Black British Culture and Society

A Text Reader

Kwesi Owusu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134684144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Black British Culture and Society brings together in one indispensable volume key writings on the Black community in Britain, from the 'Windrush' immigrations of the late 1940s and 1950s to contemporary multicultural Britain. Combining classic writings on Black British life with new, specially commissioned articles, Black British Culture and Society records the history of the post-war African and Caribbean diaspora, tracing the transformations of Black culture in British society.
Black British Culture and Society explores key facets of the Black experience, charting Black Britons' struggles to carve out their own identity and place in an often hostile society. The articles reflect the rich diversity of the Black British experience, addressing economic and social issues such as health, religion, education, feminism, old age, community and race relations, as well as Black culture and the arts, with discussions of performance, carnival, sport, style, literature, theatre, art and film-making. The contributors examine the often tense relationship between successful Black public figures and the media, and address the role of the Black intellectual in public life. Featuring interviews with noted Black artists and writers such as Aubrey Williams, Mustapha Matura and Caryl Phillips, and including articles from key contemporary thinkers, such as Stuart Hall, A. Sivanandan, Paul Gilroy and Henry Louis Gates, Black British Culture and Society provides a rich resource of analysis, critique and comment on the Black community's distinctive contribution to cultural life in Britain today.

Section Two
CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF A BLACK BRITISH CULTURAL DISCOURSE

PART 1: CULTURAL IDENTITY AND SELF-REPRESENTATION

Issues around Black cultural identity and notions of Britishness represent some of the most contested areas of debate in contemporary British society. Whilst the political right, led by figures such as Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher and the late Enoch Powell has argued for an exclusive white national identity, there is now widespread recognition of the multiracial nature of British society; the result of demographic and cultural transformations throughout the period following the Second World War. The essays gathered here (Chapters 12–16) explore what this new multiracialism means, especially to the Black subject. Henry Louis Gates Jr, the American scholar, offers his ‘outsider’s’ view of Black Britain, highlighting its influences on the society at large, as well as presenting us with his choice of the main ‘movers’ and ‘shakers’. Ben Carrington’s essay on Linford Christie and Frank Bruno, arguably the two most popular Black Britons, explores one of the central themes of this book: Black Britons’ claim to nationhood. This is interrogated historically in Maya Jaggi’s interview with writer Caryl Phillips, and in Fred D’Aguiar’s autobiographical essay. Ferdinand Dennis’s account of Black life in Birmingham in the aftermath of civil disturbances of 1981 investigates the social impact of urban decay and the widening cultural gap between many Black Britons and British society.

PART 2: BLACK ARTS AND CULTURAL MEDIA

Part 2 (Chapters 17–24) interrogates the Black arts and cultural media, focusing on the problematics of self-representation. These are explored in a broad range of media including cinema, theatre, performance poetry, and the visual arts.

PART 3: CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP

Part 3 (Chapters 25–8) brings together texts that highlight how a new critical scholarship is engaging issues of contemporary relevance and concern. Heidi Mirza intervenes in the controversial debate on ‘race’ and social intelligence, while James Nazroo revisits the racialization debate in the sociology of health. Karen St Jean’s essay responds to the idea, publicized by the Black press, that Black economic success is now a significant feature of the national economy. The essay also discusses the impact on the Caribbean. Cecil Gutzmore explores the politics of the Notting Hill Carnivals, highlighting its artistic and policing paradoxes.

PART 4: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN GENDER DEBATES

The texts gathered here (Chapters 29–32) take a challenging look at issues around sexuality and gender. Carolyn Cooper focuses on the romantic world of reggae music and the controversial lyricism of the ‘dancehall’ (ragga), making a defence of singer Shabba Ranks against charges of sexism. Aminatta Forna’s essay raises the issue of motherhood within feminism. She makes a case for the recognition of the African concept of motherhood common to most Black cultures around the world. Clare Alexander shifts the emphasis to the study of young Black men and their relationships with Black and white women. Richard Majors, Vincent Wilkinson and Bill Gulam examine the problematic position of young Black males within British society. Their focus is a unique mentoring project in Manchester that is trying to provide an alternative to the wasteful cycle of miseducation, joblessness and prison.

12 DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BLACK BRITISH ATHLETE

Ben Carrington

Fifteen years ago we didn’t care, or at least I didn’t care, whether there was any black in the Union Jack. Now not only do we care, we must.

(Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’)

Introduction

This chapter seeks to address some of the implications of Stuart Hall’s remark, in the late 1980s, concerning the politics of Black Britons’ claims to nationhood, by tracing the problematic and complex positioning of Black athletes within contemporary British society. If we want to talk seriously about aspects of national identity and the place of Black Britons, then we cannot do so without some understanding of the importance of sport, for top-performance competitive male sports, in particular, continue to hold a central symbolic place within the popular-nationalist consciousness.

I explore these issues by providing a brief genealogy of, arguably, the two most famous Black people in Britain at the end of the 1990s, namely Linford Christie and Frank Bruno. The fact that these two people are both Black sportsmen is itself instructive in highlighting the restricted opportunities that continue to be available to Blacks living in Britain and can be seen as evidence of both Black achievement and continuing racial discrimination within British society.

I argue that we can map on to the lives, careers and mediated-public personas of these two athletes something about the condition of Black people living in Britain, and of British society itself. Both men, in admittedly limited ways and not without contradictions, offer a response to contemporary cultural racisms that posit the inherent incompatibility of ‘Blackness’ and ‘Britishness’, and provide at least the beginnings for more progressive positionings for Black Britons in an increasingly hostile environment.

The Black British athlete, however, is placed in a seemingly impossible position in being called upon to represent both ‘the nation’ and ‘the race’ at a time when such a subject formation, and the conditions under which this is possible, is constantly being challenged and fought over from both sides. We might suggest, following Du Bois (1994:3), that the Black British athlete simply wishes to make it possible for a Black Briton to be both Black and British, without being cursed and spat upon by their fellows, and without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in their face.

Where’s the white in the Union Jack?

In looking at contemporary sports (athletics and boxing in particular) we might provocatively ask, reversing Gilroy’s (1987) appropriation of the far right chant, where’s the white in the Union Jack? It has long been acknowledged that the very presence of Black athletes wrapped in the Union Jack still provides a distressing sight for the far right in visibly and publicly challenging the claim that ‘there ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’.¹

Currently, the ‘fact of racism’ is a phenomenon that dare not speak its name in many spheres of British society. Blacks, and Black athletes in particular, will be rewarded if they subscribe to the view that racism is non-existent within British society, or at least that it is a minor aberration, or better still if they avoid the issue altogether. But the athlete who highlights racism, or even dares to suggest that racism might be a factor within contemporary British life is immediately labelled as being paranoid, oversensitive, bitter, ungrateful and troublesome. This ultimately affects how easily they are accepted as ‘British’. As Dave Hill pondered, somewhat perplexed:

In this country, those who award membership to the sporting True Brit club frequently get it wrong. Frank Bruno, that tireless self-parody of relatively limited boxing achievements, has been wholly accepted, yet Linford Christie, a committed national team captain and arguably the greatest British sportsman of our era, has never really been made welcome.

(1997:9)

What Hill fails to realize is that it is the very rules upon which Blacks are accepted into the ‘national family’ (or the sporting True Brit club) that are the key to understanding Christie’s and Bruno’s differing public and media receptions. Christie presents a problem to the British media because by publicly mentioning the fact of racism he begins to disrupt the normative codes within which Black athletes are supposed to work, and is thus seen as ‘a problem’.

Bruno, on the other hand, works prodigiously to endorse a conservative conceptualization of the nation, supposedly at ease with itself and free from racial antagonisms, and is thus accepted unquestionably into the nation. Bruno is thus presented as the acceptable face of Black masculinity, supposedly symbolizing what Blacks as a whole could achieve if only they would stop ‘whingeing’ about racism and commit themselves more fully to being ‘British’.

There are numerous striking parallels and contrasts between the two men. Both were born in the early 1960s to Caribbean migrants (Christie was born in Jamaica, Bruno in England) and both achieved their sporting goals in their chosen careers. Both men are often presented in a similar way when their life stories are told. The underlying narrative is one of the dysfunctional Black male on the verge of crime and delinquency (Bruno was sent to a borstal home for ‘disruptive boys’ during his teenage years and Christie too left school with few qualifications, both having numerous, shortterm, manual jobs before ‘finding sport’) as a result of weak Black family structures without strong male figures. (Bruno’s father died when he was fourteen and Christie’s grandmother appears to have had the strongest influence on his upbringing).

Christie and Bruno are seen essentially as having been ‘saved’ by sport from the abyss of Black ghetto life (evidence of the myth of sport as a ‘way out of poverty’) and, significantly, by white male ‘father figures’ (Bruno’s former manager Terry Lawless, and occasionally the commentator Harry Carpenter, perform this ‘father-like’ role for Bruno; Ron Roddan, his coach, for Christie). White patriarchs and sport are therefore cast as the only means by which the excesses of Black masculinity can be controlled and refocused towards more socially beneficial aims.

