmosphere in my childhood, and even as a teenager, was always necessarily one shaped by Christianity. In terms of culture, I also consumed a lot of American action films, and I watched a lot of wrestling – WWE, or WWF as it was known in the past as well. So I consumed a lot of American culture. And I guess that must have shaped my outlook on things as well. But I also consumed a lot of British media as well, a lot of British culture. I was a big fan of the show “Mr Bean”.
Elizabeth
It is the most recognisable physical comedy in the world, right? The way it travelled is just extraordinary.
Tomiwa Owolade
Yeah, exactly. And this is something you don’t need to translate. It has universal appeal. So I guess maybe the consistent theme across my being a child is that a lot of the culture that I consumed from the stories in the Bible, to the action films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, to comedy of Mr Bean, were things that had a universal appeal. And maybe that’s in a strange way shaped the kind of ideas and the politics that I espouse, which is a kind of curiosity about other cultures, especially Western cultures. And a kind of universalism.
Elizabeth
I wanted to hear a little bit about more about your family, about what your mom and dad were like, if they were both around. Do you have siblings? Was it big, small, noisy, quiet?
Tomiwa Owolade
So I was the youngest in my family, the fourth child. And I’ve got three older brothers. No sisters.
Elizabeth
I think therapists would say that your obsession with wrestling and being a superhero makes a lot of sense as the fourth son.
Tomiwa Owolade
Maybe, maybe. Yeah, both my parents were around. My dad used to be a politician in Nigeria; he’s now retired. And my mum used to basically buy and sell clothes. So she was a trader, essentially, in clothes, and other goods as well. So that the dynamic in my family was that I was the youngest. And growing up as a child, I think I was the most shy as well, out of out of all my family members. And when I moved to the UK as well, I was also quite shy as well. I still consider myself a shy person, even though other people might disagree. And I think the reason why other people might disagree is because when I meet people, when I interact with people, I tend to ask them a lot of questions. But that’s almost like a kind of defence mechanism to protect my shyness.
From Nigeria to London: Smooth Transitions and Cultural Surprises
Elizabeth
What was that transition like, when you moved? What made your mom and dad move? And what was that emotional experience like? Maybe that first year settling into school, a new place, a new home…
Tomiwa Owolade
Yeah, they decided to move, I think, to give me and my brother a better education, basically. And the process was smooth in some respects, and a bit strange in other respects. So it was smooth in the respect of English being the official language of Nigeria. So I grew up speaking and understanding English as a child in Nigeria. And also, I consumed, as I said earlier, lots of British and American popular culture. So in terms of culture, there wasn’t that much of a shift. I think the biggest shift that I noticed was in terms of education. So in Nigerian schools at that time, even in primary schools, corporal punishment was still in use. So kids used to be paid for any transgression that they did, basically, including me. I was caned a few times as well. So I found English British teachers are far more lenient, and far more generous than their Nigerian counterparts. I think another difference is that in Nigerian, or more generally, in West African, and I also think this is true in Asian culture as well, if you if you see somebody that’s an adult, or a friend of your parents more specifically, you would either refer to them as Mr. or Mrs. or Miss, or uncle or auntie, even though they’re not related to you. Whereas in the UK, if you’re a child and you see an adult, you can call that adult by their first name. So that was another interesting cultural dynamic that I found fascinating to navigate through.
Elizabeth
And you moved to South London immediately, is that right? To kind of Plumstead area?
Tomiwa Owolade
Yeah, so I grew up in two parts of Southeast London. I grew up in the Plumstead area, but I also grew up for some time in Elton as well. And yeah, that’s an interesting part of southeast London, because the Plumstead area in particular has a very large, black African population. So in a sense, even though I left Nigeria, in a sense, you could argue “Did I really leave Nigeria, if I grew up in Plumstead and Woolwich, and areas around there?” So there was definitely a very large – and even now – a very large black African population. But Elton is fascinating place because Elson was where Stephen Lawrence was tragically murdered in 1993. And Elton, historically, has been a stronghold for the Far Right, interestingly enough. And what makes this fascinating is that I didn’t really notice until I was much older. So this is something I only knew in retrospect: the Far Right, white supremacist legacy of Elton. And what makes it also fascinating is that I went to school there. So I went to school in a place which is near Blackheath, for those of you that don’t know, near Greenwich, and the school I went to was very ethnically diverse. And I didn’t really experience any kind of explicit racism when I was at that school. But just like a stone’s throw away was is an area that has a Far Right, white supremacist legacy. So I found that destruction in retrospect, fascinating.
