Music to go with the story: something better change
Some years ago, I attended a summer course in teaching English to speakers of other languages, provided by Cambridge University. Most participants were young, female and British. Since, apart from sleeping, we spent most of our time together, I got a close-up view of modern English life.
We were being taught to teach, so practicing with real students formed an integral part of our daily activities. One day we were presented a new group and afterwards we were discussing them, their respective levels, behaviour, presumed learning abilities, and so forth. At some point a girl in my group tried to identify one of our learners. Since it had been our first class with them, we struggled for names and the girl was visibly uncomfortable with explaining who she meant. Where was he sat, the others tried to help out, what was he wearing, who had he been talking to.
By now it had become fully clear to me whom she was referring to. He was a young man from Mali and as many people from that country he was very dark skinned, almost authentically black. So I said with feigned innocence (since one can sometimes feel what is about to be washed over them): are you talking about the black guy?
A stir went through the room. Everybody were totally shocked, although our tutor, she herself still a lot younger than me, kind of giggled. Mentioning skin was regarded a terrible sin in 21st century Britain, I came to understand.
I was surprised nevertheless at the zeal the rule was followed with, since I felt I had decisively recognised our subject without insulting him. To me at least he seemed proud enough of his colour to be identified by it in a lighter toned environment. There’s no good in calling people Black merely to stress a difference, but in his case his skin really stood out. It still shone from the desert sun. As he would later point out, he had arrived in Barcelona only recently.
No talking about appearances, then. I was the stranger looking in. And I must say, the taboo made my classmates recall our learners’ names a lot faster than me.
My mind wandered to this episode when I was following the Olympic Games in London, earlier this summer. I had been a bit down at first from the whole thing. The conspiracy junks had promised a Fake Alien Attack on the Olympic Stadium, and I had been anticipating such a spectacle for quite some time. From the start of the athletics programme I’d gone following events inside the astonishingly well-equipped oval. Some proper dates (prime numbers!) had passed and nothing was happening. As so often the theories turned out to be merely rumours.
I guess I was disappointed because I felt an alien attack was about the last option left to rescue us from austerity. Who’s going to save us now then?
Luckily, I had the growing wave of Britishness to witness, mostly on English websites and through the flash interviews for TVE by Izaskun Ruíz, famously corrected by Olympian Usain Bolt when she was interviewing him and he made her pay due respect to a national anthem sounding through the stadium during a medal ceremony.
After some early positive results a thrill seemed to take hold of the host country, a first glimpse of momentous glory to come. More wins followed indeed, some most incredible ones, according to BBC’s live blogging teams due to sportsmanship taken to the extreme; and should they lose, then often enough an American or an Aussie or a New-Zealander and even the odd South-African would stand up to take the crown. With the athletics gaps filled by runners from former plantation colonies like Jamaica and Kenya, it took the British little effort to turn the affair into a Common Wealth spectacle. And oh yes, some kids from China grabbed a good handful of gold, but the rest of the world were left to pick up the crumbles, finding very few chances to step upon the gift-wrapped chocolate box that went for a rostrum.
And so was the world to Britain a British world, a world where Britons shone, where people spoke English and loved everything British, from the opening ceremony where men dressed in black uprooted the pristine hill of the commoners and turned the place into an industrial wasteland, right through to the closing ceremony, where the stadium was lit up as a British crown with the whole world caught under it (the athletes), while looking up in shock and awe to the might of Albion. From a helicopter view the place was rocking under this pulsating red and blue crown, quite the party.
The London Games turned themselves into an utterly British affair and in a sense a white Anglo-Saxon celebration of Tonies and Waynes from all over the English speaking world, winning medals. There were colonials and immigrants involved, of course, but who were missing were the other whites and blacks.
Did it really have to be impossible to grant us a single serious thought?
To be fair, the English were the first to trade their initial rough welcoming of immigrants for a widely accepted commitment to making the most out of what history had presented them with. Other European countries followed in their wake, but certainly not all. Dearly beloved Spain is still a far cry from understanding its foreigners; though on an individual level positive steps are being taken.
The people who don’t mind the colour of your skin (which, lest we forget, is a very welcoming and comforting stance to vast amounts of people), do quite carefully pick at other aspects of your being. With being British the most important aspect of any being, those who aren’t will never stand a whiff of a chance. A full century after the collapse of their empire, the English still treat all of us who don’t speak their language natively as utter fools.
How to become British, then? Not by birth, certainly not by birth alone. Many English lead a life of very little Britishness, as a careful look at the troops parading the Spanish coast will testify. On the other hand, some brilliant immigrants manage to become utterly stiff-upper-lipped.
The trick, of course, is to be educated. One can only learn to be British. What to say, how to behave and, most importantly, what to think, it is basically a matter of remembering it all.
This summer was all about sports, so a light and easy to grasp version of how to be British was presented to citizens and cousins and the rest of the world. Showing loyalty was a vital first requirement, to anything British from tea to miniature Mini’s to being surprised by one’s own achievements. Lots of unknown contestants rose to the occasion and came afterwards explaining in stylish modern day English how they had never in their lives felt so strong before, some adding they probably would never feel again.
Other native English speakers joined in, sharing jokes with reporters while being lavishly praised by an endless army of pundits. We got to know their first names, and tweeters backed them to beat any species of others they might come up against.
A sense of entitlement by now had grabbed the nation. This was London 2012 and it was England finding new prominence as a modern global nation, home and haven to the brightest of the former empire.
Too bad the speakers of other languages had to be left out.
