Kemi Badenoch gets it wrong, again

Had I seen those sentences outside of their original context, they would have given me hope for the future of the right. Sadly, they were inescapably part of a longer piece, screechingly headlined “Why SHOULD my mixed race children have to pick a side – just to satisfy the identity politics zealots tearing our system asunder?”

Why indeed? That choice is, to the best of my knowledge, not being imposed on anyone with a complex identity. If anything, I think I can go further: as a mixed race person and a second generation Arab immigrant, moving from France to Britain did wonders for my sense of self.

Of course, you could argue that describing a country as “more culturally open to minorities than the French” is akin to saying that a newspaper isn’t as preachy as the Guardian. There are low bars and even lower ones.

Still, it took me years of living in London to begin calling myself French-Moroccan, when it had always been quite a thorny topic for me. I am not a Muslim and my name sounds entirely European. Due to the vagaries of the human genome, there is no way of telling, when looking at my face, that my mother’s skin is brown and her hair is thick, black and tightly curled.

You also can’t tell that I’ve spent a lot of time in Marrakech, where I learnt to find the nightly calls to prayer so soothing that I sometimes listen to it on YouTube when I’m too fretful to sleep. Unless I choose to mention it, you couldn’t possibly guess that one of my favourite comfort foods is msemmen, which my grandmother would make us for breakfast. 

My Arab heritage is a part of me but, because I didn’t look or sound the part in France, I thought it best to simply sweep that side of me under the carpet. There was too much baggage attached to that identity, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it. In Britain, however, things felt different.

I moved here and found that people would talk about their identities with an ease and a pride I’d never experienced. I wondered, sometimes, if that was because it’d always been part of the deal on these islands. This is a country of four nations; your DNA may be entirely British, but that doesn’t mean you only have to be one thing.

There are proud Scots and English people who don’t care much about being English; some Welsh transplants who happily left the valleys behind, and others whose Welshness still drips from every pore. 

The concept of identity has long been baked into people’s personalities here, meaning that immigrants having a complex relationship with their sense of belonging isn’t anything new. As a result, it is fine for me to talk about being both French and Moroccan, as well as a Londoner. 

I also do not believe that this will change anytime soon, no matter what Badenoch or anyone else says. Her children are lucky to have a British father and a British-Nigerian mother; I don’t know them, but can imagine that it will only make their lives richer. 

Crucially, I am also certain that they will be able to define themselves in whichever way they choose, and no-one will bat an eyelid. That’s one of the really great things about living in Britain, so why wouldn’t you celebrate it?