Blackness in Britain

Kehinde Andrews, Lisa Amanda Palmer, Kehinde Andrews, Lisa Amanda Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317555896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Black Studies is a hugely important, and yet undervalued, academic field of enquiry that is marked by its disciplinary absence and omission from academic curricula in Britain. There is a long and rich history of research on Blackness and Black populations in Britain. However Blackness in Britain has too often been framed through the lens of racialised deficits, constructed as both marginal and pathological.

Blackness in Britain attends to and grapples with the absence of Black Studies in Britain and the parallel crisis of Black marginality in British society. It begins to map the field of Black Studies scholarship from a British context, by collating new and established voices from scholars writing about Blackness in Britain. Split into five parts, it examines:

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• Black studies and the challenge of the Black British intellectual;

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• Revolution, resistance and state violence;

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• Blackness and belonging;

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• exclusion and inequality in education;

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• experiences of Black women and the gendering of Blackness in Britain.

This interdisciplinary collection represents a landmark in building Black Studies in British academia, presenting key debates about Black experiences in relation to Britain, Black Europe and the wider Black diaspora. With contributions from across various disciplines including sociology, human geography, medical sociology, cultural studies, education studies, post-colonial English literature, history, and criminology, the book will be essential reading for scholars and students of the multi- and inter-disciplinary area of Black Studies.

Part I

Black studies and the challenge of the Black British intellectual

1 The absence of Black studies in Britain

Lisa Amanda Palmer

How do we begin to explain the glaring absence of Black studies within the British academy? One explanation is that the absence of Black studies is tied to very old and familiar histories of institutional racism, inequality within higher education and the deeply entrenched Eurocentric production of knowledge. Without doubt, the British academy remains an overwhelming White space. As studies in critical Whiteness have shown, Whiteness is not sufficient by any measurement to account for the plurality of human experience although Whiteness has frequently assumed the posture of the universal subject (Dyer, 1997; Morrison, 1992). Currently, Black people make up just 1.2 per cent of UK national academics. If we include non-UK Black nationals we see a meagre but notable rise to 1.6 per cent (Equality Challenge Unit, 2014). By contrast, Black student numbers have increased in the past 20 years showing they are disproportionately over represented as a student body (Tatlow, 2015). However, while the visible increase of Black students on British university campuses is encouraging, their representation does not take account of the heaviness of what David Theo Goldberg (2009) has called ‘the weight of racism’, carried by many Black students who feel alienated and marginalised inside the British academy (National Union of Students, 2011). As the National Union of Students Black Student Officer Malia Bouattia, states,

The conversation [about race] has been considerably watered down to the extent that the use of terms like ‘racism’ or even discrimination to describe students experiences are rarely uttered and the HE sector and institutions rarely criticised let alone held accountable for what black students are facing.

(Bouattia, 2015, 26)

The dominance of the Eurocentric canon remains a significant barrier to learning for Black students (NUS, 2011). Student-led campaigns such as ‘Why is my curriculum white?’ and ‘Rhodes must fall Oxford’ – a campaign in solidarity with Students from the University of Cape Town to decolonise their curriculum and campus – point to the ubiquitous production and reproduction of Eurocentric thought paradigms both internationally and within British universities. These campaigns not only seek to oppose the White curriculum, they are politically engaged in transforming the academy to build structures of knowledge beyond the tightly guarded and narrowly focused Eurocentric lens. There are currently no named Black studies degree programmes, departments or centres located within the British university system despite a dynamic and rich tradition of Black intellectual activism and thought both within and outside the academy (Warmington, 2014).

In this chapter I want to discuss the glaring absence of Black studies in the British academy and the problem this exposes in terms of reinforcing and revealing the ways Black lives and Black intellectual thought are seen as inconsequential to British society and to the production of knowledge within the British universities. The normativity of anti-Black intellectual thought in British universities is a sign of the wider systematic exclusion of Black communities in Britain. Thus this chapter is also concerned with questions about the role of the Black intellectual and how we might chose to be politically positioned in relation to the purpose and development of Black studies in Britain. Are we to be the public image of neoliberal forms of Black social mobility – a Black bourgeois, or do our epistemological questions, concerns and allegiances move us beyond the neoliberalised structures that we work and live within.

There is little doubt that the material, political and structural barriers to Black studies in Britain remain stark and dismal. However, while the bleak realities of institutional racism reveal our continuing absence (Richards, 2014), we must also consider the complex epistemological reticence amongst some Black intellectual thinkers in the Black British diaspora as to the shape and purpose of the discipline itself. These reservations are concerned with how the Black subject is positioned in relation to narratives of the West’s formation and with the routing of Black studies as an ‘ethnic’ sideshow to Eurocentric histories; and the disavowal of a specific epistemological position that examines the unfolding of history and modernity from the position of the Black subject. In 1969, C. L. R. James cautioned against the epistemological pitfalls of Black studies in his essay, ‘Black Studies and the Contemporary Student’, where he wrote that,

Now to talk to me about black studies as if it’s something that concerned black people is an utter denial. This is the history of Western Civilization. I can’t see it otherwise. This is the history that black people and white people and all serious students of modern history and the history of the world have to know. To say that this is some sort of ethnic problem is a lot of nonsense.

