There Is Nothing for You Here, page 13
Why was I provoking such unenthusiastic reactions? They didn’t get it. So Sarah launched into an explanation of the UK class system, regional accents, and the negative attitudes toward the North East in the rest of England. Sarah had grown up on a farm near Sunderland, but she stressed that it was only because she had gone to a local private girls’ school and then to Cambridge that she got a pass for also growing up in the North East. I didn’t fit in, even though I had made it to Harvard. She agreed it was ridiculous and unfair.
Accent, the way a person talked, the dialect or language and grammatical constructions they used, were also markers of class in the UK. A distinct regional accent from somewhere like the North East would automatically place you in the working class, even if your family were white-collar professionals. This was a case of guilt by linguistic association with a region once completely dominated by heavy industry and thus by “workers.” Scots, Welsh, and Irish also stood out for their accents in England—and were often derided if they were native Gaelic-speakers.
Many of the English dialects came with specific names attached, which often were used in a mocking, demeaning fashion, as if to make a point that you were from a specific, amusing sort of place and didn’t fit into regular society. People from Newcastle and Tyneside were Geordies, those from Liverpool and Merseyside were Scousers. In London, the working class from the East End were Cockneys. If you were in the middle or upper classes, by contrast, you usually had “Received Pronunciation” (or RP), the clipped tones sometimes known as the Queen’s English (or King’s, before Queen Elizabeth II) or Oxford English. This was the accent immortalized by generations of BBC News presenters and the UK students who had made it to Harvard.
Aspirational Brits, mockingly dubbed “social climbers,” would take elocution lessons to change the tone and pitch of their voice as well as their diction. Margaret Thatcher herself, the middle-class daughter of a small-town grocer who went to Oxford University, famously took voice lessons in the 1970s. This facilitated her ascent up the UK political hierarchy. Others with an ear for the musicality of speech, or a chameleon-like talent, would simply transform themselves as they moved away from their regions or working-class roots and tried to blend in. They took on a new identity with a different accent, becoming something and someone else to avoid drawing undue attention and any risk of discrimination.
I had never considered changing my accent through elocution lessons to acquire Received Pronunciation and pass myself off as something else. I wanted to remain my authentic self. But as the Harvard experience was reinforcing, retaining your true voice was acceptable only within your original geographic and socioeconomic context. It became a problem when you stepped outside, into an arena or profession with different associations and expectations. Other people did actually care about your accent, even when you stopped thinking about it or thought it finally might not matter.
At a later Harvard social event, with Sarah and Nigel Gould-Davies in tow, another Kennedy Scholar, Ed Balls, referred to me as “Geordie Fiona,” linking me to the distinctive Newcastle accent. It was meant in jest but didn’t come off as especially funny. By now it was obvious to me that the UK’s class and accent discrimination was not going to go away when I encountered other Brits, no matter what I did and where I was.
My interactions with Harvard’s Oxford PPE group that year were part of the reason I stayed on in the United States. I wanted to leave the UK’s place- and class-based discrimination behind and move on. As for the Kennedy Scholars, Ed Balls did indeed go on to a high-level political job in the UK. He became the economic secretary to the treasury under Prime Minister Tony Blair and then minister for children, schools, and families under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Sarah went off to be a barrister in London, while Nigel stayed on at Harvard with me to complete his PhD in the Government Department.
Twenty-five years after my run-in with Ed Balls, I had an unexpected encounter with his boss, by then former British prime minister, Tony Blair, at another social event in the United States. For his part, Blair had been the MP for Sedgefield in County Durham, the next constituency to Bishop Auckland. He had actually grown up in the city of Durham as well as in Edinburgh and had attended prestigious private schools in both cities. Blair had studied law rather than PPE at Oxford but moved in the same social circles as the rest of the Oxford set. We ran into each other at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado in July 2014, where I was presenting a book that I had just written about Russian president Vladimir Putin as well as participating in panels on U.S.-Russian relations.
A close colleague and fellow Russia expert, Angela Stent, was also at Aspen. Angela, like me, was originally British. Her family members were refugees from Germany in the 1930s who rebuilt their lives in London. All too aware of the importance of their children securing a good education, Angela’s parents had scrimped and saved to put her through a girls’ direct grant school (a form of grammar school that also took fee-paying students). From there she went to Cambridge. Also like me, Angela came to the United States on a graduate scholarship to Harvard, where she completed the same master’s degree in Soviet studies and then a PhD in government. Angela had blazed the trail I followed and was a mentor to me throughout my professional career. After forty years in the U.S., however, she sounded more American than British.
One of the Ideas Festival organizers was insistent that we should meet Tony Blair, who was a featured speaker. The organizer spotted Blair in the crowd and called us over. She introduced us as fellow Brits, noting how “exciting” it was to be able to introduce us to “our” former prime minister and remarking that she understood that I was originally from Blair’s constituency. I clarified: not quite, but very close.
