Nikesh Shukla

Chimene Suleyman

An urgent collection of essays by first and second-generation immigrants, exploring what it's like to be othered in an increasingly divided America. From Trump's proposed border wall and travel ban to the marching of White Supremacists in Charlottesville, America is consumed by tensions over immigration and the question of which bodies are welcome. In this much-anticipated follow-up to the bestselling UK edition, hailed by Zadie Smith as "lively and vital," editors Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman hand the microphone to an incredible range of writers whose humanity and right to be here is under attack. Chigozie Obioma unpacks an Igbo proverb that helped him navigate his journey to America from Nigeria. Jenny Zhang analyzes cultural appropriation in 90s fashion, recalling her own pain and confusion as a teenager trying to fit in. Fatimah Asghar describes the flood of memory and emotion triggered by an encounter with an Uber driver from Kashmir. Alexander Chee writes of a visit to Korea that changed his relationship to his heritage. These writers, and the many others in this singular collection, share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong.By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, troubling and uplifting, the essays in The Good Immigrant come together to create a provocative, conversation-sparking, multivocal portrait of America now.

26 Writers Reflect on America

The Good Immigrant

How does it feel to be constantly regarded as a potential threat, strip-searched at every airport? Or be told that, as an actress, the part you're most fitted to play is 'wife of a terrorist'? How does it feel to have words from your native language misused, misappropriated and used aggressively towards you? How does it feel to hear a child of colour say in a classroom that stories can only be about white people? How does it feel to go 'home' to India when your home is really London? What is it like to feel you always have to be an ambassador for your race? How does it feel to always tick 'Other'? Bringing together 21 exciting black, Asian and minority ethnic voices emerging in Britain today, The Good Immigrant explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay and what it means to be 'other' in a country that doesn't seem to want you, doesn't truly accept you - however many generations you've been here - but still needs you for its diversity monitoring forms. Inspired by discussion around why society appears to deem people of colour as bad immigrants - job stealers, benefit scroungers, undeserving refugees - until, by winning Olympic races or baking good cakes, or being conscientious doctors, they cross over and become good immigrants, editor Nikesh Shukla has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreaking, polemic, weary and - most importantly - real.

blue

Is it harder to have faith when you’re in another land, I wondered? Or, in a search for meaning and purity in a place that can often resent you, does your faith harden in reaction?

We have learned to belong in the un-belonging. 

you cannot and must not turn a blind eye to injustices that your people are responsible for.

You are intermittently handed this Necklace of labels to hang around your neck, neither of your choosing nor making, both constricting and decorative.

I understood men were allowed to be reckless and hurtful, but it was women who'd get the blame.

I see coming back to my village as significant, thanks to my privilege of being able to leave. But also because I can simultaneously cherry-pick my favourite aspects of my culture for anecdotes back home and social media, and keep the private, painful reflective ones for myself. 

but playing to the myth of the ‘good immigrant’ does not lead to real equality, or even acceptance.

To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t really belong to either.

Respectability politics is the dogged belief that if black people just shape up, dress better and act right, racists would suddenly have a dramatic change of heart, and stop their racist ways.

If we share the gifts that people have carried across continents and acknowledge them as part of the fabric of our society, from the national curriculum to the mainstream media, we could be on the cusp of a paradigm shift in our understanding of the world. 

Storytelling is the most powerful way to promote our understanding of the world in which we live and the vessel to tell these stories is our media. Britain is filled with people from all corners of the earth, each with a wealth of stories to tell; sometimes, race, culture ethnicity are a key part of the narrative, sometimes not.

You cannot have meaning without knowledge of the environment from which it stems.

If cultures were to survive in England it would be on the shoulders of bastardisation.

The world saw blackness in me before it saw anything else and operated around me with blackness in mind. 

I get what life’s about. It’s about living like your actions affect the people you don’t know, as well as the people you do.

This constant anxiety we feel as people of colour to justify our space, to show that we have earned our place at the table, continues to hound us.

Rizaldi

It's an eye-opening collection of stories about the minorities in Britain.

Shona Tiger

3.5

This took me a long time (6 months) to get through. I kept finding other things to read, because of the difficult subject: the big R. It's very difficult to read about other people's pain, and much more so if you can identify with aspects of that pain. To be non-white in a world where white is the default is to face racism every day. 

These essays -- some strong, others less so -- talk about how it feels to live in this skin ("Other") in the UK. In that sense, I read the book as an outsider, having lived all my life so far as a black person in a majority black country. Striking, then, how relatable the pain they express is. Also, how similar the experience is across different ethnicities.