Settling with ease in the UK, being Christian, and the irony of African Christian identity
Elizabeth
It’s interesting. And one of the things that comes up a lot in your book is the particularity of black people’s narratives, right? How much we want to put – and we don’t just do this with race, we do this with everything – we want to have a set of narrative tracks, or narrative options, and put people in them. And the way that immigrant experience is often narrated, particularly those who are moving from a black majority country, or from a country that’s less dominant in white people as the UK is, there’s a sense of dislocation or a kind of painful coming to awareness of the immigrants’ own different racial identity, and a sense of alienation. And I think that is how a lot of immigrants would know right there, coming to the UK. From what I’ve read and what I can hear, the experience was just quite straightforward for you. Is that right? And if so, why do you think that might have been?
Tomiwa Owolade
I think there would have been a greater sense of dislocation, or alienation, if I came from, say, a Francophone country in Africa. Or if I came, say, from a majority Muslim country in Africa, or across the rest of the world. And Nigeria is interesting, because Nigeria is about 50% Muslim and 45% Christian, so it’s almost 50/50. But if I came from – and I’m from – the Christian side, so if I came from a majority Muslim country, and my family was also Muslim as well, then I might feel that sense of cultural alienation or dislocation. And I think it’s because I also come from quite a proud and quite a strong family community, so I’ve never really felt any sense of confusion about my identity as well. So I think it’s a mixture of all those different factors, which meant that I didn’t really have any sense of alienation or any desperate desire to find a different sorts of identity when I moved to the UK.
Elizabeth
And I realise this is, particularly for British people, quite a private question, but how much did and does your parents’ Christianity continue to feature in your childhood and maybe in your life now?
Tomiwa Owolade
It’s still an ever present feature. And it’s something which I think is integral to my identity, because it’s something which has definitely shaped my moral and cultural outlook. And the funny thing, and this is the strange irony of it, is that Christianity was only introduced to West Africa from the middle of the 19th century onwards. And I think that in terms of my own particular family, Christianity was only introduced by the late 19th century on my father’s side, and the early 20th century on my mother’s side, possibly. It’s a bit murky; I’m trying to trace the exact moment my family became Christian. So in grand historical terms, it’s very recent. But it nevertheless feels like an integral part of the identity of my family. And the reason why I find it funny is because when we’re thinking of being a Christian, and being British, it’s been an integral part of British identity for over a 1000 years, for like hundreds and hundreds of years. By in terms of my own identity, and the identity of African people in the UK, it’s only been a big part of the identity for a far shorter period of time. And the reason why I find it interesting and ironic is because, as I’ve written before, Christianity amongst the white British population is in decline. And in terms of considering yourself to be a Christian – which I think is slightly different from actually going to church every week. So I do think that there is a difference between identifying with Christianity and actually practising it every single week and every single day. But in terms of the black African population in the UK, it’s still a massive part of identity. So it’s funny that something that was essentially an imperial or colonial export is now being brought back to the metropole.
Journey to University and Navigating Identity and Education
Elizabeth
So you are at a comprehensive school in Plumstead, very mixed, not feeling a sense of alienation or dislocation. And then you’re getting ready to go to university, and a teacher suggests going to SOAS. Could you tell me a little bit about that moment and why it felt meaningful?
