Paul Gilroy | ukwatch.net

Stories of Black Britain in Pictures

Ellie Keen — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:18:21 +0000

Your new book, Black Britain: a photographic history, is a very different type of book from those that have made your name. What persuaded you to curate and write a book based around photographs?

I’d been living in the US for a number of years, and I returned to Britain and felt the environment around the politics of racism has been radically changed, on the one hand by the issue of security, and on the other by some of the things that New Labour has done. A whole generation of activists – my generation – seem to be management consultants! Even the black nationalists are busy managing the health service and the police.

On the other hand, young people are in transition from a Caribbean majority to an African majority. Many of them do not have the kind of information at their disposal to understand their predicament properly. So those young people are disoriented, and they’ve been abandoned by that managerial turn of the 1970s activist group.

I felt that a lot of these young people think they’re African American in the way that they model their style, habits, analysis of their situation, rapping their postcode and wearing their trousers low. They’ve been transformed by a sort of generic blackness they’ve drawn from the music they listen to and the videos they watch. They don’t really have a historical sense of themselves as a group. There are a few refugee families, but they are mostly kids who were born here.

I wanted to put some images back into their pathway and stimulate their curiosity, and these are people who are not reading for the most part – communication is already skewed towards the visual by video and other technologies.

In terms of your own analysis of black Britain, what do you think has changed in the period over which you have captured the photographs?

The integration of Caribbean descendants and early African settlers of the 1950s into the working class of this country has sort of happened. It’s regionally complicated, but basically that’s sorted.

There are still issues, but if you look at the rates of inter-marriage, and particular strands in employment, you begin to see that most of the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the original migrants have moved into a kind of working class life. That’s something that we can afford to feel good about.

It wasn’t in any sense the product of government policy. It resulted from the work done in workplaces, schools and criminal justice by people who said that the far right, the nationalists and racists had no place there. Many young people will now stand up and say, “I am British and whatever,” but they don’t necessarily understand how that came to be possible, and I wanted the photographs to offer some insight.

You talk about the transition from invisibility to visibility not as a smooth process but as the product of a series of bitter struggles.

I used to be against tokenism, but actually I think it’s necessary to have a bit of it, so long as you don’t think by having the tokens in visible positions you’ve solved the problem of racism.

The tokenism isn’t for the benefit of the black tokens – it’s for the benefit of a white public which is phobic about its proximity to the dangers and perils of blackness.

The issue of tokenism poses the question about the current debate about absent fathers, gun crime, role models and so on.

I know there are people and institutional voices who are working very hard to racialise the question of gun crime, but I don’t think those are issues taking us back to 1970s arguments of black violence, with the gunman standing in for the mugger.

I don’t believe that offering people role models is the answer. It’s so short of what needs to be thought through and what needs to be done that it’s embarrassing.

A couple of weeks ago Darcus Howe wrote a piece on the “New Nation Power List” in which he used the example of the head of the Prison Officers’ Union, Colin Moses. He said, “If we are going to have lists let’s have someone like that, let’s deal with someone who has gone into the deepest, worst, National Front heartland of the criminal justice system and came out of it saying ‘I’m a trade unionist – given that we’ve been given an impossible job by the government, we’re going to do a humane job if we can.’”

I don’t want to be starry eyed about prison officers but if you are going to have role models pick them more carefully than business people. I was ashamed to be included in all that rubbish.

How did you go about choosing the images?

A lot of the tone came through conversations with Stuart Hall who was the original co-author but whose health prevented him from playing a full role. He emphasised the need for pictures of everyday life. It was difficult. When people are at work, at play, when they’re loving, when they’re loose, there aren’t so many photographs. It was newsworthy when it was pathology, crime and violence, but it wasn’t interesting when it was just ordinary life.

I was also very keen on the military aspects. There is a lot of talk about Britishness these days. The test of any national identity is whether you are prepared to die and kill for your country. That is the bottom line. It’s clear that the black population, commonwealth people, colonial subjects, were always prepared to die and kill for this country, and I wanted that absolutely in the centre.

In the earlier part of the book there are a lot of images from outside of London.

I didn’t want to tell a London centred story. There is a London centred story, and it’s beautiful and I know it very well. But I felt it was essential that this wasn’t just a London landscape. So of course the port cities like Cardiff and Liverpool are represented, but also Scotland, Wales and what little I could find from Ireland.

What do you mean by the London story being beautiful?

Part of the organic transformation of working class life in London means that I don’t see many young people being chased for their life any more.

