Stokely Carmichael was bemused by the Brits
Stokely Carmichael — or Kwame Touré as he’s known to Pan-Africanists — is notorious for popularising the phrase “Black Power”. Dissatisfied by the way liberal integrationism had failed to deliver on the promise of black freedom during the sixties, he called on black Americans to shamelessly embrace their black African heritage: they were no longer to be regarded as “negroes”, but as “black”.
In Britain, however, where “black power” also began to take hold, there was a twist: it wasn’t just being embraced by black people, but Asians too. Indeed, Stokely Carmichael once recalled his surprise when, during a trip to London in 1967, he witnessed Black Power “resonating” among “the raised fists in the Asian communities, especially among Pakistani youth.” This would extend into the 1970s and 80s, when South Asians and black people were united under the banner of “political blackness”.
In the US, “blackness” was — and remains — both a political and ethnic identity; in Britain, things have always been more complicated. Here, political blackness was fashioned to encourage solidarity and mobilisation between Black Caribbeans and South Asians: an identity for people who shared a history of colonial subjugation, migration and diaspora — and who were now being treated as second-class citizens.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan, for instance, left behind the ethnic pogroms of his native Sri Lanka to migrate to London in 1958, only to witness attacks by white mobs on West Indians during the Notting Hill riots. “I knew then I was black,” he wrote; he would be treated as black whether he accepted it or not. Decades later, not much had changed. After a long career as the editor of the journal Race & Class, Sivanandan wrote in 2008: “Black is the colour of our politics, not the colour of our skins”.
But political blackness was born in a different era, one where “coloureds” — anyone who was not white — were treated as part of a de facto underclass in the UK. Institutional racism meant they occupied menial jobs, were denied decent housing and education and were excluded from many social spaces due to the “colour bar”.
At the time, the mainstream Left did little to change this state of affairs. Trade unions, for instance, were generally hostile to the cause of anti-racism. Political blackness, therefore, wasn’t simply a critique of Tory governments; it also attacked the Labour Party for being co-conspirators in institutional racism. “What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after,” was Sivanandan’s sardonic assessment. After Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, as fears abounded of Kenyan Asians “swarming” into Britain, it was Harold Wilson’s Labour government that rushed through the racist 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act. Where previously Commonwealth citizens had had unlimited entry to Britain, as British subjects, they were now barred.
In this context, it made sense for the descendants of Britain’s colonies to band together. In 1968, Jagmohan Joshi co-founded the Black Peoples’ Alliance (BPA). Their founding congress was attended by various Caribbean and Asian militant groups — including the Pakistani Workers’s Association, the West Indian Standing Conference (WISC) and the Afro-Asian Liberation Front. The BPA took to the streets a year later, 8,000-strong, in a “march for dignity” to Downing Street, calling for the repeal of the Immigration Act. And over the next decade, it would, along with other groups, continue to play an important role in protesting police brutality and defending ethnic minority communities from far-Right attacks.
But political blackness is now a fossil. Today it’s widely accepted that it flattens out the differences between blacks and South Asians into an abstract non-white identity. For Kehinde Andrews, a modern-day black nationalist, blackness is the sacred unifying glue of the “African diaspora”. Turning into a political umbrella, he claims, “erases the history of political organising based around shared African ancestry” in Britain.
Moreover, discussions surrounding race in Britain have been further fudged by the super-diversity that has resulted from recent decades of mass migration from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Eastern European migrants, for example, have been the frequent object of xenophobia in the past couple of decades, despite being “white”. At the same time, the emergence of identity politics in recent years has had the effect of breaking up what was once a unified “black struggle” into ethnic and religious fragments.
Within this political desiccation, it is hardly surprising that the Tories are the political group best equipped to appeal to an increasingly diverse electorate. It is, after all, something that they have been trying to do for a long time; in 1983, they ran an election poster featuring a besuited black man alongside the words: “Labour say he’s black. Tories say he’s British”. The message is clear: we emphasise nationhood and want to include you in it, while the Left wants to keep you imprisoned by your race.