Blair was taken aback when I gave my quick potted history, the usual rundown through the three determinative questions. “How did you get here?” I feigned ignorance: “On a plane from D.C., Angela and I flew in through Denver and then here. How did you come, directly from London? It’s a long trip, isn’t it?” “No . . . really . . . come on,” he said, “I obviously mean from County Durham to the U.S.; that’s also quite a journey, isn’t it?” I explained that I was a product of the “Labour Party at work.” My local MP, his colleague and former chief whip Derek Foster, had tried to address the local educational deficiencies. He had encouraged me to consider university.
Tony Blair looked more pained than pleased by this revelation. He seemed most perplexed by the fact that I had attended a County Durham comprehensive school and retained my northern accent. The two of those together were confounding, while Angela’s trajectory, including the family horrors of escaping Nazi Germany, somehow seemed explicable to him. In the UK context, even in the 2010s, moving from the working to the middle class without some divine intervention, in the form perhaps of a scholarship to a private school accompanied by some elocution lessons, appeared more of a feat than Angela’s remarkable transformation from refugee to successful citizen. Nevertheless, at the end of our brief encounter, Blair insisted that the three of us take a selfie to commemorate the meeting.
There was an added irony in all this. Several years earlier, from 2006 to 2009, I had served as the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, in fact succeeding Angela in the position. As part of this assignment, I had to brief President George W. Bush. On our first encounter, he also expressed interest in my accent and where I was from. He was delighted to find out that my hometown was near Blair’s home constituency. He had visited Sedgefield on a state visit to the UK in November 2003. He joked that he had waved to my parents. I mentioned that they had actually come out into their back garden to wave to him as he flew over Bishop Auckland in Marine One. They would be pleased to know he had waved back. From then on, President Bush dubbed me “Blair’s girl.” I didn’t tell the former prime minister this. But Angela and I later laughed about our “Blair’s girls” commemorative selfie.
The encounter with the former prime minister was a far cry from my much less self-confident interaction with Ed Balls in my first year at Harvard, but the framing was the same. Traditionally, promoting social mobility was one of the key platforms of the Labour Party as well as of the old-style labor unions like the Durham Miners’ Association. Tony Blair himself in the late 1990s, when Ed Balls had left Harvard to work in the government, had instituted all kinds of policies to encourage the development of new educational programs for underprivileged kids and raise expectations for what they could achieve. Blair’s revamped “New Labour” version of the party, however, was still replete with MPs from middle-class, private school, and Oxbridge backgrounds—and with privileged Kennedy Scholars who had just done a stint at Harvard. The perception, background, and lifestyle gap between Labour Party elites and the working-class grassroots membership widened under Blair’s premiership, from 1997 to 2007. It persisted long afterward under subsequent leaders, contributing to the party’s downfall in successive local and general elections into the 2020s. Clearly policies promoting societal change took decades to have an impact in the composition of the leadership at the top. And in the meantime the parties that advanced them were apt to reap the whirlwind.
Degrees of Discrimination
Class and accent distinctions and discrimination were one thing in the United Kingdom, but those first years at Harvard opened my eyes to how much worse the situation was for some in the United States. I had thought America was a far more egalitarian society with much less socioeconomic division than I had experienced in the UK. This was not the case. There was plenty of poverty in the former industrial areas of Boston, and the city was evidently segregated into different socioeconomic, ethnic (Portuguese, Italian, Irish), and racial neighborhoods. All I had to do was look around and pay attention on a walk across the invisible line from Cambridge to East Cambridge, or Cambridge to Somerville, or take a stroll from Back Bay and the South End into Roxbury on a trip into Boston itself, to see the divides.
You could also hear the divides as you traveled across Boston. The South Boston Irish accent was particularly distinctive. And I soon learned that there was accent discrimination in the United States, especially for “nonstandard English”-speakers. I just wasn’t subjected to it once I was transplanted from the UK. Any kind of English accent seemed to fall within acceptable standards. My future husband, Ken, and John Henriksen both claimed that their midwestern accents were the U.S. equivalent of RP—the neutral Middle American tones of the major network newscasters. I wasn’t initially convinced, but I did soon discover that there was a geographic reversal in the perception of accents in the United States. Accents from the North seemed to signify that people were somehow smarter and more in command, while southern accents seemed to suggest that the person concerned was “nicer” in some way, albeit a little slow. A complete flipping of the stereotyping in the UK. And then there was the racialization of speech and negative attitudes toward African American dialects that echoed the accent discrimination I experienced at home.
Race, as much as if not more than accent, was an evident impediment to opportunity in America. It was a kind of negative force multiplier for every other obstacle that got in the way of people moving ahead. Back in Bishop Auckland, in our homogenous bubble, race was not something we considered or thought about on a regular basis. I did think about ethnicity in the British context. My family had all five of the distinct British ethnic groups in our lineage—English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Traveller. My parents used to describe themselves simply as British, but not English. Our immediate neighbors on either side were Welsh and Irish. They had experienced discrimination as native Welsh- and Irish-language speakers throughout their schooling. But the first time I observed interpersonal racial discrimination close up was when a former classmate who had left school early to join the army brought a friend, Tony, home on leave. Tony was mixed-race: his father was an immigrant from the West Indies; his mother was from Yorkshire. When we all walked downtown together in Bishop Auckland, Tony got sharp stares. Some younger boys loped behind us for a while, making ape noises and rude gestures when we turned around to glare and yell at them. Tony ignored this and shrugged it off more easily than the rest of us did. We hadn’t even thought about how nastily some people might react to his presence in an almost all-white town. We were embarrassed and ashamed.