Tomiwa Owolade
Yep. So when I was applying to go to university – this this was when I was 17, and I was thinking of applying to various universities. One of my teachers suggests that I go to SOAS University in London. And the reason why she said that, is because she thought SOAS was great, because SOAS has a legacy, or a tradition, of being welcoming to people of ethnic minority backgrounds. So I responded in the negative, and quite a viscerally negative way to that suggestion, because I found it to be completely patronising. I found that to be something that reduced me to my identity, and not to any sort of educational qualification that I have, independent of my particular racial identity. And this was at a time when I didn’t really have the kind of arguments that I have now. I didn’t really think about race in the same particular way that I do now. I wasn’t really familiar with many of the thinkers that are raised that I am with now, of many of the arguments and debates on those matters that I do now. But I felt that visceral response because I think, as I intimated earlier, I come from quite a proud family, and I’m always quite sensitive to anybody that I consider to be condescending, or to be patronising to me. And I also have quite a strong sense of not always wanting to be viewed as just a black person, and nothing else. Because I know that I’m more than that. And I think perhaps one of the reasons why I felt that is because I was born and raised in a country where over 99% of the population is black. So in Nigeria, being black is not like a social dividing line, because everyone is black. The dividing lines within Nigerian society are based on things like religion, ethnic–tribal group, region in the country, politics, class… All those other various factors rather than race. So as I was raised in a black country, in my mind, to be black, to me, it’s not something to be all and end all of my identity. And I felt that that woman was turning it into the whole of my identity. I found that extremely patronising and extremely something that was not consistent with how I saw myself, essentially.
Elizabeth
Yeah. And you ended up going to UCL, is that right?
Tomiwa Owolade
So I went to Queen Mary, University of London for my undergraduate degree. Then I went to UCL for my Masters.
This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter
Elizabeth
Yes. And you came to the realisation that you wanted to be a writer. Given that you’ve said what you’ve said, was there a temptation to not write about race? What has drawn you into this conversation where it is both not central to your sense of self, but something that you feel compelled to speak about?
Tomiwa Owolade
Yeah, yeah. And this is something that I’ve been ruminating on for quite a long while. And I think the reason why I decided to write about it is because I found the conversation and the discourse about it so frustrating to witness. And I felt compelled to give my two cents on the topic. So in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, I found the conversation around race in the UK to be frustrating, because I felt that these conversations did not reflect the complex realities of black British people. So for example, I saw many well–meaning progressive British activists using terms like BIPOC to refer to ethnic minority people in the UK. Now BIPOC is an acronym that stands for “Black, Indigenous, People of colour”. A term like that would make sense in America, because of course, America has discriminated against and oppressed its various indigenous, Native American communities. But using a term like indigenous in a UK context is a bit strange, especially if you are a progressive activist. It’s the kind of term that you would expect somebody like a member of the BNP, the British National Party, of far right groups use rather than a progressive, left–wing activist from UCL. So at that time, that was the most vivid illustration of something of a more wider phenomenon that I was observing, which was that all too often when we talk and when we think about race and racism in the UK, we do it through an American perspective. And I thought at the time – I still do now, of course – that this is completely inconsistent with the actual complex experiences of black British people. So I would argue that the black British population is very much an immigrant group. If you are black and British, the majority of black and British people are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. Whereas in America, if you are a black American, the overwhelming majority of black Americans can trace their ancestry further back than the majority of white Americans. And that’s funny. That’s because of immigration to America from Europe after the end of slavery, basically, after the mid–19th century. And there has always been a substantial black minority in America – it’s now 13% today – whereas in the UK, the share of the British population that’s black is 4%. And 30 years ago, or maybe even 40 years ago, it was about 1%. And there are so many cities and towns in America where the majority of the population is black. So if you are in America, and you live in one of those cities and towns, your social circle, essentially, can be exclusively black. Whereas in the UK, the city with the largest share of its population that’s black is London, and it’s about 14 percents. And in the UK, we don’t have the legacy of segregation that America has. So in the UK, for example, interracial marriage has never been banned. And black and ethnic minority people have never been barred from standing for electoral office or voting in elections. Black and ethnic minority men, I should, of course emphasise. So that particular legacy of institutionalised segregation in America simply doesn’t translate to a UK context.
