We cope with the micro slights and othering. But what are we to do when openly racist attitudes are exploited for political gain?
There is something particularly grotesque about a golliwog. It’s the smile, I think, its teeth frozen in a rictus grin behind the exaggerated redness of the lips. The golliwog seems to say that not only is it OK to “minstrelise” black people and display them as dolls, but that they should enjoy it.
That smile is the price of entry into white British society, of acceptance and integration into workplaces, social groups and our wider politics and culture. The golliwog, despite it being a relic of the past, is in fact a symbol of the present. You are only allowed visibility as a black figure if you’re grateful, permanently smiling in all circumstances. Your status, as someone who is part of Britain and therefore gets a say in how they experience it, is conditional on the fact that you must never suggest that the country is not quite so hospitable to you sometimes. Ideally, if you want social and professional mobility as a person of colour, if you want to be moved from the bottom shelf to a position of higher prominence, you must go further. You must grin harder and always maintain that Britain is, in fact, a race-relations utopia, even as things regularly happen that prove that we are far from that.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
