Am I White?

Some reflections

In any given week, I see thousands of comments and posts in live chats and across social media. Usually there will be at least one person drawing attention to my mixed race and speculating on whether I ‘count’ as white. In terms of my skin colour, it is white — for most of my life, people upon learning my name have asked if I am Italian.  My mixed-race status seems to have brought me zero diversity points; although it is also true to say that the social justice crowd reserve special vehemence for, say, an Andy Ngo or even a Candice Owens. But this is not really an article about my skin colour, rather it is about the more vexed question of identity. This is an issue I have typically avoided until now. I thought I’d try to address it once and for all.

It is well known that I was born in Wales and that my mother is white and Welsh from a little coal mining town in the valleys. Lots of the men in her family were miners but on her dad’s side they were unusually entrepreneurial and owned, among other things, a newspaper route and a Fish & Chip shop. Equally well known, however, is that my father is from Iran. He arrived in the 1970s to study engineering and met my mother somewhere in Cardiff. In those days, and especially in the valleys, he must have seemed like an exotic character and since he worked as a marine engineer — which is to say on the ships — he represented round-the-world adventure to my mother, which is what she duly received. My father’s father had a very interesting life and, like me, wrote books. Many have suggested that, in my intellectualism, I ‘take after him’. But the upshot is that I am the son of a first generation immigrant to the UK with a British mother. How did this affect my identity? How did this affect the way I viewed identity, if at all?

Before continuing, whenever someone brings up my ethnicity, someone else will bring up bring up old Nazi talking points about Iran meaning, literally, ‘land of the Ayrans’. This was true enough for Hitler to declare Persians ‘pure Aryans’ and exclude them from the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. He even promised to return all Russian-held lands to Iran — old territories of the Persian Empire which rightfully belong to it — should he defeat the Soviets in the war. Iran, nonetheless, was officially neutral and the Allies — the U.K. and the Soviet Union that is — in a shameful and little known episode, invaded Iran in 1941 and overthrew Reza Shah to install what would be the Last Shah. When shitlibs talk about what led to the 1979 Revolution, they often point exclusively to the later overthrow (in 1953) of Mosaddegh, who wanted to nationalise the oil, but this earlier (disgraceful) invasion is forgotten. But let me just say that I do not lean on this idea that the Persians are the ‘real Aryans’ or connected to the ‘hyperboreans’ even as I recognise that the Persians are one of the world’s great civilisations with a proud history, tradition and literature going back thousands of years.

I feel deeply ambivalent about claiming received glory for things distant ancestors may have done. I’ve always thought it disingenuous and low status to claim that glory for oneself. We should respect our ancestors — in fact my first name, given to me by my grandfather — means something like ‘our ancestors’. We respect them and live in their shadow, stand on the shoulders of giants, but let us not pretend that we are them. I can no more claim the victories of Cyrus the Great for myself as I can the victories of Henry Tudor. I find it absurd to think in this way. This is a kind of cartoon nationalism. In my experience only Tory Boys imagine this is what nationalism is. None of my truly nationalist friends ever speak in this way. Our ancestors live in us but it’s not a low-rent game of glorified spectator sports whereby the Liverpool fan lords it over the Manchester United fan because some man wearing the right shirt scored a goal. To feel the call of a hundred generations in your bones is not some two-bit game of oneupmanship, it should be a profound and humbling realisation that you are part of something far bigger than yourself and far more significant than the trifles of the past few decades. In this sense, I feel blessed to be the product of not one, but two, of the great world civilisations, it would suck to be like — I dunno — Papuan or something.  No offence to them, but 60,000 years and they didn’t even manage the wheel, that’s not many Sid Meier Civ points, notwithstanding the geographic excuses made for this by Jared Diamond.

Anyway, first, I think it is worth recognising that the second generation immigrant has well known and peculiar characteristics. I’m not talking about a half caste like me, but a 100% second generation immigrant with two foreign parents. Typically, such a person can go one of two ways. The first is that they REJECT their parents’ identity in a bid to EMBRACE the identity of the host nation. Most first generation immigrants get profoundly nostalgic for their home nation and it makes them, strangely, more nationalistic for their home nation than they would otherwise be. Obviously I’ve seen this with my dad who seems to become more Iranian over time, not less, despite the fact he’s been here since 1977! I’ve seen this first hand with Indians too, for example. India becomes a kind of obsession for them. But it’s not the India of now, it’s a romantic version of the India of their childhood. The home nation stays frozen as they remember it. So too with British ex-pats I am told. But, for their kids, this becomes so incessant as to become a kind of embarrassment and they go the other way. They will roll their eyes at being made to go and do Indian festivals and so on and instead lean heavily into adopting the customs and habits of the home nation. I saw this first hand: some of the hardest core Wales rugby fans you’ll come across, draped in the red dragon, are Indian. You’ll see this in England or Scotland too. Sometimes it comes in the form of the Union Flag. Leaning heavily into the adopted nation is a survival strategy for second generation immigrants. Their parents will mourn the loss of their own identity as they see their kids assimilated into the host nation: this is the price they pay for migration. Now the other way the kids can go is to do the opposite: to lean into their parents’ identity. I’ve met both Indians and Iranians who have done this. Some even going so far as to affect an Indian accent despite being born and brought up in Birmingham or wherever. For these kids, their ethnic identity makes them special and different and they lean into that difference. Maybe to please their parents, maybe to make themselves feel good, who knows.