Diversity of Black British population, and unhelpful generalisations
Elizabeth
Yeah, it was really helpful reading just how big some of those differences are. And the other thing that really comes through is how much there is a real sense of distinctiveness about different groups of black immigrants to the UK. And you really highlight this difference between people who came here as part of the Windrush Generation with a black Caribbean heritage – who obviously, similar to black Americans had ended up in the Caribbean because of slavery. And those more recent and bigger influx of black African immigrants directly from Africa, from places like Nigeria, like you did, and Ghana and other places more recently: could you just spell out why you think that distinction is really important to hold in our minds when we’re thinking about the black British experience?
Tomiwa Owolade
Sure, yeah. So I think many people, when they think of what it means to be black and British, still think of it in terms of black Caribbean people. So many people still think that black Caribbean people constitute the majority of the black British population, but that’s not the case. The striking thing is, as of today, there are twice as many black African people in the UK, as there are black Caribbean people. 25 years ago, the majority of black British people were black Caribbean people. When over the past 25 years, there’s been a massive influx of immigration from Africa, which has completely changed the demographic makeup of the black British population. In terms of the differences between black Caribbean people and black African people, I think looking at education is a fascinating and striking way to tease out the differences between these two groups. So in terms of education, black African pupils have a higher GCSE and A level attainment than black Caribbean pupils. Black African pupils tend to do better in terms of GCSEs and A levels. In terms of being excluded from schools, as well, black Caribbean pupils are three times more likely to be permanently excluded from schools than black African pupils. And I think these differences are important if we genuinely care about the inequalities in our society, because if we genuinely care about making our society more inclusive, and more fair, and more equal, we need to focus on the black communities that are actually struggling rather than making generalisations about what it means to be black and British. And I think this is important more generally when we talk about ethnic minority people in the UK. So the ethnic minority groups that have the best GCSE and A Level results, and also do the best when it comes to going to universities, are British Indian pupils and British Chinese pupils.
Elizabeth
And they tend to do better than the white population, right?
Tomiwa Owolade
Yes, they do. They tend to do quite a lot better than white population, actually. And they also tend to do better than the white population in terms of things like the way that they interact in the criminal justice system. And by that I mean that British Chinese people are actually less likely to be stopped and searched, for example, than the white population. And I think this is important because we have this particular paradigm in our minds of that there is a group of white people in this country that are privileged, and there is a group of ethnic minority of people in this country that are not privileged that suffer discrimination, and oppression in terms of education, in terms of employment, in terms of their interaction in the criminal justice system. And this kind of paradigm is too simplistic, because there are nuances within it. So when people say, “Ethnic minority people in the UK are struggling”, I always ask them, “Which ethnic minority people?”, because the experiences of British Chinese people are very different to the experiences of British Pakistani people. The experiences of British Nigerian and British Ghanaian people are very different to the experiences of British Jamaican people. And I think teasing out these nuances is absolutely crucial, because race is not the only thing that defines inequality in our society. Race can shape inequality, I’m not denying that. But inequality can also be shared by other factors, such as class, such as geography, such as religion, such as the family background of a particular individual, such as the cultural environments in which they were raised, such as their own individual character as well. All these various factors could shape the circumstances and the particular experiences of an individual. And I think just defining somebody in terms of their race means that we can’t have an accurate picture of inequality in our society, and this is completely contrary to the central organising mission of well–meaning progressive and liberal people, which is to improve the lives of disadvantaged people in our society, while you can’t improve their lives if you just look at them through one dimension.