Of course, when the Tories first tried to paint themselves as the party of the aspirational ethnic minority, the message was hollow: the party was extremely white. Now, the party is responsible for the most ethnically diverse cabinet in the history of British government. Beyond Rishi Sunak — who is, of course, its embodiment — there’s also Priti Patel, the daughter of Indian migrants by way of Uganda, at the helm of the Home office. Kwasi Kwarteng and Kemi Badenoch, both of West African stock, are Business Secretary and Equalities Minister respectively. Then there’s Claire Coutinho, Bim Afolami and Suella Braverman among others.
What this shows is that there is no such thing as “black politics” in any unitary sense. Black people, with various backgrounds, are acting politically across the spectrum. Yet today’s understanding of “political blackness” still implies that you need to have a particular kind of radical politics be “authentically black” politically — and any deviation equates to “selling out”.
This expectation that all ethnic minority politicians must be naturally Leftist reveals a basic ignorance of the fact that many of them come from communities and cultures that are conservative, probably more so than your typical Tory whose conservatism has been diluted by the winds of liberalism. Norman Tebbitt once expressed his admiration for the “natural conservatism” of British Asians (and you could chuck in British African communities too) for upholding traditional virtues: respect for tradition and faith, strong family and communal bonds, deference to authority and conservative sexual morality. A recent BBC survey of British Asians also concluded that they were more socially conservative than the rest of the British population.
Of course, within ethnic minority communities these values are hotly contested, as in any community. Ethnic minorities are as divided by class and politics as white people. Many British Indians and some segments of Britons from West African communities are affluent, socially mobile and well credentialed enough to vote Tory; most other ethnic minorities are disproportionately poorer, so tend to vote Labour, though there are exceptions. Gone are the days when “political blackness” could be used to represent ethnic minorities as an underclass; significant slices have climbed the social ladder.
So don’t underestimate the power of a Tory government that can synthesise patriotism and multi-ethnicity, practise “colour blindness” and rebut the Left’s accusations of tokenism by pointing out that they operate on talent and aspiration and beliefs, not skin colour. The Tories’ message of equality of opportunity and meritocracy strikes a chord with many, whatever their hue.
On the identitarian Left, meanwhile, instead of “political blackness”, ethnic minorities are currently stuck with “people of colour’ or the soulless bureaucratic acronym BAME as umbrella terms to express their collective grievances to officialdom. Political blackness may have been flawed, but at least it was a radical attempt to encourage solidarity between different communities for a politics dedicated towards social transformation. Any attempt to revive it now would only degrade into kitsch.
For today, blackness in Britain has morphed from a radical political identity into an almost wholly racial identity associated with African ancestry. If anything, blackness has become an aesthetic, a chic identity swallowed up into the consumerist economy. Despite the Left’s best efforts, political blackness cannot be the basis for any politics of solidarity any longer.
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.
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SubscribeAs someone whose family has been booted around by history a few times through the twentieth century, I have always found the congenital victim culture, with an emphasis on skin colours by many ethnic minorities, both meaningless and counterproductive. It’s a monumental waste of your time if you buy into those narratives: it alters your perspectives, colouring all events with the prejudices of your protest, and you will miss those opportunities that come along for improving things at both a personal and community level. There are better ways to improve things than buying into systemic narratives of political protest.
I had a rough time at school in London in the 70s (all the routine ‘paki’ abuse, plus a few assaults), but even in my teens I could see that stuff was toytown compared to the real trauma caused by partition in India or being kicked out of Africa, both of which my family experienced with huge loss. Moreover, it only takes a cursory glance at European history to see that skin colour has hardly anything to do with race – the nazis completely had it in for Slavs, but admired the Nordics, all completely random stuff, nothing to do with nothing, and the focus on equating their skin colour with victimisation by ethnic minorities is as much a costly false correlation.
