There is something particularly grotesque about a golliwog. It’s the smile, I think, its teeth frozen in a rictus grin behind the exaggerated redness of the lips. The golliwog seems to say that not only is it OK to “minstrelise” black people and display them as dolls, but that they should enjoy it.
That smile is the price of entry into white British society, of acceptance and integration into workplaces, social groups and our wider politics and culture. The golliwog, despite it being a relic of the past, is in fact a symbol of the present. You are only allowed visibility as a black figure if you’re grateful, permanently smiling in all circumstances. Your status, as someone who is part of Britain and therefore gets a say in how they experience it, is conditional on the fact that you must never suggest that the country is not quite so hospitable to you sometimes. Ideally, if you want social and professional mobility as a person of colour, if you want to be moved from the bottom shelf to a position of higher prominence, you must go further. You must grin harder and always maintain that Britain is, in fact, a race-relations utopia, even as things regularly happen that prove that we are far from that.
Let’s take just last week. A pub in Essex had its collection of golliwogs confiscated, after which they were promptly replaced with a new collection by the landlady, who refuses to accept that they are racist. Some of the new golliwogs she says were sent in by sympathetic supporters. In the same week, a Tory councillor was suspended after he was reportedly recorded saying “all white men should have a Black slave” and that black people “are a lower class than us white people”. Neither of these incidents suggest that Britain is a uniformly racist place, but clearly, I think it’s safe to say, something is going on.
And that something is that it is possible for a society to make large strides towards racial equality, and still be meaningfully prejudiced in ways that make life difficult and uncomfortable for a significant number of people of colour. This is not a complicated fact. Racism isn’t a disease that is cured by a single shot of medicine, it’s a combination of attitudes and social values around which there are varying levels of agreement. We have agreed, for example, that you can’t say the N-word. But, it seems, not against the hanging of golliwogs in public places, as the pub landlord commented on a Facebook post, the way “they used to hang them in Mississippi years ago”. You might think we also agreed that we couldn’t say white people should own black slaves, but it seems that even that is not a certainty.
Constantly realising all the questions you thought were settled are in fact not, is my abiding experience of being a non-white Briton. Along with those realisations comes a queasy sense of foreboding, because I know that suggesting that all might not be well in Britain on the race front isn’t going to be pretty. In choosing not to smile, there is a price to pay. You’ll have to be subjected to the usual: that you are oversensitive, woke, and in fact, actually the one making it about race when it’s just some dolls hanging like they used to hang black folk in Mississippi. Despite all recent fictions about Black Lives Matter (BLM) ushering in an age of deference to black people, one only has to look at how race incidents are discussed in our politics, and our media, to see that our group response to expressing discomfort about race isn’t exactly “let me kneel in solidarity this very moment”.
Any questions asked of the appropriateness of our symbols or historical legacies is not merely met with a lack of deference, but with punishment. Students who suggest modifying curriculums are mauled in the press; others who campaign against systemic racism, such as BLMUK, are investigated for something called “progressive extremism” and struggle to open bank accounts to disburse funds raised to support precariously employed and housed people. People such as Ngozi Fulani, who had the misfortune of expecting enlightened views of the royal household, are savaged by the press and, in turn, members of the public, for pointing out that it’s not very nice to be aggressively asked where you are from.
It’s a sort of law of racial gravity – for every claim of a racist action there is a wildly unequal and disproportionate reaction. Most of the time I don’t particularly care about who asked whom where they were from, or if there’s a pub that wants to display golliwogs. Sometimes I actively will myself not to care, because really, in the grand scheme of things these are relatively small incidents that do not make up the sum total of the experience of being a person of colour in the UK. But one is forced into a state of outrage by a government and media that then throw their weight behind the aggressors. If we can be convinced that there is a powerful onslaught against the good British people and their history and traditions by radical leftwing identity politics, then maybe there’s a chance we can be distracted from the colossal failures of the last 13 years.
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, apparently found time to let it be known that she had rebuked the police for getting involved in the golliwog matter. In truth, according to weekend reports, no real attempt was made by Braverman to contact Essex police. But no matter, for that starts a process. A columnist in the Telegraph laments the demonisation of the innocent golliwog and says your teddy bears could be next. The matter then becomes not one of outliers and hold-outs, but rightwing state and media sanction of their positions. The result is an encouragement and entrenchment of racist views, that is a constant drag on a Britain that is becoming increasingly enlightened on race.
Racism as individuals acting out is ultimately a diversion from racism as threat to life and liberty. In the same week that golliwogs dominated, it was revealed that black girls are three times more likely to undergo an invasive strip-search by Met police than white girls, and that more than a third of people from ethnic and religious minorities have experienced racially motivated physical or verbal abuse. But when the Home Office gets involved to protect the right to insult you, then you have to care about golliwogs too. Because now they are now a matter of national debate, of dinner party conversations and school playground taunting, and actual YouGov polling that asks if golliwogs are racist – a swirling national discourse in which the final arbiter of what is racist is never you.
It’s dizzying, trying to calibrate the appropriate response to these travesties, because, yes, of course things are getting better. But they are also getting worse, because the frontier for what constitutes racial equality is always shifting. The questions are new: not ones of civil rights, but of all the cultural adjustments that are required to make people of colour feel at home and equal, not erased from history, not subject to the glorification of imperial overlords, not having to drink a pint as a golliwog hangs over them or as a nation debates whether they should be forced to. It’s an awful lot of contempt to carry around with you, while simultaneously disciplining and reminding yourself that it’s not all this nation has to offer. So forgive me, for not smiling.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
