Aufgabe Vorschlag B2 – 2 · Abitur Hessen Englisch LK 2022

Material

Afua Hirsch: Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (memoir, 2018)

I had left Britain to leave being British. I believed that relocating my future to one or more of Africa’s

many nations would solve the problems of belonging that had nibbled away at me, a mixed-race girl

growing up in Britain, for as long as I could remember. I had not meant to come back, not after two

years, not ever, but to settle in West Africa for good, and take up my place in the world as a proud

5 African, in places where I thought I would fit in.

Exactly the opposite had happened. Living in Senegal I had discovered, to my endless confusion, how

British I was. Returning to London meant the relief of familiarity, of home, but the painful reminder

that home was a place that had surveyed me as alien, questioned me about my background, and

expected me to provide explanations. Very little, it seemed, had changed. [...]

10 I had brown skin, an African name, hair that coiled tightly, knotted and frizzed when brushed, and

never flopped around my face. I shared this with my sister, characteristics we inherited from our

mother, who is black and African – from Ghana – and our father, who is white with a mother from

Yorkshire and a father who came to Britain as a Jewish German refugee. [...]

[E]veryone around us was white. Our neighbours were white. My school friends were white. The

15 history I learned was about white people, the books I read were about white children; Jack and Jill,

Peter and Jane – that was what childhood was meant to look like.

I’m not sure how many of my neighbours in Wimbledon, where I still live, would approve of this

description. Most of the well-heeled residents of my home suburb prefer to say they do not see race at

all. And because race allegedly did not exist, in this all-white world, the whiteness that made me so

20 self-conscious was regarded as completely normal. It was I who was at odds with my environment – I

did not conform. But, since there was no such thing as race, there was no space in which it could

matter.

But it did matter to me. Even before I had a vocabulary to express it, race began to manifest itself in

my life. [...]

25 I learned how common my experiences were. And I learned something else, something that over time

has come to crystallise the uniquely British problem we have with race and identity. In Britain, we are

taught not to see race. We are told that race does not matter. We have convinced ourselves that if we

can contort ourselves into a form of blindness, then issues of identity will quietly disappear. My sister

and I were no different. My parents were, laudably, concerned with nurturing us with a happy

30 childhood, full of opportunity. Race, heritage and identity did not rank among their priorities for

raising their children.

But like the people in my books, being taught not to see race only heightened my sensitivity to the

extent of my difference. I didn’t find race, race found me; in the playground or the classroom, on the

street, in the shops. I already knew that I looked different – kids work that out for themselves – but

35 that there was something bad about my difference, something inherently undesirable about being

black: that, I had to be taught.

The first teachers were my peers at school. From the age of seven to the age of eighteen, I went to the

same school, where I was one of a minuscule number of children with brown skin. [...]

Even when it’s quite clear that people around me are conscious that I’m different, because of how I

40 look, I know exactly how to reassure them. I’ve been conditioned in the art of English manners,

politeness, harmless banter and casual charm my whole life; [...] you learn to send the subliminal

message: don’t worry about the fact that I’m black, I won’t make you feel uncomfortable. I may be

brown, my hair is a texture you don’t understand, I have a name you struggle to pronounce, but it’s

OK – I am completely non-threatening, I am brown, but safe. [...]

45 [My boyfriend] Sam 1 had what I did not: absolutely zero desire to make himself appealing, non-

threatening and safe. Sam and his peers spoke their own language, and had their own value system,

their own subculture, their own music, their own aesthetic and fashion ideals. It had nothing to do with

the white, middle-class world of Wimbledon and beyond, and it wasn’t interested in making itself

palatable to that world either. From where I was standing, what Sam had was a coherent,

50 multidimensional identity which was unequivocally his. It was black, and it was proud. I dreamed of

this certainty, and I was drawn to it, with a gravitational pull. [...]

I am the eternal outsider. In Wimbledon, I am the black girl. The more I asserted my black identity,

the more of a threat I became to the prevailing order – that race is something unseen, unspoken of and

unacknowledged in polite society. In Tottenham, I am the rich girl, who speaks ‘like a white person’,

55 and has access to privilege and opportunity most people cannot imagine. For years I internalised this

as a status that carried with it multiple rejections, because everywhere I went, I was other. But over

time, it began to manifest as an opportunity to observe and question our attitudes towards race and

identity, driven by a fascination that perhaps only an outsider can have, and, maybe, the ability to see

things that only an outsider can see.

(948 Wörter)

Afua Hirsch: Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, 2018, S. 3–19.

Hinweis

Afua Hirsch (born 1981): British writer and journalist, daughter of a British father and a Ghanaian mother

1 Sam is black, comes from a Ghanaian family and has grown up in Tottenham, a very multicultural borough of London.

2

Relate the author's struggles with her identity to similar experiences dealt with in class, especially referring to the short story "My Son the Fanatic".

(40 BE)