Being Brown in a Black and White World: Conversations for Leaders about Race, Racism and Belonging

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In 2005, he was chosen by the Royal College of General Practitioners to deliver the annual William Pickles lecture, and he chose to give a searing critique of the inimical atmosphere he and thousands of other South Asian doctors faced when arriving in the UK. In 1950s (and later) South Africa, the "brown people" were the Coloureds, referring to those born of multiracial sexual unions out of wedlock. But as the colonial project waned, staffing shortages meant that Indians were gradually able to train and work as doctors, though always having lower status than their white counterparts. That we live in an era so tolerant that even formerly colonised people can now take up work in the old imperial motherland?

Lord Taylor of Harlow said as much, in a House of Lords debate in 1961: “[Overseas doctors] are here to provide pairs of hands in the rottenest, worst hospitals in the country because there is nobody else to do it.Meanwhile, ravaged by two world wars, Britain was left with a huge hole to fill in its workforce and the former colonies became the obvious source of plentiful, cheap labour to rebuild the old imperial metropole. I wish someone had understood and validated both my fear and my desire to emulate whiteness—and I also wish that I had had the social safety of other options besides blending in or being an outcast. Born in 1922, at the height of the British Empire, into a family of land-owning farmers in the fertile northeastern state of Bihar, my grandfather was the first member of our family to be educated – first, in a Christian missionary school, and then a medical school run by the British.

I wanted no part of the Indian community my parents were peripherally involved in and looked the other way when I saw Indian kids in public. This digital-abuse was magnified by real-world incidents including being told, “ we’ve won, f—k off…” whilst sat in my car at a traffic light… and whilst on a walk with my wife being taunted with shouts of, “ do you have a passport? Because they know it is dangerous to be Black in America because racist Americans see Blacks as dangerous. We are one big, beautiful, dysfunctional and incredible family, tearing itself apart over something as inconsequential as our hue.

At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. This feeling was tempered by my own professional desire to treat all patients alike, regardless of their background. His trajectory, from the son of farmers to a Professor of Surgery, owed a lot to his Anglophile early education, and would have been unimaginable for an Indian just one generation earlier.