Guide to British Assimilation
- Holly G
- Mar 18
- 5 min read
This piece below was originally published to YouthTheGap’s inaugural zine, “Our Flag, Our People”. The editor, Dyar, together with his co-leader Kaia decided to use this piece as a way to facilitate the presentation of the other pieces, moving through the themes of nationalism and British culture. So each item in the list ‘introduces’ the work of the other artists and writers. As it is spread throughout the zine, I am posting it here as well so it can be read as one entire narrative.
To read, download, and share the zine, please check out the original here.
I am so grateful for the opportunity to work and create with this organization again. To see my other collaboration with YouthTheGap, check out my post, Reflections on Resilience.
Guide to British Assimilation
When you move back to the United Kingdom after 14 years in the United States of America, you will realize a few things:
It has been affirmed now: Europe is not a magical utopia separate from the rest of the world. In fact, the UK has a mountain of issues equal to if not surpassing the US, that it is struggling to address. Everything is expensive: public services are still falling apart, many children are still hungry, and many people are without work or without housing. While there is a small difference in severity (the US will always proudly hold the trophy for ‘doing the most’), the core issues are the same.
Your re-entry into the country, and all the benefits that come with it, is smoother than normal, all because of a few years you spent here you barely even remember. For many others it is much more difficult.
You can sympathize with them. You and your family spent years navigating the American naturalization process. It is long, inconvenient, arduous, often nonsensical at many points, and at times hostile and dehumanizing. And that’s if you have a ‘good’ passport.
Navigating busy streets feels like driving along a route you know by muscle memory. Much of the urban noise sounds like a song you used to play on repeat. Even many of the archetypes you meet are the same. Just like at home, there’s a guy always hanging outside the corner store – except here it’s an off-license and he’s smoking a rollie instead of a straight. The waitress at your favorite cafe smiles and asks you what you would like, but now she says “You all right?” instead of “How you doing?” Apart from a few discrepancies, for a few moments you can convince yourself there is barely any difference at all.
Working in a pub will give you an in-depth syllabus of the best and worst of British culture.
You will watch grown men drink beer out of their shoes, throw pint glasses in the air for a goal, and get so drunk they almost topple over themselves into the Thames on a Tuesday night.
You will also see best friends unite around a Christmas party dinner table, plates and puddings pushed aside to make room for presents. You will see actual successful first dates, despite the fact that one lives in Richmond and the other lives in Romford. You will see kids run screaming around the tables, stealing little sips of the leftover lager long since gone flat. (American parents would have a fit if their kids were in such close proximity to alcohol being served).
Compared to how sensationalized political discourse can be in America, the UK is quite tame. However, both governments function about as well as a car running with a gutted engine.
You will try to engage in your civic duty with hope – at least there is more than one party to choose from now. But why does your vote still feel like a whisper in the wind?
The money you pay in taxes is still used to fund wars abroad. The elected officials continue to lie and distract from the blatant injustice. The elites are tangled in the same web of sordid crimes that give even the most staunch conspiracy theorists enough to choke on. It is not identical to the severely over-inflated, bloated and boastful pride that has become endemic to the United States. Instead it hides and denies itself, disguised in another image of power.
Brits can dissect your accent and run it through an automatic psychological algorithm built over the course of generations that is able to determine which town you’re from, which school you went to, what your parents do for work, and any and all details of your social class. If your accent is a little difficult to place – like an awkward, indecisive mix of American and British – then they will pursue the investigation further. Every time you begin a conversation with someone new they will interrupt you to ask: “Where are you from?”
This question can actually mean several things:
Where were you actually born? (Answer: nationality)
Where were you raised? (Answer: where you lived growing up)
Where are your parents from? (Answer: ethnicity)
It will take a few tries and several months to be able to more accurately understand which one people are asking you.
Coming from America, this will strike you as extremely odd. In the US, you are American first, and everything else comes second. This is in stark contrast to the diasporas in England, all of which hold their cultural heritage very close, prioritizing it above being “English”.
Many black British people will not understand what you could never forget: the United States was a country built upon a highly efficient and extremely violent system of exploitation for labor and profit. Any and all connections black Americans had to their original cultures, languages, and practices were erased – that was integral for getting this industry to work.
Your relationship to your mixed heritage has been irrevocably changed by this conflation of ideologies. You are still not quite sure what you have a right to claim, what is yours to carry.
A cognitive dissonance can occur when your identity does not completely match with your surrounding environment. Despite this, you will seem to acclimate to life in London quicker than any other city you’ve lived in. Perhaps this is due to a secret familiarity in your blood, a newly awakened sense in your bones, a psychic bond between you and the soil beneath the concrete where you were born. Or maybe you’re just not a kid anymore.
Your identity is composed of pieces you have collected over time and across borders that simply do not fit together.
Like the membranes of a cell or the skin of an organ, national identity is integral to maintaining the form of the person. But what happens when this membrane is perforated with holes? Our nations try to construct a collective identity using consistent messaging, but if these are interrupted…
Like when people move and migrate. When love sparks across borders. When a child is born between two cultures. It is proof that the egos of these nations are built on nothing but centuries upon centuries of carefully constructed lies.
…the biases are challenged. Assumptions are subverted. Things given as fact can be questioned. You begin to put the pieces together on your own even if they contradict what everyone around you is saying.
You will slowly begin to discover that you can claim what you would like and leave the rest. There is no world in which you do not fit in the context of the national identity, as you are inherently a part of it.
I hope you enjoyed reading this piece! I am so proud of how it turned out.
This piece is part of a larger collaboration, so please don’t forget to read the zine in its entirety, which can be found here.
I hope this work continues to spread and sparks conversation.
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