4: Political Blackness

In this country in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white The whites have become black If you open your door to uncontrolled immigration from Middle Eastern countries who are advising The British people have voted to leave the European Union and the will must be respected This is not a racial problem always says that we've got enough immigrants into the country and that no more should be allowed in Welcome back to About Race with Rene Edo Lodge In the last two episodes of this series I took a deep dive into the politics of whiteness Looking particularly at how it functioned during key UK elections You'll notice in those episodes that I was very careful not to use the word "black" to describe people who are not white In my work I use the term "people of color" to define anyone of any race that isn't white And in this episode I want to dig into the meaning of the word "black" One thing I noticed when I was recording for this podcast was how many of my interviews wanted to talk about this idea of political blackness Often it came up in our conversations unprompted Let me tell you a story In 2016 Kent University Student Union Ignited Internet Aga after they included the pop star Zayn Malik and the politician Cedit Khan in a post-display for black history month The student union was called a national embarrassment by one of its own members and the official Twitter account for black history month tweeted deeply disappointed that Kent unions ill thought and misdirected black history month celebrations With Asian heritage month being observed by a growing number of countries in May Will black icons be celebrated at Kent University then? March press coverage and bewildered commentary ensued The president of Kent Student Union ended up issuing a statement It read I want to apologise on behalf of Kent Union to any individuals who are upset Uncomfortable or offended by the image shared There was no intent for this to happen and I am very sorry to anybody who felt this way Whilst we made every effort to include black and minority ethnic students on the planning for the month Clearly we haven't got it right on this occasion I can understand the anger. I mean Asian people are Asian right? Not black black people are black But it appears that this has not always been the case Kent Union didn't really explain it very well in their initial statement But it seems that what their poster exhibition was referring to was a political kind of blackness It's quite difficult to find an official definition But I understand black in the political sense works as an umbrella term in order to be an organizing tool against white supremacy I sometimes call it trade union black Because when I was first getting involved in politics that's where I first saw it in use I remember being dead against it at the time This was on the basis that its use wasn't widespread enough So rather than having its unifying intent it was actually alienating My stance back then appears to be the consensus now Have you seen that backlash against you? No, it's been a huge backlash against how do you have political blanches when we came in in an AC7? Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington for over three decades She was the first black woman in Britain to be elected to Parliament We spoke in her port colors house office there were for the benefit of the tape Diane's looking for something what she found you got picture here This is a picture of It's a picture of me and Bernie and Jeremy actually and Bernie grants why so we've got we've got a very young looking Diane here We've got Bernie Grant was it was he an MP at this point? Yeah, yeah, so he was the MP for Tottenham Yeah, which is where I grew up then we've got a very young looking Jeremy Corbyn with a very very full beard and Lady on the end who you say she was Bernie Grant's wife Sharon Grant Sharon Grant and she was a counsellor in Harringay and Jeremy was a counsellor in Harringay also so yeah, there's been a huge backlash against political blackness so when we all got Elected in 87 he's was actually from and go I think he's an Indian from from Della Poor by time his father was a Ghanaian politician his mother was in English. I think Poor I think he was born in this country, but he spent a certain amount of time in Ghana as a young person Bernie Grant was born in Ghana and I was born in my family for my stenders, but we had no problem in calling ourselves black but From the 90s onwards there was a challenge to the nation of political blackness and first of all people They need some continent said we're not black and Then even within the Indian subcontinent you had Hindus saying we're not Muslim and Muslims saying we're we're not Hindus and then Even in Africa you had people from Northern Nigeria saying We're houses, we're not black and you got your office saying we're your over and you got either saying we're either and so what you've seen over the past 20 years is a pushback against the concept of political blackness and increasing fragmentation because if it means more to you to assert your identity as a Eurobar then To assert your identity as a black person then you're looking at a weakened political push I'm