When my mum came to England in 1952 she used to have to run for her life from the teddy boys in Brixton; when I was a teenager I used to run for my life from the skinheads. The generation of people a bit older than me couldn’t walk the street with a white woman – they had to walk 30 yards behind them. So in that sense I’m happy that those things have been largely resolved. I don’t say there aren’t the Anthony Walkers and the Stephen Lawrences, but that doesn’t happen on every street corner. There are pockets of it, but it’s not like it was, when the city was saturated. Nowadays it’s deaths in custody we have to worry about.

You should look at the resolutions from the TUC conferences of the late 1950s. The nurses’ unions were saying, “We don’t want black nurses to have special treatment: they’re being given heaters when we don’t get heaters.” On the buses Sikhs wanted to wear their turbans. People talk about the veil now but don’t remember the battle over turbans. The white women conductors in the union said, “If they’ve got their turbans, we want to be able to wear our headscarves.”

It’s not just the way racism works, although that’s part of it. The general temper of postmodern life isn’t friendly to recovering any history.

When you talk about US culture, do you mean hip hop culture?

When I say hip hop culture it sounds like I’m saying the cultures of the black working class but that’s not what I mean. 50 Cent isn’t that – he’s a corporate projection. It’s the entertainment business, which has a strong commercial interest in circulating an official version of defiance while piling up large amounts of loot and voting for George Bush.

Even the tension between 50 Cent and Kanye West, it’s all ritualised. But don’t get the idea I’m blaming black culture because how much that’s got to do with black culture I can’t even see. I went to see Get Rich or Die Trying with my daughter. Everyone else in the cinema was Polish, so that should be telling you something too. Thirty years on it’s mainstream.

A few years ago the role models debate was being turned round. Some argued that black boys didn’t have low esteem, they had high esteem because of the dominance of all these images, but the problem was it wasn’t focusing on academic achievement.

Why would it focus on academic achievement in a situation where to be educated is to be in debt? There’s no mystery in that. People say, “It’s a corporate good to train people up for our great and glorious industry; it’s a private good because you can earn more money than others, so it’s appropriate for you to make a contribution.”

The idea that it might be a social good to have people who can read and write and communicate at a high level – not to someone else’s specification of what a docile worker might need to know – is never discussed. We’re all better off if people are more highly educated. I’ve never said this before, but in my little core of Orwellian English patriotism, my heart breaks when I see the generation of people coming up learning less than we learned, and the next generation will learn even less.

There are really difficult issues in how all these people are “managing change”. They were activists. Now they are complicit in the privatisation of whole layers of social services and local government.

I get a letter a week asking if I would sign up for some consultancy “reforming” the NHS or the army and I reply saying that I don’t believe in privatising these things and I don’t want any part in it. The consultancy hustle is really out of control. I know it isn’t just something black people do, but it seems to have a specific sort of appeal to us and helps to explain the emergence of this black middle class, which isn’t really middle class at all; it’s an insecure group.

I think there was a real sense of that in the immediate aftermath of the publication of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry when the government laid itself down and admitted there was institutional racism.

They’ve rolled back quite a distance since then. Not only are we not supposed to talk about racism any longer, but in a number of areas there has been a very extensive fightback from people who understood that was going to take away a large degree of their power, not least in education where the number of black students and academics is pitiful.

The London School of Economics always seems to do very well in being able to show there are black and minority ethnic people here. But they are not local – they are sons and daughters of an international class. They help to buffer the institution from accusations that they don’t serve the needs of local people.

When I was working at Yale in the US they had a substantial number of minority students, but most were one generation away from migration – Caribbean or African. For the most part they were not African Americans in the sense that they had historic attachments to that place.

What’s interesting is that the pressure to integrate culturally arises at a moment when people don’t really know what British culture is. If you ask people what it means to be British you’ll get a range of answers. If there was football going on you’d get a lot of answers about sport; you’d probably get answers about monarchy. You might get arguments about the Second World War as a place people like to revisit as a source of national pride – “We stood against fascism and we won.”

This is another reason why I want to put some black people in that story into my book. But for the most part there wouldn’t be a consensus over what it is to be British. English, maybe. They might say that’s beer, cricket, fish and chips. A lot of it is imported, of course. But British culture? Something that brings together Welsh and Scottish and Scouse and Geordie and the protestant Irish and the Cockneys? It doesn’t make sense. They want to make a statement of British values, and beat up the incomers as a way of telling themselves who they are.

Did you have a particular audience in mind for the book?