By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, troubling and uplifting, these "electric" essays come together to create a provocative, conversation-sparking, multivocal portrait of modern America (The Washington Post). From Trump's proposed border wall and travel ban to the marching of white supremacists in Charlottesville, America is consumed by tensions over immigration and the question of which bodies are welcome. In this much-anticipated follow-up to the bestselling UK edition, hailed by Zadie Smith as "lively and vital," editors Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman hand the microphone to an incredible range of writers whose humanity and right to be here is under attack. Chigozie Obioma unpacks an Igbo proverb that helped him navigate his journey to America from Nigeria. Jenny Zhang analyzes cultural appropriation in 90s fashion, recalling her own pain and confusion as a teenager trying to fit in. Fatimah Asghar describes the flood of memory and emotion triggered by an encounter with an Uber driver from Kashmir. Alexander Chee writes of a visit to Korea that changed his relationship to his heritage. These writers, and the many others in this urgent collection, share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong.

Vivian

As the title suggests, The Good Immigrant is a collection of essays from 26 immigrant writers reflecting on their experience in America. 

I had high hopes for this book as I was looking for a book that explores racial/cultural identity as first generation immigrants (compared to 2nd generation or mixed-race native born Americans, there’s a huge difference in terms of sense of belonging and identity ambiguity).

Unfortunately the book is a disappointment. I found a few essays (no more than 5) poignant, relatable and offer interesting perspectives that help me deal with my own immigrant identity. But the rest of the essays are just plainly boring, unrelatable, and lack depth. The editors did make an effort to be inclusive so the writers' ethnical backgrounds are quite diverse. 

This book also has a UK version and seems to have better reviews. I'll still give that a try and I’m curious about the UK immigrants perspectives.

The Good Immigrant is an anthology of 21 essays written by BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) writers in Britain. This book inspired an American sequel - The Good Immigrant USA. 

I found this collection more powerful and moving than the US version; several essays even made me tear up. Particularly enjoyed the pieces Airport and Auditions by Riz Ahmed, Perpetuating Casteism by Sarah Sahim, The Wife of a Terrorist by Miss L, and The Ungrateful Country by Musk Okwonga. 

It was very educational for me to learn about the racism history and current situation in the UK. Nowadays almost all racism discussions are US-centric that in a way ignores and minimizes the experiences of marginalized people living in other white-dominant countries.

Rose Stanley

Book eight of Whateverathon
Prompt: Read something with PoC representation

This is a great collection of essays, giving us stories of many different experiences of being non-white in the UK (different ethnicities, different nationalities, different generations) - some light-hearted, some serious, some simmering with rage, some hopeful. Would definitely recommend, especially for those wanting to educate themselves more about racism in a British, rather than American, context.

Juliana Matias

I just realized I finished this review without saying anything about the book, so I'm back with a short summary.

This book groups together 21 essays from minority ethnic people in Britain today, talking about how their ethnicity impacts their every day life. Some of them are famous - actors, comedians, journalists, bloggers -, none of them were known to me.

The essays are raw and real, and paint an incredible picture I believe everyone needs to see. And they caused me to reflect deeply on my own life, and my own prejudices.

Read it.

I was born in Brazil. I have 2 passports: one attesting to the fact that the land in which I was born embraced my father, and a second one proclaiming I am Portuguese, proving the country where my father was born embraced both me and my mother. All of us have dual citizenship, and while Brazil will always be home, it is mostly my Portuguese heritage that allows me transit around the world with relative ease.

For quite a few years, I've been an immigrant. I moved to France after university and stayed there for 4 years. I lived in Paris, a city where most inhabitants, French or not, consider themselves to be immigrants on some level. Very few people consider themselves to be Parisian, they either came from somewhere else "à la campagne", or from a different country altogether. And there are so many foreigners living in Paris I felt right at home, even if most of my friends were other expats.

I went back home, and 10 years after I first set off to live in Europe, I packed my bags again, this time to the English midlands, where I've been living for about a year now. Although a little hard pressed to find the diversity I have come to expect after years in cities like Paris or London, my social circle profits from the company's qualified labour needs, and is filled with other expats, mostly German, but also plenty of latin american and eastern european, and the advent of websites like internations.org, which afford me the opportunity to meet like-minded people, so-called "citizens of the world".

Even throughout the entire Brexit debacle, and the election of Donald Trump in the US, during the myriad of racist and xenophobic propaganda I heard and discussions I engaged in, I have never been personally discriminated. And it's shocking to suddenly realize there is a simple reason for that.

I am white.

