Sajid Javid’s Home Color Review – From One Hostile Environment to Another | Biography and memoirs

SAjid Javid’s memoir traces his journey from being a frightened child in the racist town of Rochdale in the 1970s to becoming a leading member of a political party that attacks and marginalizes people like him. However, it is an intimate, and at times poignant, family portrait, as well as a social history of race, class and ambition in late twentieth-century Britain.

The opening chapters, with their omnipresent skinheads and taunts of “Run, cry, run,” contain the book’s most interesting scenes. Racism is persistent and targeted: from graffiti on his father’s storefronts to daily humiliation at school, and on buses where his father bravely fought an unofficial color barrier to become a bus driver.

Javid does not shy away from showing Britain’s cruelty in the 1970s and 1980s towards black and brown children. White neighbors and co-workers help the family live in the same place as the racists, and the book shows that the system is hostile even when individuals are kind.

The Color of the House is a moving study of Javed’s parents, especially his indefatigable mother. Her illiteracy conflicts with her intense commitment to her children’s education: clean uniforms, organized homework, trips to the Rochdale library. Javed’s father appears as a man of energy but limited luck: a bus driver who repeatedly launches small clothing companies that almost always fail.

School is a site of trauma. Javid doesn’t ignore the brutality of racism on the playground – from the boy who tries to “rub the blackness” on his arm with sandpaper, to Javid’s shame-filled rejection of a black classmate in order to fit in.

Alongside these scenes is the story of intellectual combustion: the teacher who continues his teaching for free, the pink pages of the Financial Times abandoned on the bus, and the feeling that reading could be a reliable means of escape.

Javed is not a natural writer; The prose is a bit like Jack and Jill, and could have done with a sharp edit. He is at his best when he occupies the Dickensian domestic instability, the presence of bailiffs, the stocks that never sell, and the children in trouble. These short, lively chapters – ‘Dettol and Determination’, ‘Britain’s Most Dangerous Street’ – carry a clear narrative. The memoir’s argument about merit is more nuanced than Javid’s political sloganeering ever was.

Politically, the memoir is compelling because it refuses to remove contradiction. Javid’s father goes from doubting Margaret Thatcher to voting for her, even as his life is shattered between property developers, debt and deregulated markets. Javid was clearly inspired by his father to rise through the Conservative Party, but this falls worryingly alongside the book’s record of racism.

Indeed, reading his story in the context of the past decade of Tory rule shows how his party exploited the narratives of children like him while entrenching policies that brutalized people who looked like his parents. For example, when he was Home Secretary in 2019, Javid shamefully revoked Shamima Begum’s British citizenship shortly after she was discovered in a Syrian refugee camp. Begum was trafficked to Syria when she was 15 years old in 2015.

Likewise, his successor Priti Patel’s position as a child of immigrants “taking back control” was a political cover for policies that forced people into poverty and destitution. The “hostile environment” approach to immigration enforcement, initiated by Theresa May, and which remained a consistent feature of the Home Office culture after her departure, reinforced racist practices and directly contributed to the Windrush scandal, in which black Britons were detained and threatened with removal from a country they had a full legal right to call their own. Javid later claimed that he did not like the term “hostile environment”, but nevertheless defended and preserved the structures that perpetuated it.

Suella Braverman’s time as Home Secretary took this fusion of identity politics and punitive politics further, pairing the image of a British Asian woman in a major state office with apocalyptic language about “invasions” by small boat arrivals. She repeatedly pitted her “law-abiding national majority” against desperate people crossing the Channel. In both cases, the presence of non-white women at the top of the Interior Department did not mitigate conservative immigration policy; It helped insulate the hardline border regime from accusations of racism while continuing to inflict racist harm. Although Javid may not have been a member of the government by then, he remained a member of the party for which these official positions were.

Racist rhetoric and policy are now hallmarks of mainstream British politics. Recent reports on Nigel Farage’s time at Dulwich College underscore how little distance there is between the corridors of elite education, racist language and political success. Taken alongside the scenes of playground racism in The Color of Home, these testimonies show continuity rather than discontinuity: the same casual dehumanization of Jews, blacks, and Asians.

In this context, his depiction of a boy learning to survive and excel in that environment – ​​and his insistence that education, solidarity and institutional self-scrutiny are the only real antidotes – seems less like a nostalgic political origin story and more like an urgent warning about the Britain to come. Javid, now cheerfully living in the Big House, can sometimes sound like Uncle Tom: his narrative downplays structural barriers and suggests that minorities simply need to work harder in order to succeed.

His decision to focus on his early years and not write much about his rise within the Conservative Party represents a serious omission. He certainly has a lot to say about the inner workings of the now-collapsed Conservatives. But maybe save that for another folder. It would be fun to read if he could be as honest about this as he was in his childhood.