No. My ideal reader would be someone under the age of 25 with a curiosity about the past, people who aren’t content with having 50 Cent as the measure of blackness. Maybe people can develop a different kind of appreciation of their grandparents and the things that they suffered, the things they gave up, to make life habitable now. That’s really what I wanted to do.

Some of those pictures really transmit that. There’s the guy demonstrating by the roadside with homemade banners about house prices, inflation, “Britain invaded”, “White Britons – who’s taking care of us?” and so on. It’s all the same stuff that the BNP are still coming out with. Now you’ve got New Labour people – many of them migrants – saying, “We can migrate to this country but other people can’t.” They pull up the ladder behind them.

But that sort of defensive, white, nationalist, racist eruption of feeling – and the anxiety and the fear that drive it – is not something that comes out of the present, not something that actually comes out of having refugees and asylum seekers competing in your labour market.

The fact that this picture’s 40 years old shows that it isn’t just something that’s growing out of present conditions. There’s a historical weight to it that ties it to past experiences. That’s important for people to realise.

Paul Gilroy’s Black Britain is published by Saqi, £19.99.

Slave Trade Commemorations

Alex Doherty — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:38:45 +0000

“Leading black intellectual Paul Gilroy spoke at a Socialist Worker meeting last week attended by 300 people on ‘Who Really Ended the Slave Trade?’ It discussed the commemoration of the 1807 Act that formally ended the trade in the British Empire. Here are extracts from his speech.

‘The commemoration is a fantastically important moment for this country. It’s a chance to reflect, a chance to remember, a chance to honour a history of struggle.

But it’s also a chance to make an assessment of black social life in this country, about the shape and place of racism here and about the contemporary relevance of racial divisions to the politics, economics and cultural life of this country.

Like many of you I’m sure, I really wanted to support the commemoration. But I found it hard to join in the official version of it.

For me it felt too much like a “business as usual” operation.

It was missing the elephant in the room – capitalism – and what the history of slavery tells us about the transition of capitalism from its mercantile to its industrial forms, and what these commemorations tell us about the condition of contemporary capitalism in our country.

Slaves were property, they were pieces of property. And their sufferings and their resistance offer, I would claim, a deeper commentary on the idea of private property than the one that comes out of the Marxist tradition.

Perhaps here we can agree that the history of slavery requires us to think about capitalism and its continuous mutations.

But there’s another point, a point about the commemorations themselves as a kind of property, a point about the critique of life as property, of humanity as property, and of history as property.

Those of us whose ancestors were property shouldn’t relate to this history as if it were now somebody’s private cultural property. It doesn’t belong to anybody.

CLR James in 1969 wrote an essay on Black Studies which was rising up in the academic sense at that time. He says, “To talk to me of Black Studies as something only of concern to black people is an utter denial.

“This history is the history of Western civilisation. I can’t see it otherwise – this is a history that black people and white people – all serious students of modern history and the history of the world – have to know.”

We do hear a lot about Britishness these days. It seems to me that part of the explosion of official commemoration is about that.

They say it’s a matter of British “values”, and this commemorative process is about a celebration and affirmation of the values they want to claim and they want to monopolise.

I think that the idea is to show that their capitalism, and the colonial imperial adventures that they’re trying to bring back now, are somehow clean operations, infused with the moral spirit of the legacy of abolitionism.

That view is affirmed in the “Great Man” theory of how the slave trade was brought to an end, by William Wilberforce above all.

I have nothing against Wilberforce – I admire him and he should most certainly be celebrated.

I like the idea that British people might be made to identify with a humane figure, one who made efforts to achieve this notable source of good.

But I don’t think he achieved these things by himself, or that the amount of good he did personally corresponds exactly to the volume of the bad stuff that preceded it.

1807 isn’t the biggest deal in any case. The Danes decreed abolition in 1792, and of course after the abolition of the trade, slavery continued.

In 1816, eight years after prohibition, the African Society of London told Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary at that time, that an estimated 60,000 slaves were being shipped across the Atlantic every year.

British interests supported and provisioned that operation, mostly in Spanish ships carrying slaves to Brazil and Cuba. That process continued through the 1840s.

The vein of work established by Eric Williams, the great Trinidadian historian, argues that directly and indirectly, the profits obtained from the triangular trade between Britain, Africa and the New World colonies provided one of the main streams for the accumulation of capital which financed the industrial revolution.

That work has been vilified and attacked systematically over and over again for at least 60 years.

Williams’ critics want their liberal tradition to be clean and wholesome. They want to dwell in a world where moral sentiments might be seen, even now, to dominate economic imperatives.

