A few years ago, I was visiting a school on the outskirts of London to speak to some sixth-formers about identity and the role it plays in our mental health. Afterwards, a young man asked if I minded him asking a question in private that wasn’t “strictly relevant”.

This happens to me on a regular basis and it always intrigues me and makes me feel privileged - because I take it to mean that the student in question trusts me enough to broach a topic that might have been playing on their mind for some time.

The lad proceeded to tell me about a citizenship lesson conducted by his religious studies teacher the week before. In it, they were discussing British values - whether they could be articulated definitively and what the class believed they should constitute. The teacher had then pointed at this young man, apparently apropos of nothing, and asked him what he felt he should be doing to “integrate” into British culture.

The pupil I was speaking to was not an immigrant. If he had been, there were several reasons why his teacher’s comment might have been considered insensitive. The fact that he had been born and raised only a few miles down the road from his school, had attended it since he was in Year 9 and the only thing that distinguished him from his classmates was the colour of his skin (he was of African descent in a predominantly caucasian environment) took the incident into the realms of totally outrageous.

He asked me what I thought and whether he had grounds to make a complaint, but overwhelmingly he seemed, understandably, just confused. It struck me that it must be bewildering, to have spent your entire life in a place, to consider yourself not particularly different from anyone else who lives there and then to have some imagined obligation placed upon you to “integrate” into your community.

He was wrong when he began by saying the anecdote wasn’t “strictly relevant” - it had everything to do with his identity and his sense of self.

The fact that this particular conversation has stuck so vividly in my mind is a testament to how rarely I hear this kind of thing. I’m pretty confident most teachers reading this wouldn’t conduct themselves in this way in their wildest dreams.

Yet, outside of the traditionally liberal environment of education, the idea that ethnic and religious minorities should make “more effort” to “integrate” is an opinion I hear often. It’s a viewpoint that has been thrust once again into the limelight since last Monday’s tragic events in Manchester, when the usual suspects took it upon themselves to blame the incident on the “Muslim community”.

Suspicion and mistrust

The more fraught our sociopolitical climate, the more “othering” is done. As part of a mixed-race family, this is something I have experienced. Sometimes the suspicion and mistrust directed toward anyone perceived as “different” is explicit, like the vicious far-right ramblings you see on social media. Other times it’s more obscure, such as during the tense atmosphere surrounding Brexit, when I noticed my darker-skinned family and friends were being stared at more than usual.

I do not claim to know anything about what motivates young terrorists, but I do believe it’s sensible to assume that a facet of the radicalisation process must be the belief that you have more in common with Islamic State than you do with the people of Britain. 

Of course, it’s irresponsible and erroneous to suggest that being a target of racism automatically makes you vulnerable to radicalisation. Yet I’d be willing to bet that the chain of causation works the other way - that every person who has been radicalised has felt shunned and excluded by their communities.

In recent weeks, there has been much questioning of the Prevent programme, a government-designed strategy to detect young people at potential risk of radicalisation. Critics say it divides communities and encourages the perpetuation of negative racial stereotypes. In doing so, they argue, it has quite the opposite effect to the one intended.

Perhaps, then, at least part of the solution is to educate young people on the historical and present significance of diversity in British society. In the week following the Manchester attacks, the Guardian published a study that they claimed showed the “majority” of British people think minorities “threaten UK culture”.

That’s a large number of people who had failed to comprehend that the UK is and always has been a place where people of different colours, races and religions have co-existed. Perhaps if the history curriculum included more reference to the crucial and significant role minorities have played, it would go some way to dispelling the myth that immigration is a new phenomenon that threatens the status quo.

I’d summarise with the same advice I gave to the guy whose story I began this article with - it is not his job to “integrate”, it is Britain’s job to make him feel welcome and included. In doing so, we not only maintain the true British values that have contributed to our proud heritage as a nation, we also lessen the risk of shunned and isolated teens falling into the clutches of those promising to give them that all-important sense of belonging. 

Natasha Devon is the former UK government mental health champion for schools and founder of the Body Gossip Education Programme and the Self-Esteem Team. She tweets as @_NatashaDevon

For more columns by Natasha, visit her back catalogue

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