I'll ignore that technically, were I in th US, I might be classified as "latina", because the fact of the matter is that regardless of my dark curly hair and ability to tan, I have spent the past 15 years of my life in somewhat cold places and it has afforded me a rather pale complexion. Maybe not British pasty, but "white" nonetheless.

And I don't think I ever really understood just how much priviledge this brought me.

I heard once someone say that Brazilians are "good immigrants", because we don't "form ghettos". For years, I wore this sentence like a badge of honour, not really understanding the undelying assumptions there. I avoided other Brazilians, wanting to "integrate" myself in the local culture, never realizing that it would never happen. I would never really become anything but what I was. I might have thought it was alright for me, who was only temporarily somewhere else, but negating your own culture in favor of acceptance into another supposes that the other culture is somehow superior to yours, and it's a futile exercise at best. One cannot expect immigrants to deny their roots because life has brought them elsewhere, and then label them "ghetto" when they do not comply.

I heard the good vs. bad immigrant spiel again when joking that the UK was voting to kick me out of the country. And again when talking to an Australian friend who lives in the US about the Trump elections. Pro-Brexiters and Trump supporters would tell us that yes, they wanted to close their borders, but not us. We were not the immigration they wanted to stop. Because we work, and we're highly educated, and we pay taxes. And the part that was always left unspoken, but was always lingering just below the surface... because we're white.

There is a type a colour-blindness, I discovered reading this book, that only comes with being white and priviledged all your life. People don't question our motives. I may not have been consciously racist, but the simple fact that I didn't notice the level of prejudice and discrimination going on, shows how I've taken my own freedom and priviledge for granted.

After reading essay after essay of these so-called immigrants, most of whom have actually been born in the UK, sometimes to british children of actual immigrants, I started to notice how lucky I really was. Both to have been born in Brazil, a country who took my actually immigrant father in as its own, and who never questioned the legitimacy of my claim to itself.* And to have been born white, in a way that makes me blend in and escape scrutiny.

In the UK, I noticed people have a very set view on when an immigrant family becomes English. And I think the answer to that question might be never.

A quote fom the last essay in the book struck me because it summed up what I had written a huge paragraph trying to explain: "It was as if, even though we had been born here, we were still seen as guests, our social acceptance only conditional upon our very best behaviour." (Musa Okwonga)


I sometimes catch a lift from work with 2 guys from my department, and once I asked them where they were from. Mostly because one of them speaks much better French than English, and is actually an immigrant. But the other one told me he was from India, and I later discovered he's the third generation to have been born in the exact same town I live in right now. And it shocked me. How can he not consider himself to be English by now? How can others not accept English as an answer? And it wrecked me that maybe by posing the question, innocent as I might have been, I reinforced this awful segregation with my own prejudices.

And I realized I still have a long way to go myself. It's a daily struggle to not allow myself to be guided by stereotypes, and most days I lose. But I guess we've all got to start somewhere.

So, long story not so short: you should read this.

*This is not to say that there is no racism in Brazil. There is. A lot of it. Sometimes thinly veiled, sometimes openly broadcast. It's there, as sure as the rising sun, ingrained in every aspect of our culture, but if I was to start on that, I'd never finish this "review".

Hidde

Great collection of essays written by (children of) immigrants into the UK. Articulates well what it is like to live between cultures, prove yourself more than others have to and tiringly deal with what's essentially a misguided lack of trust. Witty, funny and moving stories, some appealed more to me than others, overall an excellent read.

How does it feel to be constantly regarded as a potential threat, strip-searched at every airport? Or to be told that, as an actress, the part you’re most fitted to play is ‘wife of a terrorist’? How does it feel to have words from your native language misused, misappropriated and used aggressively towards you? How does it feel to hear a child of colour say in a classroom that stories can only be about white people? How does it feel to go ‘home’ to India when your home is really London? What is it like to feel you always have to be an ambassador for your race? How does it feel to always tick ‘Other’? Bringing together 21 exciting black, Asian and minority ethnic voices emerging in Britain today, The Good Immigrant explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay and what it means to be ‘other’ in a country that doesn’t seem to want you, doesn’t truly accept you—however many generations you’ve been here—but still needs you for its diversity monitoring forms. Inspired by discussion around why society appears to deem people of colour as bad immigrants—job stealers, benefit scroungers, undeserving refugees—until, by winning Olympic races, or baking good cakes, or being conscientious doctors, they cross over and become good immigrants, editor Nikesh Shukla has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreaking, polemic, weary and—most importantly—real.

The Good Immigrant 26 Writers Reflect on America

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