I mean my family's from Jamaica. It's born here my family's from Jamaica. I'm very proud to be a Jamaican I think even though I was born here, I see myself as culturally still that's my cultural heritage and I'm proud of it And I think it's important to be proud of your cultural heritage But I think the extent to which the black community has fragmented and has rejected any notion of political blackness Has tended to weaken it. That's my view Diane says that as a community we have lost the notion of collectivism I remember going down to Brixton the day after the riots and Walking along the streets and was broken glass Ashes and it was just extraordinary. So what the riots did? Those rights nearly eighties First of all, I think they built a case ofness Because if you were right on the street now, I'm saying are you Nigerian? Are you from Sri Lanka? Are you Indian? You were a person of color when you were writing but also They made the society stop and think about issues around black representation Which I've never thought about before clearly a shadow him secretary I'm not saying that I support violence in any form But there's no question historically that the reason you're able to get black people elected to parliament at all Was not because people tell me I said oh, I know this will be nice. Let's have black people in parliament. It was a conversion so What happened in the eighties? Which was the election of the first time of full Self-defined blackhead peace being elected in 19th and for the first time Myself Benny Grant Keith Thar and of course Paul Butter But you also had around the same period you had the emergence of black council leaders like Bernie Grant and Linda Bellos and I think that the emergence of that early generation of black council leaders and specifically the emergence of Paul and Bernie and Keith and myself owes everything to the urban insurrection of the alien there's a convergence actually of a generation of Struggling activity by people like the race to their collective It was a convergence of the kind of realisism effect on the society of the riots and the fact that I mean the people I refer to as black leaders in the eighties like as I say John the Rose and Fruit Don Deer and dockshound so forth were born abroad without any exception So the point was that my generation generation was born here and our slogan our favorite little slogan was get stay here to fight root Don De about his time as Channel 4's multicultural commissioner. But he was also a committed member of the British Black Panther League during the 1970s. He's South Asian. I found the Black Panther movement extremely impressive. They were talking since. They were not talking cult of leadership. They were not talking back to Africa, Black nationalism. They were talking about how do we find a place in British society here with all the rights that we should have. And the leaders, very charismatic young lady from Tridad called Althea Jones. At the time she was undoubtedly the leader, right? She was a student. She was doing university medical students. They saw that I had done my reading on socialism and so forth. And so they recruited me to the movement. And I soon became a member of the central core, right? There was no colorism in the Black Panther movement. Obviously there were no white members. There were supporters, associates. But the membership was basically Asian and Black. They saw it as a common fight against the ex-colonial masters. Thoreau told me about the horrific racism he faced when he first moved to England. The simplest one was they never served you in pubs. If you went as one or two or three or four Asians in a group, your friends, you went to a pub. They stood you at the bar and they ignore you for half an hour, even though you said, "Sir, can I have a glass of beer, sir?" "Can I have a glass of beer?" "You excuse me please?" They wouldn't listen. Landlords, we lived in bed sitters if we could afford it because we earned our money working dogs, cleaning flats, as a graduate who didn't have a regular job. And you couldn't get a bed sitter unless it was from say, "A Pakistan, you landlord." Or somebody who said, "Okay, we'll give you this dirty room." So you had the dirty room. You shed the bathroom with 28 other people. If you went to a house which was, say, South Kensington or even Notting Hill, they'd say, "Sorry, the room's just gone." You wandered around for days, sleeping on friends floors, and tried to get a room with your own. And then, of course, on football nights, I met with people coming up, the escalators would give you a slap as they passed or just catch you because you didn't look as though you were a supporter of Celtic or Arsenal or God knows. He was living above a squatted bookshop in Brickston, named Freedom News in the early 1970s. We'd sell black literature, black history from there, and so on. I lived on the second floor. And one day on the 15th of March, 1973, I woke up with the whole place full of smoke. I thought somebody was smothering me with a pillow. And I got up and I couldn't see anything. Open the window of the second floor. Took a deep breath. The whole place was on fire. Freedom News bookshop. The glass was bursting out towards the