As an Asian woman brought up in London, a cultural and ethnic melting pot, I learned to be colour blind in my dealings with others. We were all Londoners first, sharing accents and school lives and the same music and TV shows. As a result, today I sometimes forget I am brown and I’m surprised all over again when others see my colour first, engage the usual stereotypes and then express embarrassed surprise when they discover that I had a successful career spanning multiple countries, several multinationals, and serving on the Executive Board level of a Fortune 500 Company. With the double whammy effect of Asian and female I sometimes have to turn on the tough side early to ensure that I am not taken for a pushover. I wish I didn’t have to, but I hate being patronised.
I ran Inclusion training for managers and leaders at Ford Motor Company and I used the usual tools to illustrate our tendencies to short cut when we meet new people. Our judgments can fill in many gaps using pre-conceived notions and some anecdotal observations. One tool was to share a photo of an Asian family at what looked like a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony. It happened to be my Oxford Chemist sister with her Asian Catholic boyfriend at an engagement celebration. The trainees would talk in some detail about how unhappy she was about her arranged marriage, that they were probably factory workers who spoke little English and poorly educated. It was always good fun to share the facts. Some could see that they had jumped too fast to the wrong conclusions. Others would say yes, but they were different and the stereotype holds.
Despite the countless numbers of people who defy stereotypes, some aspects of stereotyping seem hard to shift. There are always some credible anecdotal examples that support racial stereotyping with certain subgroups. Black men can be judged to be more likely to have left illegitimate children, be flighty with partners, lack responsibility and be caught out in big lies. But how is that any different than English Prime Minister Boris Johnson? The reality is that you can always find good and bad people in all races and across genders. It is much safer to take each person’s story and judge it based on the facts before leaping to conclusions.
The rise of nationalism and white supremacism really does defy logic. You do not need to go back many generations in almost any country to see the blends of cultures and ethnicities. Any country that has a history of immigration – the US, the UK, Australasia, most of Western Europe – among many others – means that it’s difficult to work out who the original populations even were. England is a rich example. The British Royal family are mostly of German origin, needing to change their name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor in 1917 to sound more local because of anti-German feeling during World War 1. The country has a long history of Norman (French), Viking (Norway and Denmark), and Roman invasions. Due to the burgeoning economy of post war Britain, foreigners were enticed to come and work in the factories and dockland areas coming largely from Afro-Caribbean countries. Healthcare and other workers being pulled from Asia including my father, a radiographer. Curry is now considered to be the most frequently consumed meal in Britain and is referred to as the “national dish.” More recently was a wave of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, leaving some of their countries with talent shortages. Britain is a true example of an inclusive society. You will always find some immigrants who don’t integrate, stay in micro communities, and don’t embrace the blend of where cultures connect. And you will always find groups who have been in England longer who make a fuss over more recent arrivals.
This summer we visited a beautiful and historic town called Wells, in the heart of the English countryside. It is home to the Cheddar Gorge, an excavated area of limestone caves. It was here the oldest complete skeleton of a British person was found buried. It is believed by scientists who have carbon-dated it, that Cheddar Man is around 10,000 years old. As they examined the DNA, they concluded that he was probably lactose intolerant and likely to have had dark skin and dark curly or waxy hair. So even early Brits were likely to be racially mixed!
If you go far back enough to Mitochondria Eve, the DNA origins of Homo Sapiens, where we all came from was East Africa. Across the whole planet we humans are more alike than a single group of chimpanzees and yet we find so many reasons to despise each other due to colour and cultural differences. We should be much less prejudiced and much more generous to all of our very close human cousins irrespective of our differences.