The UK is a remarkably open, fair and colourblind country with plenty of opportunities for anyone with the gumption to take them, and anyone who has the luck to migrate to UK who does not see that, is lying to themselves. I cannot honestly say I have experienced any discrimination based on my race, in academia or in my profession, in four odd decades since the 70s ended.
You are also one of the top posters here. I have had a good bit of experience with the India/Africa diaspora, mostly from the Goan ones, Catholics, but also from the Hindu, and they have been exceptional every where they landed. To me they are always a sharp reminder on what immigration should be all about, not the refugee side, but that some migrants tend to have qualities which can be looked at to infer future.
I remember a study on immigrants in some big region of USA (which could never be made now) where results of migrants outcomes were quantified on their first and second generation. The result was surprising as Hungarians came at the top. They had the highest number of successful business ownership (entrepreneurship), high education levels in the second generation, and a well above average income. Such a pity studies like this are not the norm when setting up immigration policy. Immigration policy seems to be set for the advantage of the migrants rather than for the benefit of the host nation. And for some very weird Social Engineering purposes. USA has in fact outsourced its immigration policy to the Mexican Drug Cartels, and I suspect USA’s interests are not at the heart of their decisions.
Glad things are looking up for you (since the ’70s (a good while ago now!) Your remark about victim culture made me smile. Here in the U.S. some of us call it the Victim Olympics.
Just to say: what an excellent post. You remind of the kids I grew up with in the Midlands in the 70s.
Ty
The reason the German Nazis admired the Nordic peoples was not at all random. All the Nordic nations – with the important exception of most of Finland! – are of Germanic stock, ultimately. I come from Sweden originally, and the various Nordic languages – again, with the exception of Finnish, which belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family – are ultimately derived from Germanic dialects. Swedish contains a great many German loan words and also still some of the German grammar and unwieldly word order. During the 1500s, the were very large numbers of German merchants, traders and their families domiciled in Stockholm especially.
The old Norse sagas and myths are derived from the ancient Germanic ones, as were the Norse gods.
The Nazis hated the Slavs because Hitler wanted their geographical territories. This contempt had nothing really to do with “racism” but was grounded in Hitler’s changing political ambitions, targets and goals. The Poles were especially loathed and earmarked for either extinction or Germanisation (of the children, and the blond Polish children in particular). Partly this had its roots in the peace settlement after the end of WWI (which Germany lost) when East Prussia was separated from Germany by awarding Poland a “corridor” of land which included the harbour city of Danzig. The predominantly Polish West Prussia (and also other German territory) was given to Poland, along with other pieces of Germany. This was perceived by the Nazis as a great insult to Germany, and reuniting East Prussia with Deutschland was one of their (many) promises and goals.
Ultimately, the Nazi “race policies” were all about political power and grabbing that which other peoples had – their wealth, their land.
Ultimately, the X group with X policies grabbing political power, other people’s wealth, opportunities and land.
It seems the human races just repeats this pattern again and again… I hope people stick to their guns and demand equal human rights regardless of race, sex, relion. I think It really is the only way.
One thing I know from London in the last few decades is the different ethnic groups who are not White seem to have very ‘racist’ feelings towards each other. When I ride in taxis I usually try to get the driver to tell me about what his rides are like, and they are not reticent about it. Because I can have some points of reference if they are Muslim the drivers seem to not hold back in listing differences by ethnicity, and what they tell me would not be said by White drivers to a stranger.
Any idea that there is ‘Political Blackness’ which is some kind of umbrella has not been my experience, looking from the outside. I do not see a solidarity of unifying feelings, more like everyone sees the image of a ladder, and where each group is, and is going. It is all very different to USA, where I live.
It gives hope. One day a great leader will use divide and rule upon them and they will lose their power.
I would have loved to have had one taxi ride in Germany where I was not lectured on Turkish/Kurdish politics. There was no stopping a lecture. Even at 5 a.m.
