Cosmic architect Yin was in bad mood. Something had gone wrong. Yin had picked a universe, found a suitable planet, added a moon, seeded life, guided evolution by wiping out the dinosaurs (with, Yin smugly recalled, a well-aimed asteroid), and now, after four billion planet years (no time at all, really) the sodding superconscious beings were about to destroy their environment!
Reason had replaced religion, so further intervention was out – free will was essential. It was tempting to smite that ‘drill, Baby, drill’ fool, but it was a free and fair election, so… The short life span didn’t help. Yin felt bad about that, but it was what happened with evolution. Apparently.
The angels would try to help, but it wasn’t looking good. Another singularity project down the drain, thought Yin. The same thing, or similar, was happening in innumerable universes. Oh well, fuck it, thought Yin. Plenty more fish in the sea.
Black and South Asian postwar immigrants to the UK and their descendants are often asked ‘Where are you from?’ – a question loaded with a queasy mixture of idle curiosity and unconscious or semiconscious racism.
Begun 2019 | Revised 2025 | 1,300 words | Contents
How should they respond to that loaded question? It’s a minefield.
For a white Briton like me, asking that question of a brown or blackBriton who’s a stranger or casual acquaintance is a bad idea. Much worse is asking as a follow-up question:
Where are you really from?
Such questions are inconsiderately intrusive and, at best, microracist. Unpicked – though the questioner might not consciously realise it – the question is likely to mean:
Your skin colour and facial appearance suggests your ethnic origin isn’t north European. In which country are your family origins? Actually, though, I don’t really care where you’re from. My question is mainly rhetorical and microracist. I’m really just drawing attention to your otherness.
A 2022 high-profile incident at a charity reception involving a UK royal aide, ‘Lady’ Susan Hussey, and a black British charity worker, Ngozi Fulani, is a good example of this phenomenon.
Hussey questioned Fulani’s origins, repeatedly asking where she was ‘really’ from. This was witnessed by several other people and reported by Fulani on
social media.
Former royal aide Susan Hussey | Photo: Getty
‘Lady’ Hussey – daughter of the 12th ‘Earl’ Waldegrave, widow of former BBC chairman and life peer ‘Baron’ Hussey, godmother to heir ‘Prince’ William, and a close friend of ‘King’ Charles, ‘Queen’ Camilla and the late ‘Queen’ Elizabeth – resigned after the incident.
At an arranged meeting two weeks later in Buckingham Palace, Hussey apologised to Fulani, and Fulani accepted Hussey’s apology.
However, in spite of that stage-managed resolution, the unpleasant incident supports Meghan Markle’s implied claim of racism in the royal household; and implies widespread casual racism amongst the ruling class.
If the question, as in that case, seems offensively rhetorical, the asker’s bluff can be called: ‘Why do you want to know?’
If the question seems genuine, and worthy of a helpful response, it might nevertheless be not so easy to answer.
For an answer to be accurate – and understood – both parties need good geopolitical and historical awareness. It can get complicated.
For instance, If a British person of South Asian appearance is known to be a Muslim, they might not be – as might be assumed – of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin. Many UK Muslims have origins in the Indian state of Gujerat. (Almost 20 percent of Indian people are Muslims.)
Many South Asian people came to the UK from Kenya and Uganda. South Asian communities were established beforepartition in East Africa and the Caribbean, mainly in Kenya, Uganda and Trinidad. They were there because of another piece of clumsy and careless social engineering by the Brutish Empire:indentured servitude.
Following the ending of slavery, between 1834 and 1917, many people were induced to move from India to other colonies as indentured labourers for the empire. Unsurprisingly, the conditions were harsh and the wages low. The workers were derogatively called ‘coolies’.
Indian indentured labourers, seeking to escape the poverty and famine frequent during colonial rule, came mainly from the Punjab and Bengal regions (both later severed during partition).
On completing their indenture, some Indian people stayed on in Africa or the Caribbean. They were joined by family members and formed thriving expatriate communities, albeit protected by the brutal stranglehold of empire.
After those colonies gained independence, many South Asian residents moved to the UK. Those in Uganda were famously expelled by Idi Amin. In Kenya, harsh changes to citizenship rules prompted mass voluntary emigration.
Those UK immigrants, whilst identifying by religion, often also identify by their diaspora community. For instance, people may identify as Kenyan Muslims.
My South Asian Muslim wife, when asked ‘Where are you from?’, sometimes says ‘Nairobi’. Her ethnicity is Punjabi but she was born in Kenya and spent her childhood there.
The person asked that question could give an informative reply, such as:
My family origins are Punjabi Muslim in what’s now Pakistan. In the late 1800s my grandfather went from the Punjab to work in what’s now Kenya. Our family lived there before coming to the UK in the late 1960s.
They could summarise it: ‘Pakistan’. But the question is more likely to provoke a passive-aggressive and deliberately obtuse reply, such as, ‘I’m from Leicester – where are you from?’ (or the deliberately annoying ‘from my mother’s womb’).
The hidden question, ‘Why are you here?’ at least offers the possibility of debate and reason; but behind that lurks the racist rhetorical question:
Why don’t you go back there?
For postwar immigrants to the UK and their descendants, such racism is never far below the surface.
Note: My post Racism explained as a redundant instinct suggests racism is a redundant anti-stranger instinct revived and twisted by colonialism and postcolonialism – and, sadly, provoked by the postwar mass immigration carelessly engineered by a patrician government. We anti-racists choose to reject and oppose that twisted impulse and to embrace our brilliant multicultural society.
