I could have written the comment below reflecting on a conversation I had with an English man when the British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned. It was part of a very short exchange in a coffeeshop in north London. The English man said that Boris Johnson was better after all. I jumped in saying that he was a racist, and that the problems in Britain were not about one man, but about the form of the political economic policies. classes, etc. The man disagreed with me, saying : “But everybody wants to come to this country. You, where do you come from?” I asked him to stick to the argument rather than speaking about where I come from. He refused. Our short conversation ended abruptly there. *** “Where are you from?” is not necessarily a racist question, but for those of us with brown skin, it’s a loaded one. We answer it uneasily, unsure if the conversation is going to unravel into something more distressing, as the encounter between Lady Susan Hussey and Ngozi Fulani did on Tuesday at B
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51