Linford Christie: ‘I want them to treat me as a man, not as a Black man’

Christie occupies a paradoxical place within the public imagination, both challenging and reinforcing dominant ideologies about Black Britons, often in equal measure. Unlike Bruno, Christie has never fitted comfortably within the narrow parameters within which a Black man is supposed to conform (docile, loyal, deferent). As a result his relationship with the British media, especially the print media, has been, ‘turbulent, to put it mildly’ (Profile 1996:3).

The dominant media view is that, unlike other Black athletes, Christie has never been truly grateful to those (athletics/the media/the British public) who gave him the opportunities to gain the wealth he now has. Christie is thus constructed very much like the ‘uppity nigger’, ungrateful, rebellious and paranoid about his persecution. Most commentators are careful to avoid directly positioning Christie in this way and therefore often code their language, usually using criticisms of Christie by other Black figures, sometimes taken out of context, to justify their comments and to side-step any simple charges of racism. It is virtually impossible to read a commentary on Christie without a quote from the alleged remark made by Derek Redmond. The Sunday Times’s profile of Christie is typical:

even his colleagues recognise the volatile, prickly and hyper-sensitive side to his nature. Derek Redmond, the former British record holder at 400 metres, famously described his running mate as ‘perfectly balanced because he’s got a chip on both shoulders’. One chip at least, is his belief that he has been continually misrepresented by the press.

(1996:3)

Never has a Black athlete been quoted as often as Redmond. If Christie signifies a particular view of Black masculinity we can see how the ‘volatile, prickly and hypersensitive’ narratives become transposed on to Black men in Britain more generally, reinforcing popular representations about the supposed inherent instability of Black masculinity.

Black sprinter, white laughs

Christie’s penalty for his refusal to accommodate to the media and his assertion of an identity not reducible to the safe image of the ‘good black’ was to be subjected to a racialized discourse of sexualization that sought to undermine his achievements by reducing him, with an almost pathological fascination, to discussions about the size of his genitalia. Frantz Fanon (1986) reminded us long ago that the central component to the emasculating discourses of racism is an attempt simultaneously to dehumanize and to sexualize the Black male body, in effect denying him his humanity.

The Black man is thus reduced to his biological essence: ‘The Negro symbolizes the biological’ (Fanon 1986:187). The logical conclusion to this sexualized discourse is that, via the process of objectification, the Black man is effectively reduced to the phallus: ‘one is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis’ (1986:170). Fanon continues to suggest that there ‘is one expression that throughout time has become singularly eroticized: the Black athlete’ (1986:158). Thus, of all the colonial fantasies about the Black male, it is the Black athlete who has to carry the full burden of white fantasies about the Other (and who other than the Olympic sprint champion could lay claim to being the ultimate athlete).

The ambivalent and contradictory fascination with the Black male sporting body has nowhere been more clearly displayed than on the body of Christie himself, which has become the site for white male fears and fantasies about the sexual excesses of Black masculinity.

In the days and weeks following his success in winning the 1992 Olympic 100 metres Gold, Christie was subjected to an intense and systematic process of objectification and sexualisation. Following Christie’s Olympic success, the Sun ran a feature under the heading ‘10 WAYS TO PACK YOUR LUNCH BOX LIKE LINFORD’:

LINFORD CHRISTIE is way out in front in every department—and we don’t just mean the way he stormed to victory in the 100 metres in Barcelona. His skin-tight lycra shorts hide little as he pounds down the track and his Olympic-sized talents are a source of delight for women around the world. But the mystery remains…just what does Linford, 32, pack in that famous lunchbox? The Sun…decided to pack model Lawrence Jean-Baptiste’s lycra shorts with a variety of goodies to achieve that look. You may notice that we have featured only nine ways to create the look. The tenth way is to be born like Linford.

(6 August 1992:15)

Significantly, the model chosen to wear the various items that were put down his lycra shorts was Black. As Christie and his ‘lunch box’ have come to signify Black male sexuality, any Black person could have accompanied the piece, the assumption bei...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction charting the genealogy of black british cultural studies
• Section One: Classic texts from postwar narratives
• Section Two: Critical elements of a black british cultural discourse
• Section Three: Cultural studies and black political debate
• Section Four: Diaspora and new trajectories of globalization
• Notes on contributors