Recent stats of NYC, show that blacks perpetrate most crime against Asians and that started way before Trump came on the scene. Leftists would have you believe that Trump’s use of the ‘China Virus’ causes it, but there is no evidence of that.
“If anything, blackness has become an aesthetic, a chic identity swallowed up into the consumerist economy”.
So true whether it is the multi-millionaire footballers kneeling, the never-ending blm “in screen” logos on sky sports or the over-representation of BAME individuals and couples in so many adverts (and historic tv dramas!).
Quite so, it’s a fashionable media thing. The advertisements are particularly amusing, and the subject of domestic fun and games. When will the first mixed race couple appear? Ah, first time obviously. And usually he’s black and she’s white, for some reason. Mixed race Asian and Afro-Caribbean? Not so much. Curiously, one of the biggest ethnic minorities in the country (the Poles) are absent from our TV and radio dramas. I think one might have appeared in Ambridge once, but can’t be sure (in the days when I listened to R4 I always reached for the off button the moment that annoying jaunty theme tune came up).
Yes, they are very racist in their BAME choices.
There are far more South Asians in the UK than blacks – but on adverts and on tv there are far more blacks than all other BAMES combined.
I also notice that the young and energetic characters are more likely to be BAME, but any old, worn out characters are usually white. 🙂
And of course the young black dudes are always heroically virtuous (when not put-upon victims) and never the bad guys – just like real life
It is a bit of a cliche black guy white woman. I personally know more white guys married or partnered to black women in the south-not-London England, but I suspect the reason you don’t get the white-guy-black-woman couples is because of the perception among the left-leaning-virtual-signaling chattering classes that it is whitey and males ‘colonising’ and taking advantage of black women as in the nasty days of slavery and colonialism. That’s what the memo said.
Yes, I have know and been friends with quite a lot of black woman/white man couples. I cannot, offhand, recall knowing any black man/white woman couples.
Very different than in the USA then. I live in a very mixed race place, and have all over the South USA, and I have almost never seen the Black Woman / White Male, but the other are exceedingly common.
In much of the parts of America there is a real feel of desperation among Black Woman that they will never find a high status, or middle status Black Man because so many are with White Women. The Black culture in USA has a terrible problem with stable marriage and more Black Women continue to secondary education than Black Men, and after graduating are really having a terrible time getting with a man of equal status and qualification because the more successfull Black Males are so often taking white wives and very few White Men are taking Black wives.
This is a real problem in USA, one which is much bigger than Europeans understand.
That’s interesting, Women generally marry up… And one of the unintentional reasons for the widening inequality – A woman lawyer will want to marry another lawyer…
“I cannot, offhand, recall knowing any black man/white woman couples.” Perhaps it’s because after the initial flush of ‘romance’ a lot black men having been brought up in a single parent situation cannot cope and do exactly as their own fathers did and leave? Might also explain why many mixed couples are as Chris observes, as white men are more reliable?
Also, generally in the black community it is far less acceptable for a black woman to go with a white man even amongst the women
Well, it’s cheap. Would you rather pay your minority workers a decent wage and have functional benefits, or would you have an half-assed slogan pretending to care? Remember, everything is about race or sexuality now. Discussion of class has conveniently disappeared.
Everywhere in the wider world an ethnic minority is understood to be a numerically minor population with a deep history on the soil. A foreign population colonising another people’s land are not an ethnic minority.
It is an Establishment abuse, therefore, to label populations coerced upon the three peoples of Britain “ethnic minorities”, just as it is an abuse to label the natives’ rejection of these populations “racism”. Something truly terrible has been done to the British people, as it has to all European populations wherever they live. The extent to which you, dear reader, appreciate this is the extent to which you are free from the dictates of the powerful.
“This would extend into the 1970s and 80s, when South Asians and black people were united under the banner of ‘political blackness’.”
I’m pretty sure this would have been limited to very small handfuls of political activists and wouldn’t have had any relevance to the wider population at all.
