Established 2005 Registered Charity No. 1110656

Scottish Charity Register No. SC043760

current issue

October – November 2026 : Express yourself READ ONLINE

RECENT TWEETS

Identity crisis

October 01 2026
Tian, pen on paper. © Antropia Tian, pen on paper. © Antropia

On identity, homelessness, race and a call to challenge narratives and value your voice. By André Rostant

According to a 2026 UK Government report, black people are four times more likely to be homeless and are more likely to be in temporary accommodation – and for longer. But need this concern presenter Andi Peters, whom comedian and actor Myriam Margolyes described on national television as not entirely black, but “high yellow”? Now that she is returned to England, will it affect Meghan Markle, who says she only started being treated as black after she went out with Prince Harry, thickening, according to Rachel Johnson, “… watery, thin blue blood… pale skin and ginger hair with some rich and exotic DNA”? 



What is going on?


There has always been a politics of identity, because people have always been treated differently according to their individual traits and qualities, acquired or inherent. We happen to live in a time when claiming and challenging the authenticity of somebody’s identity has all but eclipsed objective fact as the way to win arguments, by driving a narrative. And we are each part of many narratives: stories society and the system weave around us; stories we tell about ourselves; the stories of friends and acquaintances.


I am a homeless, white-looking 60-something, bald, male Londoner, raised in a diverse, largely immigrant environment. My mother was Irish, father Trinidadian, which I typically have to explain is not Jamaican. I am often obliged to describe what shade of black my father was. But am I homeless in more than one way? My identity is somewhat in the lost and found. My siblings and I used to sing Irish music in pubs, being ‘plastic paddies’ to purists who laud old Irish republican heroes like James Connolly. Yet Connolly, born and raised in Scotland, was himself nearly 30 before he moved to Ireland.


I sing calypso. When I first started, a black fellow calypsonian expressed delight at seeing a white man so enthused about ‘our’ culture. His presumption meant no harm. Myriam too, meant no harm by her ignorant presumption and apparent attempt to sound ‘hip’, when she clumsily employed a deeply racist term. Both were struggling to reconcile what they perceived as narrative anomalies: Andi was not supposed to have a BBC accent while looking black, and who am I to look white and sing Caribbean songs?


The discourse of Britain typically includes themes of race. One recent fable has the Big Issue sold by gangs of Roma ‘pretending’ to be homeless. Yet Roma are consistently discriminated against and are, in fact, disproportionately affected by homelessness. Jewish people have been subjected to horrific prejudice for centuries. Lately their story has been woven into a seemingly intractable conflation of politics and contested authenticity. Meanwhile, rising populist party Reform has pledged to deport over half a million people should it gain power. A poll shows 54% of the party’s overwhelmingly white voters are eager for those deportees to be non-white foreign-born British citizens, and for them to be forcibly sent ‘home’, while 22% would also send away second generation non-white British citizens, of whom I am one…


Might I have a get-out? If Reform were to check whiteness in the same way as Apartheid South Africa, Andi would definitely be considered black – not on colour alone, but additionally because he would fail the pencil test: there is no way a pencil would roll out of his hair. Even when I had hair, it was wavy rather than curly. However, if they take their cue from segregated southern US States, I will be caught under the ‘one-drop’ rule, and deported.


Myriam would certainly have been determined to be Jewish under the Nazi Mischling Test.


How painful is it to be subsumed into an evil racist narrative? The thing is, if people want a group to hate, they find ways, however bizarre, irrational, arbitrary, of populating that group. Those ways will always arise from a narrative. Who has power over that narrative matters profoundly.


Reform’s spiel is that white British people are disinherited and robbed of their voice by a liberal metropolitan elite that uses racial dilution as its weapon. This elite is chimeric. It would include Myriam, myself and Andi because we are either educated, inordinately articulate or somehow not ordinary enough. We would also all find ourselves part of the racial dilution, though.


And I can hear you asking who is this guy to make such bold, sweeping pronouncements and why does this article seem to be all about him? It is not. It is about you. You have a voice in determining whether Britain’s homeless crisis and immigration are the same tale, or whether a different narrative can be asserted.


Do not let anybody else write you out of your own story. 

< Safe spaces Try to be yourself >
October – November 2026 : Express yourself

CONTENTS

BACK ISSUES
BACK TO PAGE TOP