fire. That's what happens. Somebody had bombed into the place. Feroube told me that he and many others believed that the far-right national front were behind the bombing. I had to jump out of the second floor window, broke my ankle, and got burned to this and that. That was the worst case of racism that I have faced. Somebody had killed me with a fire bomb. I'm going to ask if the police have a court then, but I think I already know the answer. They never did the police never even question me. They did no wrong to know. (upbeat music) I mean, how'd you feel about that backlash against the idea of trade union, black, political? It's the most disgraceful thing that has happened to our ex-colonial community. I used to call them new communities. Now, they're not new communities. They're pretty damned established communities beginning with new generation, or even with the generation above. And the disparity between new communities or any hostility between them is absolutely shameful. It's a kind of nationalism has taken over. There was such a strong back to Africa movement that we are Africans and we have African culture. This then the other. One of my greatest friends was a black philosopher who lived in my house for a year called CLR James. And there's of course a library named after him and Hacmi. Of course, yeah. Of course, of course. He lived with me. He had no disrespect for Africa, but he said, look, over the last three, four hundred years, we have become part of Western civilization. We are part of and clear phrase, the Western intellectual tradition. And our ancestors are not some tribal chief, but Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mozart, Karl Marx. That's who we have through the force of history become. Absolutely no antagonism towards adopting African cultural modes. He said jazz is the contribution to Western classical music that black Americans have made. There is a link there, but also I feel that despite the fact that we are part of that in the Western intellectual tradition, we can't see how to fight for and defend our place in it. We've been trying to do that for years and years and years and it sort of works, you know, in my generation, no black woman would be allowed to run a podcast institution. They wouldn't have written books, right? They wouldn't have. There has been progress. One key contention with political blackness is that it doesn't account for anti-black attitudes among people of color who are not of African descent. I put this to Ferulk. One could say that in a generation community, you would find prejudice against black people. And in the black community, you'd find prejudice against coolies as the equal nations, right? Not in the political movements, obviously, right? But certainly there would be in some kind of shopkeeper mentality or some bungalow dishy communities did say it's because of the blacks that this is happening. And in some black communities, these people are not us. But of course we were fighting that. I think that there is a generational divide on this issue. Many of the members of the feminist activist group, Sisters Uncut, were barely twinkles in their parents' eyes when Diane Abba MP and Feroute Dondi were organizing in the '70s and '80s. I'm interested to know what the younger generation of activists think about the concept of political blackness. I spoke to two Sisters Uncut members, Angelica and Kelsey, about the issue. I think Sisters Uncut doesn't really, we don't organize under the banner of political blackness. That's Angelica's voice. Yeah, it's not really a phrase that's thrown around. And that's Kelsey's voice. We all said much in our circles. Why is that? It's kind of old school. It's just people of color, I think, we used to mean anyone who's not white. What do you mean by old school? Just like you said, there has a very specific history and context. I know the NUS was still used again for a while. I've seen a lot of union spaces. Union spaces, yeah. And I think that is reflective of that kind of '70s, '80s political, British political tradition. Sisters was founded in 2014. I don't-- I guess in terms of the concept as well, we don't tend to lump everyone together. We are aware of a specific anti-blackness and things like that. And that there are different privileges within the range of people of color. So we don't tend to organize as if everyone is having exactly the same experience or anything. I think that makes sense. What I can glean from the original uses was not really that everyone was having the same experience, but rather we are all united against the same power structure. Yeah, it was strategic. And the thing is, for a lot of people, I think of our generation in terms of organizing, they are so adamantly against the idea of political blackness. They think it's insulting, it's offensive. I don't-- I personally don't have that position. I appreciate what it was at the time. And I understand the conditions out of which that was born. But it's not a hill that I'm willing to-- For some people, they'll say, if you organize under political blackness, I'm not going to-- I'm not going to effort you. That's messed up. I personally don't throw the same way. I think discussing identity is only