At St. Andrews in the mid-1980s, there were only a handful of Black students, mostly from affluent families from Africa who had been sent to private schools in the UK. A few students were from South Asia—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka—or were second-generation immigrants, and occasionally of mixed racial heritage. The father of one of my closest friends, my roommate from my first year, was originally from Pakistan. Malika came from a working-class area of Billericay in Essex, east of London. She had attended a comprehensive school. We often discussed class and racial issues. She noted that on the surface I fit in . . . until I opened my mouth. She, however, did not fit in. She stood out right away. When people looked at her, all they saw at first was someone “different.” In theory, if you worked on it hard enough, you could change your accent and conceal your social origins, Malika said, but you could not change the color of your skin. It would always be a factor drawing additional prejudice on top of class discrimination.
None of these discussions had prepared me in any way for the structural racism I encountered in the United States. I simply didn’t expect it. I was starry-eyed about the United States and the obviously life-changing opportunity to study at Harvard. Having only read a few American history books at the time, I assumed that the civil rights movement had relegated racial discrimination to the past. I was sure, at least, that this was the case in Massachusetts, even if things might be different in the American South. In fact, I was more worried at the time about the potential spillover from the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the United States. Boston was a known IRA stronghold, and in my first week at Harvard I had spotted collection boxes for NORAID (the Irish Northern Aid Committee, a charity with purported ties to the militants) on the counters of some of the Irish bars in Cambridge that I went into. On one occasion I had been grilled about my background by one of the bartenders before he would serve me. He clearly wanted to gauge my attitudes toward the Irish republican cause. He eventually seemed satisfied that I was from the North East and not London, and that got me a drink.
With other things preoccupying me, I had not fully processed or factored in how recent the civil rights movement had been. When I got to Harvard in 1989, I was a year younger than the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the same age as the U.S. Voting Rights Act. Black and Native Americans had been recognized as full citizens for only twenty-four years. People of my age or younger in the United States were the first generation who had been born at a time without employment discrimination on the basis of race and enforced segregation in public places. It quickly became apparent, however, that America still had a long way to go before race—like gender, class, and the other social markers that I had experienced to date—would ever be part of someone’s personal identity rather than a major impediment to opportunity.
A Crash Course on Race
One of my fellow Harvard graduate students, Tom Stewart, was Black. Tom was pursuing a PhD in political science in the Government Department. Like me, he was from a low-income background. We discussed some of the similar challenges we had faced, but the comparisons stopped there. He had grown up in Washington, D.C., and enrolled in the U.S. Army before going to the University of the District of Columbia. He was older than the rest of us and a compelling advocate for increasing access for students of all backgrounds to a high-quality education. He led student meetings on this issue. He helped open my eyes to the importance of educational reform in the distinctively racist society that was the United States.
The graduate students’ dorm association organized a regular pizza night, and on one such evening I volunteered to help Tom, who was a graduate dorm counselor, collect the pizzas in his car while others set things up. We had ordered ahead of time, but when we went in to collect and pay, the pizzeria staff refused to serve him. I was completely appalled and confused. How could they refuse? Why? Tom was clearly angry but holding himself in check. I stepped up closer to the counter. The man asked if we were together. I said of course we were, and then realized from his reaction that he was asking if we were a couple, which was clearly not okay from his point of view. Other people eating in the restaurant were staring at us. We were a spectacle just for walking in together. I said we were both graduate students at Harvard and we had ordered ahead for an official event. What was the problem? We had the payment with us. On hearing my accent, the man softened a bit. I gave him the money and he handed me all the pizzas, averting his gaze from Tom. As we left, he said loudly, “I guess they’ll let anyone into Harvard now.”
On the way back to campus in the car, Tom offered me my first crash course on race in America. I was clearly clueless. He enlightened me on the specific history of Boston and the desegregation of the city’s public schools. Boston had begun to integrate its de facto geographically segregated school system only in 1974, and then only because of a court order after a landmark class-action lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The beginning of forced busing of students from predominantly Black to white neighborhoods had been met with months of violent protests, particularly in the largely Irish Catholic areas of South Boston. Conflicts over school integration continued through the 1970s. As Tom explained, by the time the court-ordered busing ended in 1988, white students had emptied out of Boston’s school district. The public schools were now mostly Black. This was the exact opposite outcome to the intent of the original ruling. It was one of the issues that Tom had been looking at in his PhD studies. The scars of desegregation were still raw in Boston. This was literally just yesterday, not the distant past. People like the man in the pizzeria, Tom noted, had probably gone through school during the Boston busing and were still aggrieved.
