‘Where are you from?’: a question of race and identity

I turned on the radio last Wednesday, and the lead story on BBC News was “about how some woman had asked another woman where she was from”, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. There were many people commenting on this incident, most of them “beside themselves” with rage.

It seems that at a Buckingham Palace event, the first woman, 83-year-old royal courtier Lady Susan Hussey, had asked the second, Ngozi Fulani, who runs the domestic violence charity Sistah Space, where she was from; and had persisted with this line of questioning, dissatisfied with the answer that she was from Hackney.

Was this insensitive? Yes. Was this racist? Perhaps. But it seems odd that the story led the national news for two days, and that Hussey had to step down from her honorary role after 60 years of service to the royal household; Prince William, her godson, even said he was “disappointed”. It all suggests this country is “a little deranged” by the issue of race.

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Let me spell this out, said Trevor Phillips in The Times. People from ethnic minorities are “regularly and tiresomely asked versions of this question”. Behind it is the implication that their appearance and British identity are incompatible. Hussey made this very clear to Fulani, saying: “No, but where do you really come from? Where do your people come from?”

Even more explicitly, she asked: “No, what part of Africa are you from?” That is “unambiguously racist”. And it’s unbelievable that a senior courtier like Hussey – a Lady of the Household and close friend of the late Queen, nicknamed “No. 1 Head Girl” by staff – didn’t realise this.

Terrible timing for the royals

The story continues to “reverberate”, said The Independent, because it suggests that attitudes in inner royal circles “have yet to catch up fully with where they should be”. It also suggests “that Meghan Markle may have been on to something” when she alleged that there was racism in the royal family. This story could hardly have come at a worse time for the royals, with Harry and Meghan’s Netflix documentary exposé coming out this week.

I still don’t believe Hussey’s words carried “any iniquitous meaning”, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. Fulani is British-born, of Caribbean parents, but has embraced her African heritage. At the event, she was wearing African costume; her name tag bore her adopted name. “If I walked into a party wearing a kilt and sporran, and a name badge saying ‘Hamish McTavish’, I could not reasonably take offence if someone asked me from which part of the Highlands I hailed.”

Of course people can ask about others’ backgrounds, said The Times. But such questions can be “benign or sinister”, depending on context. If “posed clumsily, doggedly and with a degree of condescension, as in this case”, they will seem rude and aggressive. It was right that Hussey stepped down; but she should not be publicly pilloried. “A sense of proportion must be maintained.”