Society
The New Statesman Profile - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Published 23 October 2000
She is everywhere, this self-proclaimed champion of the ethnic minorities. But can she really speak for them? Yasmin Alibhai-Brown profiled
There was one thing you could have bet on about the commission behind the Runnymede report - the one which had those challenging ideas about Britishness - before you ever saw its conclusions. Its brief was to consider matters of race, religion and ethnicity: ergo, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown would be a member. And sure enough, there she was.
In the curious little world from which commissions are drawn, there is a golden circle in which journalism leads to quangos, which lead to think-tanks, which lead to radio and telly punditry, which leads to newspaper columns which lead to a curious kind of public status which in turn translates into books and further quangos, until the unstoppable momentum of the whole cycle brings the lucky pundit to a seat in the House of Lords, without ever having troubled an electorate.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has yet to get a peerage (although it can only be a matter of time), but there is no question that she is everywhere. She has written books on the subject of race and identity, with titles like No Place Like Home, Who Do We Think We Are? and True Colours (which was launched by the Prime Minister). She is a member of the Home Office Race Forum, she advises assorted institutions on race matters, writes a column for the Independent, contributes to the Guardian, is a familiar voice on Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live, a panellist on Question Time. In terms of reach and ubiquity, she's in the Simon Jenkins league.
Whenever race is an issue - in the wake of the Macpherson report, say - she, like a human inverse of Macavity the Mystery Cat, will be there: in the case in question, on a programme on Radio 4, Beyond Black and White. Most recently, she was appointed research fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute, a kind of foreign affairs Demos, on the back of which she addressed a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference on the subject of "After Multiculturalism".
It is difficult to list the activities of this busy bee; more interesting to speculate why it is that she occupies the position that she does. For that, there is only one possible answer: she is Asian and she is a woman. Given the sheer dearth of Asians on the telly, the radio and in news-papers, and the want of imagination on the part of commissioning editors, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is the easy answer to the dilemma arising in features conferences in several media: where to find a member of the black-and-Asian community - they don't much distinguish between the two - to give a non-white view of the world.
Some of the most distinguished black-and-Asian women (I know, I know, they're not the same, but like Alibhai-Brown, I try to find some way round the formula "ethnic minority") in British public life, like Baroness Scotland, have real jobs to do; credibly representative bodies such as the Muslim Council of Britain do not often impinge on the imagination of talent scouts for Question Time and Any Questions. Which leaves us by default with the ever-willing Alibhai-Brown. It is quite tragic to think that a woman who has spent so much labour deconstructing monolithic, ethnic and sexual identities should owe her career to ethnicity and sex.
It should be said that Alibhai-Brown, 50, has written and spoken extensively about the dearth of non-white broadcasters. Addressing the BBC governors' seminar on "cultural diversity" this summer, she complained: "Actually, one of the most irritating things I have to go through almost every day of my life is people saying to me: 'Oh you're always on Radio 4', and I have to say to them: 'You think I'm always on Radio 4, because there are so few of us who actually are on Radio 4, so you do remember'."
Well, her interlocutors are not in fact imagining things: as the Voice of Multiculturalism, Miss Alibhai-Brown is ever with us. Although, as the Sunday Telegraph's admirable radio critic, David Sexton, remarked: "Whatever she's saying, Yasmin has a pernickety, schoolmarmish way of talking that makes even the mildest proposition hard to take."
I have only had the pleasure of meeting the lady once, and she seemed perfectly nice. A Ugandan Asian, she came to Britain in 1972 as a result of the persecution of Idi Amin. She completed an MPhil at Oxford in Victorian studies. When her son was ten, her husband left her for a younger woman, an act of betrayal that was particularly grievous, she says, because of their shared memories of life in Uganda. She met her second husband, an Englishman called Colin, on a train to Brighton. They have a seven-year-old daughter.