Elizabeth
Yeah, I’m gonna have a go at summarising what I think. Well, it’s not your whole argument, but part of what your argument is. And I’d love you to correct me if I’m wrong, because I’ve been sort of sitting with this summary in my head. And it’s essentially a kind of material argument. It’s not that class trumps race, but that class and race are much more closely entwined than we think. And the way I was thinking about it in my head all the way through the book, is the legacy of slavery. It’s the way that British Caribbean people, and black American people, were forcibly removed from their land and their resources, and then forcibly restrained from building up capital for generations. Whereas more recent immigrants from Africa, but also from other countries, people of colour from different economic, hard economic and material circumstances in their pasts, are coming from a completely different place. And that, therefore – and you’re very clear in your book that you’re not arguing that racism doesn’t exist. You’re sometimes accused of kind of downplaying or denying racism; I didn’t read that at all. You’re your chapter on the Windrush scandal is extremely angry, and rightly so, about what has happened to black Caribbean immigrants, even in the last decade. You’re saying racism exists, but that much of the difficulties and the challenge that these most disadvantaged groups experience are the legacy of racist structure from centuries ago, of the way colonialism plays out, in the way that slavery plays out. And yes, there is still a kind of cultural racism in the air, people still have prejudices, but that most of the race conversation is focusing on those: on the language used now on, on diversity schemes, when actually what needs to happen is a much more structural. (Actually, I want to ask you about reparations and what you think about them.) But the way this plays out much more specifically in your argument, is for something like publishing in the arts: don’t do loads of diversity schemes to try and get more people of colour in your industries, pay them more. Because they don’t have generational wealth, so they can’t afford it. Pay people more. Don’t dress it up as diversity. That’s it. That’s not a very good summary of your argument, but that’s what I’ve been taking from it.
Tomiwa Owolade
It’s actually a very good summary of all of my argument, yeah. I think all of it is a good summary of my argument. I think the argument about diversity and inclusion should be rooted more in material reality. And you we were right to point out legacy, the particular legacy of slavery, in terms of the black Caribbean experience. I think what I would also add as well, to complement it, is that it’s material, but it’s also in a sense cultural as well, because black Caribbean people – and this is also driven by American people as well, of course. They were not just expelled from their ancestral homelands and removed from any source of resources and economic capital, but they also have had their language taken from them. They also had their sense of ethnic, or tribal, or communal affiliation removed from them. The value of community. And yes, they also had their cultural roots taken from them. And so they needed to find other sources of culture to develop their own culture, almost to compensate for this particular loss, for this particular lack. And that particular historical experience simply doesn’t translate to the black African experience, because when I was growing up, even when I was in the UK, my family still often spoke to me in the language of my ancestors. I still have a West African, in particular Yoruba, name. It goes back to what you were saying about cultural dislocation and cultural emulation. That’s simply not the case for many black African people in the UK. So yeah, it’s a mixture of those factors: the material circumstances, and also the fact that, for example – and this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the experiences of black Caribbean people in British education. The fact that, for example, when many of the Windrush generation came over in the 50s and 60s, and sent their children to British schools, and the racism that they experienced that their children experience of British schools – for instance, being consigned, rather unfairly, to special educational institutions. The experience of being told that they were loud, or being rowdy, or being uncivilised by British teachers. I think that did generate a level of mistrust between many black Caribbean communities and the British educational establishment. But black African people simply don’t have that historical experience in general, because most black African people came over 25/30 years ago to the UK.
Elizabeth
Yeah. I wanted to read a little bit from your book, where you’re quoting from Ralph Ellison, who wrote a novel called “Invisible Man” and he’s, I believe, a black American thinker. But as I read it, I had such a strong sense of this is this speaking for you? Is this? This is sort of your voice. “Ellison’s unnamed narrator, protagonist, is invisible, because his experiences are not viewed on their own terms. They’re viewed through a narrow ideological perspective, white progressive, liberals simply see him as a victim who needs to be rescued. Black nationalists only see him as a vehicle for righteous indignation against racism. Both of these groups are different, but they share one thing in common: they only see him for his race and nothing else.” How much did you feel like the Invisible Man when you were reading that book?