Now, having seen such things up close, my instinct has always been to recoil. I recoil from the overcompensatory efforts to embrace the Welsh flag as much as I recoil from the wholesale embrace of Iranian identity and culture. In both cases, it felt fake and contrived to me: pretentious and somehow like a form of badge wearing. Perhaps it is because these modern national identities are in themselves fake and have the air of the tourist shop about them; to me they feel like empty symbols stripped of their original meaning and injected with poz. The Welsh flag or Union flag come to mean something like ‘liberal values’ and — in the context of the UK at least — Iranian culture and its iconography, separated from its proper contexts, comes to mean something like ‘a celebration of diversity’. In both cases, you’re getting a Mickey Mouse theme park version of the thing itself — far removed from anything real.

But at the same time I think it is something deeper in myself too. I have always been very non-groupish and sought to stand alone. If the crowd go one way, I tend to go the other. I have speculated to myself whether this is the result of being of mixed race, but then my brother is the total opposite: he leans into both identities with relish. Loves our Welsh family and has much closer relations with them, but then he’s like that with the Iranians too. He’s just more social and family-oriented than I am. I find Iranians loud and obnoxious a lot of the time. I feel quite far removed from my relatives from the Welsh valleys, separated by such vectors as class and education. I hate amateur psychoanalysis, but I’ve always thought that my brother wants and thrives on unconditional love and acceptance. He finds that with family and so is in his element. I don’t have that yearning and so don’t look for it. I’m much more likely to get fed up and seek to escape. Two days spent with my folks, as much as I love them, and I need a week to recover from the ordeal. I’ve never felt like I’ve ‘belonged’ anywhere, but at the same time I don’t seek to belong, I don’t want to belong. When they talk about the atomised, deracinated postmodern person, that is me. As Daniel Plainview said, ‘I hate most people.’

Most of my life has been a kind of ceaseless search for meaning and authenticity of some kind: in a manner that is both rootless and nomadic. Even now my heroes are all idiosyncratic Gen X nomads and eccentrics such as the bizarre Bronze Age Pervert, the Shaman Thomas777, the despised pro-wrestling heel Dickie Spencer and many more along these lines. I love unique people and hate NPCs. I find myself wondering in dark moments: is this because my father descended from a Nomadic tribe? (You can watch some pretty good documentaries on them like The People of the Wind.) Is my tendency towards binary ‘black-and-white’ thinking a vestige of Zoroastrian dualism? Is my proneness to dark melancholy and black pilling some manifestation of the Welsh poetic soul a la Dylan Thomas? Such fleeting thoughts feel like grandiose pretension, but I have found out the hard way that you cannot construct an identity out of your record collection or your taste in films or your interests. This is modern hubris: it’s the Faustian spirit, the Renaissance humanist idea that one can forge yourself, construct yourself, rather than the idea that you are the result of the immutable characteristics of blood and rank manifested in and underpinned by faith which is, in the end, simply an expression of bio-spirit. Low IQ grugs think I rail against Americanism ‘because I’m Iranian’, but in fact it is because I’ve spent most of my life utterly seduced by the American mythos. In such a mythos, a man stands alone — John Wayne — and forges his own destiny in this world. Maybe it’s not surprising that the mongrel immigrant nation — the USA — would have such a mythos. As appealing as this is to a misanthrope like me, I can see how dangerous and civilisation-destroying it is to the collective. There need to be hard and groupish checks against the Daniel Plainviews of this world. In-group preference, much as it seems to be missing in me personally, is vital to determining friend and enemy. I maintain my dream of being a strange and antisocial loner in a completely cohesive village. I believe we disagreeable loners have our place but only in a society that has healthy and natural established norms.

Let me return now to the question: am I white? To the extent that whiteness is a social construction, I don’t believe my ambivalent feelings towards the group are a unique result of my mixed race. I believe that many white men share exactly my ambivalent feelings because we are all children of these ashes born and brought up in a time that taught us to be suspicious of everything. In other words, I do not feel this ambivalence because I’m mixed race, I feel it because I was born and brought up in Britain. Turns out a steady diet of He-Man, Thundercats and Danger Mouse cannot substitute for a culture. Television and mass media are not culture and cannot be culture: they only serve to alienate and unmoor you from authentic, real, lived experience. The close-knit working-class community in which my mother grew up had already been smashed to pieces by deindustrialisation by the time I was born. In a way, the working classes became refugees within their own nation. This is why men who supported Enoch Powell to this day maintain nothing but hatred for Mrs Thatcher. To be spiritually ‘white’ in 2022 is to be deracinated and atomised and dislocated from any sense of belonging. This is why we fight: because we have been denied even the possibility of being rooted in a world that is fake and gay. I see my fight as the same fight as Fróði Midjord’s ultimately: the return of the real. Even if Fróði’s ancestors were Vikings and mine were nomads the from the Zagros mountains or Welsh druids, I feel like our struggle is the same. To the extent that whiteness is defined by race, then it’s a more mundane biological question. Such matters are of no great interest to me. We are led by people who imagine that if they create mixed race people like me, they somehow solve the ‘problem’ of human tribalism. They imagine that in my very embodiment, it should be impossible to turn against the regime of equality, diversity and inclusion. They are wrong. We live in the anomaly and exception of history: never forget that this is neither natural nor normal. Sooner or later, a normal state of affairs will return: our successors won’t second guess their identity like we do, they’ll know it as something real, lived and authentic. I believe this to be utterly beyond us here and now — it’s definitely beyond me — but like, I say, this is why we fight.

PS. It may be amusing for some longer time followers to know that when I told my wife I was writing an article called ‘Am I white?’, she laughed and said ‘no, but I am!’ That’s another way of looking at it, I suppose …