But should the mere fact of being Ugandan Asian be enough to qualify her as the catch-all spokeswoman for ethnic minorities? One distinguished Muslim put the problem bluntly: "She speaks as a Muslim, but she knows nothing at all about Islam. Her knowledge is zero . . . She is not very much part of the Muslim community. She's Ismaili, and I don't know whether they're keen on her. She has no constituency as such. And she's not very clever. What really annoys me is her line: 'Just look at me, I'm Asian.' It just doesn't count. There are millions of Asians: you have to have something profound to say. She's a very confused individual."
For Christians, the differences between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims and the Ismaili community - followers of the Aga Khan - are not well known. But for many Muslims, an Ismaili is not a representative Islamic spokeswoman - yet being a Muslim is one of the identities that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown talks about most. (Though there are, of course, others. In one interview, she remarked: "At different times of day, I'm a Muslim, a woman, Asian, black, left wing." Exhausting.)
Actually, her notion of Islam is alarmingly all-embracing. In a piece about a visit to Venice she talked about her pleasure, as a Muslim, in seeing Muslims depicted in Venetian art - suggesting that the representations of the Ottoman Turks can be blithely appropriated by a Ugandan Asian by virtue of sharing Islam with il porto grande of that era. Far more problematically, she made the same mistake in the Kosovo conflict. She was a supporter of Nato intervention, for the simple reason that she is a Muslim and so, she thought, were all the Kosovo Albanians. "It as if an invisible thread binds us unexpectedly and powerfully to an emerging pan-Islamic identity . . . As we watch Kosovar children weeping on screen, these become our children, because they are Muslim."
For someone who routinely condemns sweeping ethnic and religious designations, it is remarkable that she seems unaware of the nature of most Muslims in ex-Yugoslavia (she includes Bosnia in her solidarity). The war was not about religion; the primary identification of Kosovar Albanians is national, not religious; and in Bosnia the government spent the entire war complaining that its army was designated by European commentators as "Muslim".
But in general, her world-view is benign to the point of banality. One is grateful that she speaks out on the question of forced marriage (she is against), but it is a little alarming that this should be presented (by Alibhai-Brown) as a courageous thing to do.
How much influence does she exercise? Discussing the question of black representation within the Labour Party, in an interview with an American journal, she remarks cheerfully: "I have actually gained a huge amount of influence in the inner [Labour] sanctums, as well as in terms of credibility within the communities where I spend a lot of time."
Indeed, she has criticised British feminists on the grounds that "they are not found in the streets of Bradford or Brixton, nor are they engaged in continuous and deep conversations with Indian, African, Arab and other women living in their own back streets". Unlike, one understands, Alibhai-Brown. Her solidarity with oppressed humanity is admirable: "I am a woman," she pronounced in one newspaper column: "I love being a woman. I hurt when women are denied rights and I spend much of my time battling against these injustices."
Clarity, however, is not perhaps her strong point. It is, at times, difficult to identify precisely what her agenda is, beyond a commitment to having more non-whites on Radio 4 and in the Civil Service; an insistence that all ethnic identities are complex (as she is fond of pointing out: "Anglo-Saxon is a hyphenated identity"); strong feelings about colonialism; and an antipathy to Conservatism. Her most interesting and distinctive view is that the Commission for Racial Equality should be subsumed in a general Human Rights Commission, which would comprehend discrimination based on age, sex and religion, as well as race.
Does she think that Britain is a racist society? Well, in the Daily Mail, she writes: "Today I rise - an unexpected warrior fighting for that threatened British national identity. When I arrived here in 1972, racist abuse . . . was a fact of life. Thirty years on, I am a citizen of a multi-ethnic country which appears at ease with itself." Yet much of her book Who Do We Think We Are? is spent identifying the origins of British racism and ends up praising the Macpherson report for identifying institutional racism in Britain.
Actually, there are a number of subjects where one could agree with Alibhai-Brown, indeed, where it would be hard not to. The problem is not that she is malign - just tiresome, repetitive, sometimes ignorant and alarmingly unrepresentative. She flourishes in a society that has elevated pundits to positions of power, that allows influence to be wielded by bodies whose members are appointed and not elected and that takes token representation of ethnic and religious groups in quangos and on telly as a substitute for their real participation in public affairs.
Who Do We Think We Are? she asks. Who Does She Think She Is? would be more like it.
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