Thoughtful white Brits aware of all that – or just wary of the social minefield – don’t ask that awkward, loaded question. But it does get asked.
If I was a British person of colour asked by a white person, ‘Where are you from?’, and the question seemed intrusive, I’d want to challenge it, but it in a non-hostile way.
I’d initially bat it back by – politely – saying, ‘How do you mean?’ If they indicated they were asking about my ethnic origin rather than my place of residence, I’d ask – still politely, if possible:
Why do you want to know?
The questioner might well find it difficult to explain themselves. Serves them right.
British people of colour people also ask the question, ‘Where are you from?’ of each other. The purpose is to find out the other’s origins: country, religion, region, town, caste, class, whatever.
That’s a different can of worms – and it doesn’t excuse white Brits asking that question. As always, context is crucial. The context is the white west and – as always – racism is prejudice plus power.
Osler takes the question seriously, exploring her complex Empireland* family heritage, but she starts by explaining how that question can undermine one’s sense of belonging and nationality with its implied accusation:
You don’t belong here – you’re not British
Clearly, not everyone asking that question is aware of the toxic smog it stirs up – but ignorance is no excuse. Osler suggests a barbed comeback: having answered (or not answered) the question, turn it around and ask:
Where are you from?
* Note: The resonant name Empireland was used by award-winning British journalist Sathnam Sanghera as the title of his 2021 best-selling book, which shows how the Brutish Empire shaped modern Britain but has been airbrushed out of cultural awareness and is barely even taught in schools.
After centuries of previous military incursions, the 1649-53 conquest of Ireland by Protestant mass murdererOliver Cromwell made Ireland a British colony.
The ‘Plantation of Ulster’ consolidated colonialisation. British landowners acquired land in the north of Ireland, mostly stolen from the Irish under 1652 legislation. The new landowners imported English and Scottish tenants and workers as ‘settlers’.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, more British settlers came to the north of Ireland from Scotland, forced out by the theft of land known as the Highland clearances.
ProtestantWilliam of Orange (formerly ruler of the Dutch Republic) had recently become William III of England and Scotland, deposing CatholicJames II in the so-called Glorious Revolution.
James’s ‘Jacobite’Irish army, mostly Catholic, hoped to reinstate James and resolve long-standing grievances about land ownership, religion and civic rights.
The crucial 1690Battle of the Boyne was fought for control of a ford on the River Boyne near Drogheda, north of Dublin. William won.
Having lost the battle and the war, James fled to France. The defeated Irish Jacobites were allowed to practice Catholicism after swearing loyalty to William.
(The 1745Jacobite uprising in Scotland was an attempt by James II’s grandson Charles Stuart, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, to regain the British throne for his father James, aka the Old Pretender. The uprising collapsed at the 1746 Battle of Culloden.)
After several horrific famines and brutally suppressed rebellions including the 1917Easter Rising when almost 500 people died and 14 were executed, in 1921 the Irish Home Rule movement resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and Ireland was partitioned.
The main part of Ireland became the Irish Free State, a dominium of the British Empire. Six counties in the northeast chose to stay in the UK, and became known as Northern Ireland.
In 1927, the UK was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
In 1937, following the brief Irish Civil War and its bitter aftermath, the Irish Free State got full independence as Ireland (or Éire). Ireland was officially declared a republic in 1949.
Since the establishment of Northern Ireland in 1921, there’s been constant conflict there between the mostly Protestantunionist majority and the mostly Catholicrepublican minority. Unionists – mostly descendants of English and Scottish‘settlers’ – claim loyalty to the United Kingdom. Republicans – mostly descendants of Irish indigenes – want Northern Ireland to leave the UK and join the Republic of Ireland.
This republican policy, known as unification, is sometimes wrongly called reunification. Ireland’s never been formally unified, so can’t be reunified.
It’s important to get that right – and to distinguish between unionism and unification. It’s not at all confusing. It’s Irish.
In the 1960s, the violent unrest known as the Troubles broke out in Northern Ireland. 30 years of armed conflict between republican and unionist groups and the British army resulted in over 3,000 deaths.
The Troubles ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an uneasy but lasting peace.
A power-sharing government was set up: the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont in east Belfast. It’s been suspended a number of times. Between 2002 and 2007, Northern Ireland was run from London.
Relations between the two main parties, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the republican Sinn Féin, broke down again in 2017, and the assembly wasn’t restored until 2020. In 2022 the DUPvetoed the Assembly in protest against the Brexit NI protocol. In 2024 the government was restored.
In 2020, a Northern Irelandopinion poll showed 47% in favour of staying in the UK, and 45% in favour of a united Ireland. (The same poll was run in Ireland: 71% favoured unification.)
On the whole, the rest of the UK couldn’t care less about Northern Ireland – it’s an embarrassing colonial hangover – and NI Protestants, despite their proclaimed ‘loyalism’, couldn’t really care less about the UK – they just want to preserve their postcolonial privileges.
Considering this horrible history, it’d be better and fairer all round if Ireland was unified. Sure, the Protestants would protest, but they’d be fine. They’d be a protected minority – in an EU country, lucky sods.
Unification would, of course, also solve the otherwise intractable Brexit Irish border problem.
Note to Taoiseach: take Northern Ireland – I mean, actually take it, please!
soothfairy 