Where Are Your People From?

A royal scandal, histories of race and nationality, whiteness and rural geographies in Turner Prize nominee Ingrid Pollard's art

Ingrid Pollard, Self Evident (1995), © Ingrid Pollard

Last week another racism scandal hit the Royal Family as reports circulated in the British media about a guest at a Buckingham Palace reception being interrogated about where she was from. Replying to repeated questions from the royal aide Lady Susan Hussey, Ngozi Fulani replied that she was from Hackney, a borough in east London. As bystanders cringed, Lady Hussey pursued her quest for the ‘truth’. No, but where are your people from? What an embarrassment.

In the ensuing media frenzy Hussey resigned and the Royal Family expressed profound regret etc about the inappropriate questioning. But a chorus of supporters on social media came to the royal aide’s defence. She’s 83, give her a break, she’s from a different generation! As though age excuses soft racism.

This isn’t an age thing. It’s about the deeply entrenched idea that Britain is a white society, that its ‘originals’ are Anglo-Saxons, and that people of other ethnicities are from somewhere else.

Back in the nineteenth century when many of the histories of British, American and European countries were first written, historians emphasised racial purity. Pseudo-scientific nonsense about racial categories and the supremacy of white people were prevalent in Victorian discourse, and so the foundational histories of Britain as a place of whiteness were written. These old accounts established ideas about who has the right to belong and who doesn’t, and they have cast a long shadow over our collective understanding of national identity.

The dominant narrative that Britain was historically a white society has sidelined and obscured Black British history. Let’s be clear: there is no ‘original’ anything. The history of people in Britain is the history of patterns of global migration. People with black skin have been coming to Britain since before the Romans for all the reasons that anyone migrates: war, trade, famine and the opportunity of a better life.

As the historian Hannah Cusworth has argued, it was only from the 18th century onwards with the growth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that ideas about racial categories and white supremacy started to crystallise. We can date the emergence of racism in Britain as we understand it today back to that period in history.

The whole sorry Hussey debacle made me think of the work of one of this year’s Turner Prize nominees, Ingrid Pollard. The Turner Prize is the world's most famous and controversial contemporary art prize, and the 2022 winner will be announced later today. Pollard is a photographer, but she also creates installations with found objects and makes films and sculpture.

When she first started practicing 40 years ago Pollard was one of a number of artists who were exploring creative ways to respond to their lived experience of racism in Britain. Her early work was about British identity and rural geographies, our understanding of our relationship with the natural landscape, and about constructed ideas of what it means to be British.

Pollard is best known for a series of image and text compositions made between 1982 and 1987 called Pastoral Interlude. In these works she paired photographs of young Black people in the English rural landscape with words that sit in tension with those images. 

Ingrid Pollard, Pastoral Interlude (1988) © Ingrid Pollard

The pairing of images and text challenges the viewer to question the received idea that people of colour don’t work or live or even naturally belong in rural environments. Pollard asks us to question the unspoken connection between whiteness and the quintessential ‘natural’ English countryside.

By photographing the English countryside Pollard highlights the fact that even the landscape itself is constructed for industrial farming. The hedges, the fences, the walls, the fields. Everything is divided up and fenced off. It’s all very carefully managed. ‘Negative ideas about Black people and women of African descent are just as constructed, just as historical, as this landscape,’ she says:

More broadly Pollard’s art asks us to look closely and to question ideas we take for granted as truth or fact. Her earliest work has stood the test of time: it’s as relevant today as it was in the 1980s. The ideas that she has explored about tradition, identity and how things have been historically constructed are very relevant to our discussions about immigration, race and belonging in 2022.

You can detect those historically constructed ideas in Lady Hussey’s comments. She was expressing the belief, consciously or not, that she is legitimately British, whereas people with black skin aren’t. Britain is the place of her (white) people. Her behaviour is an example of how ideas from those constructed national histories from another era are still embedded in British society today.

Lady Hussey fell on her sword. But this isn’t a case of one ‘bad apple’. There are a million other Husseys out there, young and old, and how we counter this systemic issue needs some consideration. One way to start would be to diversify the history curriculum in schools.

I’d love to know what you think about this story, and about Pollard’s work.