Tomiwa Owolade
All of it. All of it is me, basically. And I think that’s the reason why that particular novel resonated so much with me, is because even though of course, it’s a black American experience, rather than a black British experience, it resonated with me so vividly because I feel that way as well. I feel that different groups and communities only see me for my race, and not for my complex individuality. Other aspects of my identity, which are not reducible to my racial background. And I think what was most striking about reading that novel is the emphasis on humanity. So, a kind of humanism, which I feel has been lost in a lot of discussions about diversity, inclusion, equality. I feel that that sense of a kind of universal humanity, a sense of common humanity that transcends all these categories, I feel that’s been lost. And reading that novel, I felt a great kinship with the unnamed narrator of that novel, the protagonist of that novel. Because I too feel that my sense of humanity, has been obscured by emphasising my racial background, to the exclusion of other aspects of my identity.
Academic fisticuffs and unhelpful racial pigeonholing
Elizabeth
And you’ve published his book. And in classic fashion, I kind of noticed some of the noise around the book, some positive and some negative and then read the book and I’m always astonished by how something can be made to sound massively less nuanced than it is. It’s a very careful, quite stats–heavy, extremely nuanced book. And as I said, it seems to me that your argument is racism exists, racism is bad, it plays out in different places in different ways. And I haven’t experienced a lot of it, so I’d rather not have all of the anti–racism stuff focused at me. Like, let’s help the people who need help. But that’s a controversial thing to say in our current febrile debates around race. Why do you think that people don’t like it when you complexify the narrative? And what has the experience been of several black thinkers really taking issue with what you’re saying?
Tomiwa Owolade
So I think the reason why people don’t want to make the narrative more complex is because they think when we are trying to advance a social justice cause, we need to do it with great simplicity. When we are trying to argue something on the street. We need to simplify, simplify, simplify. And I think they associate tribes who make things more complex with a kind of distance and alien academia. As if somebody’s been in a sort of ivory tower. Whereas on the streets, we need to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible.
Elizabeth
Because that’s how we motivate change.
Tomiwa Owolade
Exactly, that’s how we make genuine change by simple rhetoric, essentially. But even though you rightly say that my arguments try to be fairly complex and very nuanced, and so forth. I also tried to write it in a clear way. As much as I can, in a clear and lucid way. But I also think that many people, many black thinkers have issue with my arguments and my points of view because they think that racial solidarity should trump everything, basically. That all these arguments about the differences between black Africans and black Caribbean people, or the differences between black middle class and black working–class people, all of this is irrelevant at the end of the day, because of the overwhelming force of white supremacy, basically. And on the basis of that, we should emphasise the importance of racial solidarity. But I think this is a problem because black people that live 1in Africa, for example, as I intimated earlier, we shouldn’t assume that they would necessarily share the same kind of progressive views on race and on equality as many black activist people in the Western diaspora would. Because there are many black people in Africa that might be conservative, they might be more focused on other things apart from race. And we should not necessarily assume that they share the same views and the same assumptions simply on the basis of the fact that they are black. And related to this, as well, it that it’s possible to express solidarity with somebody on the basis of shared values, and shared principles, rather than on the basis of a shared racial identity. So, a white British person might feel a sense of kinship with the struggles of black American people, for example, and that white British person might feel that kinship because that white British person has a particular set of values and principles, which explains why they have that shared kinship in the first place. Principles such as anti–racism, anti–economic inequality, maybe anti capitalism. All these values and principles might shape the way that they express solidarity. And that’s solidarity, which transcends race. So I would say that I can understand why there is a kind of emphasis on racial solidarity. But we shouldn’t necessarily assume that, because black people are humans, and humans are complex by their very nature, and diverse in terms of their preferences, and their characteristics as well. And as a complement to that solidarity, I think, can be more powerfully expressed through shared values and principles. And just to go back to what many of my detractors are saying about my book, did you read that review by Kehinde Andrews?
Elizabeth
Yeah, which made a lot more sense once I got to the part in your book where you take a pop at him and I was like, okay, there’s just beef here.
