I am a first generation immigrant. I’m Indian, a scion of the Himalayan Brahmin Zamindari, which means nothing to most people, but really speaks volumes to a fifth of the world’s population.
However, I grew up in middle-middle class circumstances in an economically and educationally deprived part of the UK because my father is a doctor. If you have ever seen ‘The Indian Doctor’ on the BBC you’ll have some idea of the milieu in which I grew up. Ironically my parents were/are socialists so my siblings and I attended mostly state schools and we lived in a very modest house (because my parents had already inherited several very large and impractical ‘status’ houses in India). This meant that nobody has ever known where to ‘place’ my family socially in England.
For the most part, our experience of living here has been hugely positive for ideological and personal reasons if not economic and social reasons. I have encountered racism but as a product of my background have chosen to exercise metta-bhavana (Google it) rather than respond to it. (Since the BLM debate erupted I am re-thinking this passivity).
Anyway, I could write a book on this subject (in fact one day I probably will, because I’m a literary and social historian by training and work with demographics and ethnographics professionally). But what I will say is that Brits, other than those who are upper class themselves, don’t realise that people who are not white can also be posh.
I very much conform to the ‘posh person’ stereotype peddled on Mumsnet and telly: I’m scruffy, my house is scruffy, my car is scruffy, I can ride a horse and parse a sentence in more than one Classical language, I have loyal ‘staff’ who have been with me for years. But because I’m not white, and even though I sound like Princess Anne, I am constantly mistaken for my housekeeper (who is white non-British) or my nanny (who is white British).
Like many genuinely ‘posh people’, I used to think this was funny rather than mortifying, and would often take pains to rescue the person who’d made the mistake of inaccurate unconscious bias from their embarrassment.
However, as my DC has got older and developed some complex health and educational needs, I have realised that their needs are actually underserved because of these wrong assumptions.
I am now becoming increasingly obnoxious where required, with the necessary results, and I’m also embarrassed to say I have embraced some of the (to my mind) first generation upper middle class vulgarity of my white British husband and his family.
I’ve upgraded my appearance with new clothes and time-consuming personal grooming, started wearing the jewellery that previously lived in the safe, and made over my house so that it’s more obviously the home of someone monied.
As a result of my upbringing I cringe about the ostentation of it all, but I had to do it because I’m not willing to compromise my DC’s life chances just because of my ingrained (and obviously wrong in their own way) Brahmin assumptions of superiority.
Class snobbery is an intrinsic part of British culture and my liminal status within it actually enables me to play it to my advantage as I know the ‘rules’, and in both cultures. My in-laws are very adroit about projecting their poshness with their smart house, and children’s and grandchildren’s smart schools, but the moment they grumble about their cleaner or lose their shit about something domestic and inconsequential, their rather humbler origins are displayed. In fact this has been my whole experience of ‘posh people’ and snobbery in the UK: most of these people are the descendants of petit-bourgeoisie who have re-invented themselves as county stalwarts, but whose snobbery is a direct result of their own class insecurities.
I do think it’s not quite right to assume unconscious bias or profiling is automatically the result of racism or xenophobia. It’s just as likely to be mere ignorance, but no less dangerous because of it. One of my potentially most dangerous experiences was at the hands of my white British GP, who is married to a British-born Asian doctor, but who clearly thought I suffered from problems of education or poverty simply because of my skin colour and geographical origin. (I enjoyed pointing out that my family didn’t merely hail from that area, but actually owned most of it, and that although I don’t have a professional job title my education would almost certainly trump his).
Finally, regarding the speculation about Rishi Sunak - he’s middle-middle class, as are his parents and grandparents. His wife is the daughter of a billionaire, but her family, too, are middle-middle. They spend their family money sponsoring healthcare charities rather than buying up shooting estates. He went to Winchester because it was the closest academic school to where he grew up. If he’d grown up elsewhere it would have been somewhere like Bradford Grammar School, which is just as academic, but leads to a very different profile.