(James, 1969, 397)

James positions his argument to deliberately move away from the idea that there are White knowledges and Black knowledges that produce two binary distinct and unrelated histories and epistemological categories. The Black presence in the West in James’s view, should be seen as interconnected and inseparable from how we understand the formation and assemblage of Western modernity. James understood that studies in Black peoples and Black histories have been neglected for far too long. However, he had anticipated the danger that Black studies could be easily dismissed as a tokenistic gesture by White university institutions to placate Black demands for Black critical thought and analysis within the academy (James, 1969). While James was warning us to be mindful of the seemingly inherent perils of ghettoising Black studies as a peculiar ‘add on’ to studies in Western civilisation, he saw the ethnic distinctions between ‘White studies’ and ‘Black studies’ as a false dichotomy. In other words how can we begin to study Western civilisation within the context of the academy without the development of an epistemological framework that specifically addresses ‘the fact of blackness’ (Fanon, 1967) inside the West’s formation. For James, to teach Black studies was to situate Black people within the vast social events that have taken place to transform Europe from the period of the late Middle Ages to emergent modern industrial societies,

This is what I want you to bear in mind. Number one: The wealth that enabled society to make the big transition was rooted in the slave trade, slavery and the industries that came from it. And secondly, in the struggle by which the bourgeois established the political and social structure of this new form in the very front line, fighting as well as anybody else and better than most, in France in the French Revolutionary war, and in the American Civil war, were the ex-slaves.

(James, 1969, 397)

Black people, far from being marginal players within these Western historical narratives, were central protagonists in the formation of what we understand as the West (James, 1969). James argued that Black people not only provided the wealth that came from Western colonial and imperial projects, they were situated at the forefront of those struggles that constitute our knowledge and understanding of how the West defines itself (James, 1969). This is particularly important within the context of the UK because, by and large, the intellectual contributions of Black people are overlooked, obscured or ignored (Warmington, 2014). This becomes evident in relation to how Britishness is still understood and assembled as a distinctive and exclusionary classification of Whiteness. White British ways of knowing and the assumed universalisms associated with it, become elevated epistemological categories that serve to valorise and validate knowledges produced from the context of being White and British. Walter Mignolo (2011) might call this the ‘Western Code’ an epistemology that is positioned as the only game in town that serves the interests of a small proportion of humanity (Mignolo, 2011, xii). The code works by committing a series of racialised exclusions by implementing systems of knowledge and governance based on the logic of White hegemony, White privilege and White supremacy. It further operates as an inward-looking reductive category where the particularity of being British is frequently (mis)understood, symbolically and discursively as being ethnically White and universal at the same time. In this binary structure of knowing, the ‘other’ is constituted as the inferior ‘oriental’, the ‘savage’ or ‘immigrant’, categorised as the perpetual subordinate outsider, as ‘non-human’, to the British imaginary. This leads to the question as to whether James was right to fervently dismiss the ‘ethnic’ coding of knowledge production specifically in relation to questions of power?

‘To say that this is some sort of ethnic problem is a lot of
nonsense’

James was clearly demarcating that human history, coded as the history of White Western man within Eurocentric centres of learning, is limited when that history is conflated as a singular ‘truth’ from the position of one dominant ethnic group over ‘others’. The purpose of Black studies, as envisaged by James in the 1960s, was not only to develop historical accounts that take seriously the presence of Black people at particular stages in human history, but one that would also subvert binary knowledge constructs that do away with the falsehood of ‘pure’ ethnic histories altogether. Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic approaches this problem of binary knowing and ethnic particularity by pointing out that even in the most extreme examples of European settlement where African people were enslaved and where the indigenous people of the Americas were slaughtered, such brutal extremities did not mean that the cultures and consciousness of both the coloniser and the colonised were hermetically sealed (Gilroy, 1993). For Gilroy, there is no ethnic absolutism that represents a definitive break in how Blackness and Whiteness have been assembled in modernity (Gilroy, 1993). The messy and brutal processes of racialisation, hybridity and syncretism are where Gilroy drops anchor on the shores of modernity and its colonial encounters with those who Europe ‘conquered, slaughtered and enslaved’,

The periodisation of the modern and the postmodern is thus of the most profound importance for the history of blacks in the West and for chronicling the shifting relations of domination and subordination between Europeans and the rest of the world. It is essential for our understanding of the category of ‘race’ itself and of the genesis and development of successive forms of racist ideology.

