“Who built the tower of London?” my husband, Salem, asks a crowd of people milling around outside of a pub, near Charing Cross.
It is his new favorite thing to do—not necessarily historical trivia, but quizzing obviously British people on the “Life in the UK” questions, the test that immigrants must pass in order to qualify for citizenship. He pulls out his phone, where he has an app that has game-ified the test, and quizzes people on everything from famous Olympians to historical knowledge to the national flower of Scotland and days devoted to various saints.
Sometimes people know the answers—but inevitably, someone awkwardly blushes, realizing that a Brown man with a beard knows more about their country than they do.
(William the Conqueror, in case you were wondering).
Just a few days before Salem walked into a small building in West London and filled out the 24 question multiple choice form that would decide whether or not he had earned his citizenship, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman visited the United States—my country—where she announced that multiculturalism had “failed” in the United Kingdom.
“It has failed because it allows people to come into our society and live parallel lives,” she said, addressing a Think Tank in Washington DC where she referred to multiculturalism as “misguided dogma.”
“In extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability of society,” she continued. “We are living with the consequence of that failure today. You can see it play out in the streets all over Europe, from Malmo to Paris, Brussels to Leicester.”
Once upon a time, this would have made my blood boil—it still does, particularly when you consider that Braverman, like so many of us, is a product of multiculturalism herself, or the fact that she also interjected that someone’s sexual orientation shouldn’t be enough to seek asylum somewhere (it is important to have extra layers of oppression, on top of living in a country where you could be killed for being gay!) But instead of running around in circles, screaming about how it can’t possibly be legal to deport a bunch of refugees to Rwanda or how a cabinet made up almost entirely of people who trace their ancestry back to Britain’s colonies have somehow managed to be more racist and xenophobic than anyone else, I want to consider her words, particularly in the context of me and Salem’s experience in Britain, as—for all intents and purposes--outsiders. Is multiculturalism really a misguided dogma? More importantly, do immigrants really live parallel lives?
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