I (just about) remember the 80s, with the huge antagonisms between South Asians and West Indians (there were very few Africans back then). The last thing just about any South Asian would have wanted would have been to be lumped under one identity with West Indians as ‘black’, and vice versa. That’s to put the case mildly.
Political commentators have to be careful not to extrapolate their personal experience within some activist groups to the wider population.
Yes, I seem to remember that in the 80s the GLC-type racial activists were trying to impose ‘political blackness’ on Asian folk, and they simply weren’t having it.
And I well remember the antagonisms you describe from my 70s schooldays. Also the antagonisms between different South Asian groups/castes and between West Indians and Africans (there were a few Africans at my school) etc. The most ‘Islamophobic’ folk I’ve met in recent years are young people of Hindu and Sikh ancestry (and gay people).
This might have something to do with the attitude of many Moslems towards Hindus, Sikhs and gay people.
Of course
In the U.S., I am waiting for the outcry against the term, “Latinx,” which stifles the cultural richness of their language. That said, generally this population is not radical, and may not call out this liberty. (Those who are radical might embrace the term.) The term just sounds terrible, and for that reason alone, it is pretty vile to use it. Who asked them? Can they vote on this?
As you night know, Latinos in the USA harken from many countries, many of which are ‘more conservative’ than the Democrats like to admit. They honor family & country. During the 2020 election there was a noticeable Latino shift to the right, especially amongst Cubans and Venezuelans who abhor the Socialist regimes they escaped; they are finding a comfortable home in the Republican Party, so one can expect that trend to continue, at least if they want to be successful in the USA. The Left’s nihilism is a dead end.
Funny, but interesting: Just before the 2020 election, my Ecuadorean housecleaner told me that she was going to vote ‘TRUMP’ (she’s legal). I was surprised. She told me that she sympathized with Americans who feel that their country is being ‘overrun’; She said that Ecuador was experiencing that inflow as well by Venezuelans and others who were pouring into Ecuador because the country uses American dollars as its currency (which I did not realize). Her relatives in Ecuador were alarmed & concerned about their own country being overrun.
The political agenda is being dictated by a mouthy minority with next to no understanding of reality; which is then disseminated by an MSM dominated by privileged f***s churned out by ‘elite’ universities who have probably never even met a ‘poor’ person. It is of very little interest or relevance to the majority of people (in my experience), who simply focus on getting by/on in life: though they would like to be able to vote for some sensible/representative politicians every few years who would help them out a bit.
The post above by Prashant Kotak speaks vey directly of the people I grew up with and their attitudes. I cannot recommend it enough, or add to it.
I just wish commentators and politicians could stop trying to stick people in boxes, label them and think that’s job done.
That 1983 election poster needs to be dug back up again. Great riposte to people and ideologies intent on dividing people up into hierarchies based on skin colour. Whether it’s a hierarchy of (supposed) victimhood, it’s still a hierarchy based on skin colour. Which used to be racist.
I assume you refer to the ad featuring a black man with the headline: ‘Labour says he’s black. The Conservatives say he’s British’. It was indeed a truly great ad and I know, and worked with, the guy who wrote it.
As the writer points out, many immigrant groups are more conservative than the native Brits and it seems to me that if anyone can save England (there is no hope for Scotland and Wales) for democracy and free speech etc it might be them. I refer to people like Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch. the black female Tory MP. and commentators like Esther Ekoko and Mahyar Tousi etc.
(Apologies if I have misspelled any names).
A blind man completely misses the point of being human.
Are you quoting that wise French philosopher Eric Cantona?
Very well said. Some of the most talented young politicians in the Tory party are not white. They hold the key to our future.
Why is there no hope for Scotland and Wales?
Cos they’re full of Jocks and Taffys…….
I’ve always thought that the stereotypical Asian corner-shop owner should be a natural Tory voter. I haven’t seen much sign of the Tories tapping into that, though.
Black people, with various backgrounds, are acting politically across the spectrum.