Tomiwa Owolade
So some people have argued that I’m a kind of, a sort of race traitor essentially, that I’m a traitor to the cause. And I always find this sort of argument rather amusing, and this goes back again to me being a child. So, I think another thing which I don’t think I’ve emphasised in this interview is, even though I emphasise the importance of community and belonging, I’ve always been – this is a strange paradox for me – I’ve always been a bit…
Elizabeth
Contrarian
Tomiwa Owolade
Resistant to being part of a tribe. I’ve always found that claustrophobic to be sort of consigned to one particular, so when I was at school, for example, loads of people were in like different cliques and different friendship groups. I was one of those kids that was in different friendship groups, was in different cliques. I was friendly with the kids of school that were interested in football and sport. But I was also friendly with the kids that were more academically orientated as well. And this is something that’s carried on to me being an adult as well. I don’t belong to one particular friendship group as well as an adult. So, the idea of belonging to the tribe of black British people, or the tribe of black British academic people, I’m always fairly resistance you. And it’s striking because I’m quite an agreeable person. I think. I don’t enjoy arguments and disputation and verbal fisticuffs. But there is, and this is a phrase that was used by the 19th century American writer, there’s a bit of the imp of the perverse in me, which is there’s a kind of subversive sensibility within me, which always resists any kind of tribal affiliation. So I find all these allegations of being like sorts of race traitor amusing more than anything else.
Elizabeth
Tomiwa Owolade thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Tomiwa Owolade
Thank you very much, Elizabeth.
Outro: Many things can be true at the same time
Elizabeth
So much to chew on after talking to Tom and perhaps starting with the book end really, the beginning and the end of the conversation where he said that his sacred value is community, that it is something beyond the individual. And this is a real dividing line. You can kind of tell he’s someone who is not explicitly or straightforwardly a liberal. Someone who kind of has a political, temperamental lean towards liberalism would almost never say to me, would almost never challenge the premise of the sacred as an individual thing. It is inherently for them a collective or a communal thing. I think it is, yeah guests challenge me on that repeatedly. And I really love the different directions that people can take that question. He said community at the beginning, a sense of belonging, the pushing back against an individualism and atomisation. And at the end, he so helpfully kind of laughingly reflected that there’s two pulls in him. One is to community and communalism. And then the other is this slightly more allergy to getting swept up in things, to homogeneity, maybe some days tendencies to be a controversialist, to take the minority opinion and how those two things live within him. And it’s just so helpful, I think, to complexify and to name how complex we are as individuals, how we can have slightly different values, temperaments, tendencies, even on different days ourselves. I think that’s the theme of this interview with Tom, its just that many things can be true at the same time. And it’s really left me with this sense of how much I want a simple story. How much I want, in literary theory, it’s called Synecdoche, which means the part standing for the whole. And I think we really want that. We really want to be able to listen to one person’s story and go, okay, I understand the experience of X. To not have to do the thing that Cole Arthur Riley challenged us with in an earlier interview, which is unapologetic and rigorous particularity. To listen to people’s stories, and we can’t possibly listen to each one, right? We can’t possibly treat each person with the same level of attention. But we can realise how much our cognitive shortcuts can trip us up when we go. And I feel it in myself, I’m like, but I just want to understand race. It’s just a ridiculous thing to ever think or, you know, in lots of areas, you know, I want to be an informed person, informed citizen I’m going to read a few books about this topic. I’m going to listen to a few podcasts about this topic. And then I want to feel like I’ve got it, you know, like I understand it. Like I can, I can narrate the experience of black British people or the experience of trans people, or I can understand the climate crisis or whatever it is. And this podcast again and again, just like wacks me in the face with the futility of that, but also the unavoidability of that, because no one has infinite time attention or capacity to issues. And I think we probably need to just decide which things, areas, issues we’re going to go deep with, but make sure in the ones we just haven’t got that ram for, we’re not assuming that we understand when we’ve only dipped our toe in.