They are disoriented by the idea that capitalism remains a brutal and unchecked system which continues into the present, enveloped in violence.

So the history of the slave trade, in a distorted official version, becomes a way to keep the histories of capitalism and liberalism clean, to keep them sanctified.

That’s what the commemoration is addressed to, rather than the rapacious turbo-capitalism and the new imperial adventures of the present.’

The following should be read alongside this article:
» Videos of Paul Gilroy and Weyman Bennett on the end of the slave trade

Paul Gilroy is a professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics.

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Why Harry's Disoriented About Empire

Alex Doherty — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 11:51:53 +0000

Prince Harry’s indiscretions have been seen in the context of the Auschwitz anniversary and the failure of his elite education. His youth, his ignorance, poor parenting and a hatred of political correctness have all been offered in mitigation.

These explanations are insufficient. To leave interpretation of his conduct on that level would be to miss an opportunity to understand something fundamental about the cultural life of a post-colonial country that has never dealt with the consequences of its loss of empire.

Harry’s behaviour, rather than just being part of the sub-culture of a group of toffs, raises mainstream themes. The telling mix of Nazis and colonial fantasy provides an insight into the core of the two-world-wars-and-one-world-cup mentality. That nihilistic outlook dictates that conflicts against Hitler and Hitlerism remain imaginatively close while Britain’s many wars of decolonisation – particularly in Africa, Malaya, Cyprus and Aden – are to be actively forgotten.

Standing firm against Nazis comforts Brits by making them feel righteous and perennially innocent. Being forced to reckon with the ongoing consequences of imperial crimes makes them uncomfortable in equal measure.

This odd pattern has a psychological aspect. Its neurotic repetitions reveal an insidious blockage in British culture, something that helps in turn to explain the political resonance of Ukip and the BNP as well as to illuminate the xenophobia and violence that can co-exist with great compassion as long as its dusky beneficiaries remain sufficiently distant.

As the generation of 39-45 combatants dies out, we drift towards becoming an anxious nation that can’t get away from the Nazis it pluckily vanquished, or past the loss of its imperial pre-eminence.

The vanished empire is essentially unmourned. The meaning of its loss remains pending. The chronic, nagging pain of its absence feeds a melancholic attachment. This is both to nazism – the unchanging evil we need to always see ourselves as good – and to a resolutely air-brushed version of colonial history in which gunboat diplomacy was moral uplift, civilising missions were completed, the trains ran on time and the natives appreciated the value of stability.

These dream worlds are revisited compulsively. They saturate the cultural landscape of contemporary Britain. The distinctive mix of revisionist history and moral superiority offers pleasures and distractions that defer a reckoning with contemporary multiculture and postpone the inevitable issue of imperial reparation.

Some old imperial follies are being replayed in Mesopotamia. The substantive lessons of the colonial period are spurned. The history of empire is trivialised so that it becomes congruent with the playful mood of the fancy-dress party that imperial rule always was.

Notwithstanding New Labour’s sanctimonious words about the plight of Africa, this melancholia is a new and very British disease. Here, too, a contrast with Germany becomes instructive.

Scholars and activists from throughout the world gathered in Berlin recently to consider the centenary of the mass killing of the Herero people in south-west Africa, then under German colonial rule. Descendants of Lothar von Trotha, the architect of that genocidal scheme, joined the conversation, not to divert it into arid guilt, but to help in making a measure of shame productive. Understanding that episode was connected to using its history to build a more hospitable and more just Europe that would not be hostile in the face of aliens and strangers.

Caroline Elkins’s recent book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya supplies a devastating indictment of the brutality and duplicity of British colonial rule in that country. She demonstrates the profound force of racism in shaping the operations of imperial government during the “emergency”. She then confronts the disturbing and complicated intersections and overlaps between the results of exported British democracy and the cruel practice of anti-democratic regimes animated by race-lore, ultranationalism and civilisationist cant.

In the light of these post-colonial developments, Britain is being challenged to accept a historical story that can accommodate both nazism and colonialism, that can explore their complex connections and use a sophisticated grasp of race and empire to explain them to disoriented young people like Prince Harry.

They will need to understand Britain’s colonial history in order to strengthen its contemporary multiculture. That is the best way to make “never again” the cornerstone of a more just nation where our civilisation might even be judged according to its ability to make reparation for those buried, disavowed and mystified colonial crimes.

· Paul Gilroy is chair of the department of African American studies at Yale University