How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference Highlight

Her grandparents were shipped there from India in the nineteenth century to work on sugar plantations under a colonial edict known as indenture—a form of semi-forced migration and labor that is a shadow of slavery. She emigrated to England in the 1960s, in the wake of the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought 802 Caribbean women and men to begin new lives in Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like them, she was a British citizen invited to the homeland of the colonies as the imperial age waned. They were bidden to help rebuild a country broken by war, and like so many who made that journey, my mother was recruited into the fledgling National Health Service, to attend to the citizens of the United Kingdom.