The election in 2008 of Barack Obama, the first black American president was an occasion of great national excitement. The same can’t be said for the elections of Rishi Sunak, the UK’s first British-Indian prime minister, or Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf, the first Muslim politician to become a national leader in western Europe.
In part that is a result of the circumstances in which they took office. Obama was elected by the voters, at the end of an eight-year spell in opposition for the Democrats, and as a relative outsider within his party. Sunak and Yousaf became leader in whole or in part because they were the preferred candidate of their parties’ establishments.
They took office against a backdrop of crisis, some of which they helped to create, and as leaders of parties that have been in power for more than a decade and are both, perhaps, entering a period of prolonged decline.
Yet some people were excited at the elections of Sunak and Yousaf. One of those people is me, and I can trace back my excitement to an unhappy incident at primary school. I was six years old, and the girl who had sat next to me for the best part of a year informed me matter-of-factly that she wasn’t going to be sitting next to me anymore, because her mother had told her she wasn’t allowed to be friends with Pakistanis. This came as something of a surprise to me for any number of reasons, not least the fact I am not from Pakistan.
I learnt two things from this. The first is that racists are not particularly sophisticated or discerning. The second is that I had a vested interest in racial tolerance: a country that was unwelcoming to one group of ethnic minorities would, almost certainly, prove unwelcoming to me. I became what the academics Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford describe as a “necessity liberal” — someone who supports liberalism for reasons of self-interest rather than ideological conviction.
Like me, Rishi Sunak does not claim Pakistani heritage, though Yousaf does. Nonetheless, I can draw a direct line between that horrible morning a quarter of a century ago and my sense of anticipation when he and Sunak became first minister and prime minister respectively.
A country in which Sunak and Yousaf can reach the highest office is, at least for the moment, a warmer home for all ethnic minorities than one in which they could not. It’s not to say that everything in the UK is perfect. In the last month alone, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, has falsely suggested that “almost all” members of grooming gangs in the UK are British Pakistanis, a charge that the Labour party’s attack ads on Sunak seemed to exploit and echo. But the accession of the two men to the two jobs is a bullish indicator, nevertheless.
The public celebrations that greeted Obama’s election eventually gave way to the age of Donald Trump. Now, one of the few things most Americans can agree on is that their debate over race and race relations has got more vitriolic. Will the UK’s more low-key history-makers fare better?
Well, maybe. There are two lessons from the Obama-Trump years. The first is an old one: progress is not linear. Things don’t only get better. But the second is that we will never “unsee” race. That is, we are all shaped not only by our own experiences, even if they took place a lifetime ago, but also by our parents, and their experiences. And people will often want to celebrate their heritage and upbringing, and will therefore emphasise their differences. For good and for ill, Sunak and Yousaf’s journeys to the top were shaped by their own backgrounds.
During Yousaf’s campaign for the leadership of the Scottish National party and thereafter, it was commonplace to compare the scrutiny of his faith with the much greater attention given to that of his main leadership rival, Kate Forbes, a member of the Free Church of Scotland. This is a view of the world in which merely being a practising Muslim is a position of equal radicalism or distinction in modern Britain to being an avowed critic of abortion, same-sex marriage and sex outside wedlock.
But Yousaf’s ethnicity also gives his government a veneer of freshness that his relatively unimpressive CV as a minister in a middling government would not.
Something similar is true of Sunak. He has impeccable Conservative credentials and is a Brexiter, yet he has faced suspicion from his own side that he is some kind of liberal wet. But the fact that this same perception obtains among liberals makes him a great asset to the Tory party.
What we can do instead of “unseeing” race is to see it in its context. The ethnicity of the prime minister, and of each of us, should be no more, or no less, important than our family stories and the clothes we wear.
Letter in response to this article:
The satirical headline that greeted Obama’s election / From Peter Overholser, McKinleyville, CA, US