Opinion

I fear the growing nastiness that Brexit is ushering in

An elderly relative is asked if she lives in a mud hut, as hearts harden and minds close. Is this what the future holds?

At the beginning of January, a few weeks before the UK’s departure from the European Union, I had a conversation with a black relative who never talks about race. And when I say never, I mean never. She is the type of voter whom the Conservative party would largely regard as one of their traditional supporters: an older, affluent member of the professional class, who believes that any amount of racial discrimination can be overcome through focus and hard work. She was the one who brought up the subject, and her voice carried an unusual level of distress. She had gone into work one morning, where she has a senior role, and as she walked past reception a couple of the youngest staff members there called over to her, since one of them had an enquiry for her. When you go back to Africa to see your family, they asked, do you all live in those mud huts with the thatched roofs?

She talked about the tone with which her colleagues spoke, the clear mockery, the wink-wink association of blackness with a certain lack of “civilisation”. We don’t really discuss politics, and so I was surprised when she drew a direct link between their comments and the arrival of Brexit. People feel that they can say these things now, she said.

I live in Germany, and have done since 2014. Though it is no racial utopia, it is a country where I have made a fulfilling new life and met some of my very best friends. One of the reasons I left England was that I had grown weary of the racism that people of colour can never fully escape, no matter what they achieve there. I was tired of just brushing it off. Look at these headlines, I told my family members. Look at the way they talk about immigrants, like we are dirt they are trying to scrape from their shoes. We came here as refugees, we kept our heads down, we worked hard and they still hate us.

The older I get, the less I dismiss racist remarks as mere ignorance. I used to do that, but seeing the devastation of people you love hardens the heart. Now I regard so-called “ignorant” comments as a threat. I do not believe those colleagues were open to dialogue with my relative. They were trying to put that uppity black woman back in her place and, judging by the look in her eyes as she told me the story, they succeeded.

My family and I don’t discuss the referendum result very much. Several of them, dissatisfied with the state of things in the country, voted to leave the EU. A few months later, one of them told me with sadness that many of her Polish friends had gone back to mainland Europe. They had done so not because of the uncertainty over their jobs that Brexit had created, but because they felt unwelcome. I gently told my relative that I was very worried Brexit was not the answer to the questions she was asking of modern Britain.

I told her gently because although I voted to remain, I am not, as a wealthy Brexiter barked in my direction recently, a remainer. It is not a tribal identity that I have taken up in response to the xenophobic rants of Nigel Farage – who, I am desperately assured, does not represent our country, but whose sentiments were alive and well in the mouths of those work colleagues. It is a political position I took because I think it is a glorious and beautiful right to get up and move to a place where you might find greater happiness or safety. I took it because my suspicion, later confirmed by data, was that the leave vote was far too tainted by a hostility towards people of colour.

It didn’t surprise me that, when the remain campaign made its case in 2016, it focused so little upon the happiness that its citizens could find abroad. That’s because the country of my birth doesn’t really care about immigrants; we are useful as economic units and little more. Several of my British friends here in Germany, disgusted by the post-referendum fallout, have said they will never return to live there.

That’s why, as the UK prepares to leave the EU, I feel sorry. Not for myself; though I have taken a financial hit, I will find my way somehow. I feel sorry for those younger people who will not be able to get up and go with the same ease I did, to live and to befriend and to love. Finally, I feel sorry for my elderly relative, who in her later years has to endure a growing nastiness in the land to which she has given so much. She doesn’t deserve that: but it is her reality, and unfortunately I think it is our future.

• Musa Okwonga is a poet, journalist and musician