Afua Hirsch

Afua Hirsch FRSL (born 1981) is a British writer, broadcaster and former barrister. She has worked as a journalist for The Guardian newspaper, and was the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News from 2014 until 2017. She is the author of the 2018 book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging; Hirsch received a Jerwood Award while writing it.

Hirsch in 2017

Quotes

• Social media have been saturated by the harrowing memories of a legacy the British establishment has refused to acknowledge. The plunder of land and diamonds in South Africa, crimes that adorned the Queen's very crown. The physical suffering that continues from violence inflicted by her government in Kenya, even as her reign was celebrated for having begun there. The scars of genocide in Nigeria, events that took place a decade into her rule. In Britain, minoritised people are remembering this Elizabethan era through the lens of the racism that was allowed to thrive during it.
  • "This is a Britain that has lost its Queen – and the luxury of denial about its past", The Guardian (13 September 2022)
  • The Imperial State Crown, containing the Cullinan II diamond, was worn by Elizabeth II at her Coronation in June 1953. It was cut from a rough diamond found in a South African mine in 1905 and named after the mine's owner.

About Hirsch

• Hirsch’s focus is not the more violent racism she has suffered; the story of the man who took off his belt threatening to thrash her following a racist spat is only given a sentence. Rather it’s the many micro-aggressions that draw her attention. At Oxford University she was a self-consciously alien presence, irritated by porters who insisted she show her ID as she entered its colleges, while her white student friends were not stopped.
  • From a review by Colin Grant of "Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch review – everyday racism and a search for identity", The Guardian (18 January 2018)