So yeah, Tom’s childhood being able to say, yes, I grew up where Stephen Lawrence was killed, and I didn’t experience explicit racism in my childhood. Being able to say, yes, racism exists. That’s bad and we need to fight against it. And it doesn’t show up in the same way for different people. And a level of granularity is helpful. And I think it was it was such a key point that, you know, he is accused of being a traitor or you know, these kind of words that are used against people of colour, like coconut and, you know, brown on the outside, white on the inside, those names that he’s been called and others get called for trying to say ‘this is not my experience. My experience is different.’ I remember when Me Too kind of hit us in the face and this sense of like whose part gets to stand for the whole? Whose individual particular story do we let become representative in the public mind? And for a lot of older feminists, I think, or women who hadn’t experienced sexual violence, there was this sense in which there was this realisation of, okay, because I haven’t experienced these things doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. But then I think for those that they had happened to, I can’t really follow through on my point in that, but just this sense in which the, we’re continually wanting to work out who is representative, right? Whose story can we file under ‘that’s what it’s like to be X.’ And if Tom’s left me with anything, it’s the resistance to that. And how we need to navigate that in ourselves and others. I find it when I’m telling my story of, I’m writing about this at the moment. I’m trying to write about the Christian sexual ethic and my experience of it having been broadly positive, but I’m having to be, and rightly so, so careful to not sound like I’m saying my story invalidates the stories of others whose experience is different. And that instinct in us to feel delegitimised or denied by someone else’s different story, I think trips us up a huge amount.
It was really interesting what he said about the Christianity basically being a colonial export, which is being exported back in, and he’s right. London, some Theos research showed is the most religious place in the UK, and it’s largely because of the very vibrant immigrant religious communities. I’m trying to get my head around Tom and what’s formed him, and why he feels this distinctiveness or difference or kind of divergence from some of the stories that are told about black people in the UK. I think a real key was this sense that he said, like growing up in Nigeria, he wasn’t Black. He was just a person. I don’t think he put it like that, but it wasn’t that he wasn’t Black, it’s that everyone was Black and therefore it wasn’t a salient fact about his identity. It wasn’t anything that other people were using. It didn’t come with associations. It was just what people looked like. And then being thrust into a society in which his blackness was in the eyes of other people, extremely salient to his identity, I think is part of what’s been going on for him. And it makes me think about how those of us who are caucasian, as this language has changed and awareness has changed over the last few years, I know a lot of people who find talk of whiteness quite difficult to sit with and can feel kind of triggered into a defensiveness. And I’m sure there are situations in which it’s being used in ways in which that reaction is perhaps justified. But I wonder if part of what’s going on is that those of us who grew up in white majority places, and are white, it wasn’t a salient aspect of our identity. It just isn’t part of our self–conception. And so when someone else comes along and says, you know, this is really salient to your identity, this is key to how I see you, maybe we’re experiencing something not dissimilar to the journey that Tom has gone on. I think the thing will maybe stay with me the most was just the sense of like material reality around race. And I wish I’d kept hold of the thread of my thought and said, what do you think about reparations? Because I think in reading his argument, I came to a stronger sense of the strength of the argument for reparations. That if what you’re seeing in the difference between a directly immigrated a kind of West African, black British population and a Caribbean black British population, if Tom is right and his data is right and their experience is so different and the kind of markers around poverty and social exclusion and school attainment are so different, some of it will be culture, I’m sure. And some of it will be when those populations arrived and the level of hostility that they experienced. But you’ve just got to go, slavery begins to loom extremely large as one of the hypotheses for that difference. That level of uprooting, both in terms of economic outcomes and in the way that forms people. I talked to Vanessa Zoltan about generational trauma and epigenetics and the way to the third generation of Holocaust survivors, the children of Holocaust survivors to the third generation have much higher levels of depression, anxiety, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, possibly a tangent, but it works out in very simple ways. In Tom’s argument sometimes where he’s like, yeah, don’t start a big diversity agenda in publishing, just pay people properly. And that feels very sane to me.
Yeah, this interview has just left me with this commitment to the bit of my brain that wants things to be simple needs to be kept an eye on. And that surrendering to the mystery and complexity and in Cole Arthur Rowley’s phrase, the sort of unapologetic particularity of each human person in front of me, that’s the posture that I want to adopt. And I think Tom is inviting us into that.
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