Brexit

The British author Zadie Smith published in the New York Review of Books her very much detailed Brexit experience in an article called  “Fences- A Brexit Diary.

Smith, who’s not only a British citizen but also a Jamaican decedent, retells her experience leading up to the historic Brexit on June 23, 2016. This historic date, that not only changed the course of the political direction of Britain, but that pretty much will impact the rest of the world.

In the article the reader is taken through an ‘insider’ review of her account of events previous and after Brexit.  As she eloquently put in the title, Smith encloses a diary and in the course of this, she also tries to make sense of what had happened.  She lists several reasons and formulates arguments that could’ve cause that kind of mind-set within the Britons. The author often compares her life growing up in London, which she pretty much describes as a truly multicultural space, as oppose to todays reality filled with hypocorism masked as multiculturalism and condescension. Where the upper class still is dominated by a constellation of narrow-minded elite. The same class that lead Britain to take this decisions. At the end of the article, she manages to beautifully put together the main reason why Brexit is an otter problem and it affects all of us. She retells a scene of her traveling from London to Paris with the Eurostar to meet with her colleague of polish descent. That situation is perfectly placed at the end of the article as a demonstration of what globalization actually means and how everyone, regardless of their citizenship, profits from it.

To me Smith touches down the most important point on why today’s society wasn’t ready to take on such a big decisions, which in this case was the referendum.