Well, yes; this is something everyone but white leftists has understood forever. The idea of black people as an unthinking monolith is, or should be, offensive on its face, yet conservative blacks are treated by the left as heretics.
There seems be a ‘healthier’ and less ideologic black community in the UK – at least from my vantage point. I am guessing, I could be wrong, that it has to do with Britain’s superior school system at the primary level. When we lived in London in the mid-1990’s our kids started school in London and we were pleased and astonished to see that much was expected of even very young students, not in a ‘pressurized’ way either. There was also a profound respect for the English language. We also found teachers ‘very loving’ versus some rather brutal approaches stateside when we returned, even at the ‘fancy’ private school our girls attended in NYC.
It’s with great misfortune for the black community and other minority communities that the Teacher’s Unions have had such a negative grip on education in the USA. The unions are not educating blacks at all in NYC; less than 25% of NYC students can pass the state exams whilst taxpayers pay the highest per capita per student in the world ($22K). It’s outright criminal. The city’s solution = get rid of the state exams (no one will see the bad performance), abolish special merit-entrance schools like Bronx Science & Stuyvesant High Schools (eliminate competition so that everyone is a loser), and hamper the charter school movement at all cost (eliminate schooling choice). Blacks have a right to be angry today as the most profound ‘systemic racism’ in the USA is in the left / progressive control of education (really just a baby sitting service which some have even admitted) perpetrated by the Teacher’s Unions.
Yet, the HUGE mysteries are (1) Why does the black community accept such lousy education for their children? (2) Why do they keep voting Democrat – a party which is glad to keep blacks as an underclass?
Those days are long gone. Primary age children are now taught more about gender identity than arithmetic. As for the English language….we pay classroom assistants to translate the teaching into the child’s home language ( Polish, Slovenian, Pashtun etc, etc) so they are not oppressed into understanding or speaking English except at the most basic, street picked up level. Afro Caribbean children are not discouraged from using the tongue of the ghetto, although many of them do not actually live there.
Of course, this leaves the children of the Nazghul , whose parents are paying for their segregated education, with a considerable advantage on the wider stage, which I’m sure is completely coincidental.
You can spot an Antifa Fascist thug by a skateboard. They train in combat use of these deadly weapons, and can carry them with impunity. Just watch film of how they use them as weapons – amazing how this is not known.
Be careful, Mumford and Sons won’t let you listen to their music if you’ve read (gasp) that book…
It always amuses me that the left think of black people as a monolith and then when one of them steps out of line and votes for the wrong person they immediately attack them as being ‘not really black’. Kinda racist.
Where are “white people” here, other than as the Tory or Labour government, or the “Far Right”?
What is the difference between migration and diaspora in”…a history of colonial subjugation, migration and diaspora…”. Why this faux listing of three items in “discourse,” so that we do not unpack ideas separately, but link everything as a packet of grievance or whatever? Sorry, am not articulate, but I sense something going on in this sort of writing.
Who is going to write about current colonial subjugation by people supposing they have a right to walk in on countries they are now walking into? I mean, try to unpack that rather than leaping to call it out as ray schism.
That “blackness is the sacred unifying glue of the “African diaspora”” is okay. Calling out turf in other countries and not unifying with the natives is a good thing? We want ours? Give us. What about recognizing that you really are imposing on the natives, even a weensy bit?
Yes, you are British for one or two generations. good. but migration is happening so quickly and when you want to be a bloc…well, you are causing division. Just be British or American? It does not erase Blackness. If you can at least try to see how this is true…
Quite so. But what all this ‘identity’ stuff (amongst other things) is about is to keep people from seeing that we are all one, and keep us at each others throats. Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ song has the following lines:
“Strangers passing in the street
By chance, two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me …’
If we all came to realise that fact the world would change overnight. Unfortunately, there are people, forces – whatever – who are keen that that should not happen; after all, who would buy the guns and bombs and all the other stuff designed to keep people churning.
That reverses the chronology: Wilson’s government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act on 1st March, 1968, then Powell made his speech on 20th April, 1968.