(Gilroy, 1993, 44)

The Black Atlantic is concerned with questioning the appeal of ethnic absolutism in the production of Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholarship. In Gilroy’s analysis, Afrocentrism is seen as falling into the same ethnic absolutist trap of producing tropes that situate Blackness, or more precisely, Africanness outside of Western modernity. Gilroy rightly questions the terms of this reclamation by arguing that it is dependent upon patriarchal and masculinist narratives. Afrocentricity is accused of retreating into the idea of tradition by focusing on the histories of pre-modern African civilisations as ‘a rhetorical gesture that asserts the legitimacy of a black political culture locked in a defensive posture against the unjust powers of white supremacy’ (Gilroy, 1993, 188). Gilroy’s critique of Afrocentricity is that in his view it overlooks slavery and modernity as important sites of knowledge that have the potential to illuminate the syncretic elements that shape the experience and condition of ‘double consciousness’ for the diasporic Black Atlantic. In revisiting and reconstructing history that underplays Black encounters with slavery and modernity, Afrocentricity is believed to be engaged and invested in ideas of African authenticity and purity unsullied by the aberration and brutalities of slavery (Gilroy, 1993). Through the explication of the ethnic absolutist entanglements of Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, Gilroy’s critique assumes the parity of moral equivalence between both schools of thought and their reliance on ethnic absolutist ways of knowing. However, while establishing the moral trajectory of any epistemological category is of critical importance, this work must exist alongside the fact that there is no parity of power in terms of knowledge production between Eurocentric systems of thought and systems of knowing that are ‘othered’, disavowed and marginalised within the Western academe. James’s dismissal of ethnic ways of knowing and Gilroy’s critique of ethnic absolutism must be understood to take account of the epistemological absolutism of Eurocentric thought that continues to operate and function as a single hegemonic ‘truth’.

Epistemological and social borders

The lure of a definitive fracture between what it means to be Black and what it means to be European remains at the heart of European forms of domination and governance over non-White non-Western human beings. The dominant European discourse on immigration, for example, which sits squarely next to expressions of anti-Black and anti-Muslim racisms, works to reinforce the idea that the ‘non-White other’ remains a recurring threat to the assumed coherency of European security and identity. Europe as an ethnic absolutist fantasy becomes heavily invested in bio-ethnic racial discourses of White hegemony that at once it seeks to uphold and deny through the performance of humanitarianism on one hand while enacting policies that institute race on the other. The abhorrent racism of David Cameron’s Government towards people crossing the Mediterranean Sea is one where an ethnic absolutist narrative is concerned with protecting and securing UK borders by dehumanising and criminalising migrant peoples. The blatant anti-African racism of the British Foreign Secretary, Phillip Hammond, was demonstrated during the summer of 2015 when he claimed that millions of ‘marauding’ African migrants were threatening European standards of living and its social structures (Perraudin, 2015). The dominant discourse on immigration in Britain is shaped by the hegemony of the British right-wing Government and media where racism is more widely blamed for regulating ‘European values’ of free speech and thought (Hart, 2014) rather than its insidious and ubiquitous role in structuring the terms of debate and of governance. David Cameron can therefore be condemned as ‘irresponsible’ for labelling migrants at the border of Calais as a ‘swarm’ equating their humanity to the lives of pesky insects, without racism being named as the problem that underpins this ideological position. Black and Brown proximity to death can only be normalised within a social context where Black and Brown bodies are routinely dehumanised and over regulated within racialised power structures that over validate White lives above all others. Regulating Black bodies and tolerating Black deaths underscores the rationale that Black deaths can be consumed and explained away as a recurring, if not necessary, spectacle to guard against the impending and perceived threat of White ‘cultural mutation’ (Gilroy, 1993, 2). Securing White Western hegemony as an ethnic absolutist fantasy has created an ugly, terrifying and perverse social order built on structures of knowing that position European states and European populations (to paraphrase Mignolo, 2011) as ‘the only victims in town’. In this hegemonic logic of White privilege, being called ‘a racist’ is perceived to be more damaging than social formations of racism because naming racism disrupts White racial comfort (DiAngelo, 2011). Such name calling fosters what is believed to be a harmful culture of ‘White conformity’ to multiculturalism (Hart, 2014). In this reality, the human disaster of Black and Brown people being abandoned to drown at sea becomes relegated by what is believed to be the more pressing issue of White individualised victims of freedom of speech. The whitewashing of freedom of speech permits British tabloid columnists such as Katie Hopkins to gleefully comment on the migrant crisis that, ‘No, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care’, all in the name of her protected freedom of expression (Hopkins, 2015). Such a toxic moral compass functions in a dysfunctional political climate where the British Government decides not to support search and rescue operations for migrants because the policy of allowing them to drown is believed to be a deterrent (Younge, 2015). Discourses that further produce false moral distinctions between ‘refugees’ and ‘economic migrants’ institute an anti-Black racist logic that appeals to populist sentiments where one group of humanity fleeing war in one region of the world are seen as m...