useful in so far as it can be used to look at structural power. My main concern is analyzing the political power of whiteness. So I really don't want to get stuck in conversations about who's black and who isn't. But then again, I'm so obviously of West African heritage that my race is never called into question. But that's not the case for every person of colour. I had a really. really interesting conversation with the rapper, author, and activist, a caller about this very issue. I identify as black because that's my upbringing. Obviously, I'm biologically mixed and I recognize that and I don't deny any of my heritage. And I think it's a different conversation. When I have a conversation with a person who has two black parents like yourself and they're like, well, if you're black, then what am I? I have two black parents. What's the different? I think there's a different internal conversation among people racialized as black, where I am happy to say, well, yes, obviously, I'm mixed. My problem is that most mixed people emphasize their mixedness in my humble opinion and from looking at the history of it, is to emphasize that I'm not black. It's not to say, look, I have this position I'm caught between two worlds in a world partly governed by white supremacy. The tradition of what I'll call Milato nationalism has always been a regressive political tradition, whereas black nationalism, I mean, the most famous black nationalists of all time, Bob Marley or Marcus Garvey, both Jamaicans, ones mixed. How was black nationalism broad enough as a nationalist conceptualization to incorporate someone like Bob Marley? White nationalism, you can't imagine the KKK saying, hey, Bob, come in, right? So these are one of reasons to subcerred to compare black nationalism, white nationalism, black nationalism literally evolved in resistance to slavery, white nationalism literally evolved as justifying a means of own and other human beings. They're not comparable. Black nationalism, white nationalism are quite different. The recognition of colorism, the conversation about political blackness versus social blackness, all of that is internal conversations I'm happy to have, but I generally don't emphasize my mixedness publicly. For number of reasons, one, my political education came from the black radical tradition. I went to Panifican Saturday school. I had an extra curricula, African history class at my school, my godfather and other members of the African Caribbean community gave my wife mother the assistance her white community would not give her to raise her children. So I feel a tremendous sense of loyalty to that. Similarly, white society only tries to claim those of us that are mixed once we've done well. Of course. Mark Dougins' mixness was irrelevant. He was a yard, he was a gangster, he was a bad guy. In fact, the fact that he could be shot by the black-on-black violence police department should tell us something very profound about the way blackness is conceptualized. So I think it would be very naive for those of us who are mixed by all things be proud of both sides of your heritage, but there is a racial conflict here that is not un-conflictive equal. It's worth remembering at this point that a carler's older sister is the multi-award women, rapper, singer and producer, Miss Dynamite. I remember when my sister was at the peak of her fame, the daily male wrote an article on "Surprising Youth". Basically saying she's not really black. I mean, look how clever she is. That literally was basically the article. She can't really be the voice of the black street and they actually just made up stuff about us growing up with our Scottish family. Now let's be clear, my mum's family is half Scottish, half English. Scottish family were totally cool. They didn't care that we were brown, in fact, in a sense. They were kind of like Alicia or not English. So they were not really bigoted, but they lived in Scotland. We didn't see them. I went to Scotland once. My sister literally lived with my Jamaican grandmother when she moved out of the house because her mum wasn't getting on. But the daily male couldn't accept, as a lot of white people still find out to accept, that my intelligence, frankly, is a product of a black radical political tradition. I literally went to a Saturday school called the Winnie Mandela School. While my summer-round middle class white teachers were putting me in special needs group for kids who don't speak English. I was reading a lot of the rings at home. I was forced to identify myself within that conflict and look at the absurdity that being half white in Jamaica made me high-coloured and an object of privilege. It meant people were schemed, I was intelligent, I had money, all of this. Whereas being half black in England comes with the exact opposite implications. And so I think mixed identity has to be trodden very carefully. I asked Simon Woolie what the black means in Operation Black Vote. It's interesting that you asked that because the perception of that has changed over the years. So when we began in the 1990s, there was an international concept in which political black, it was internationalist but driven really from a British Caribbean perspective in which non-white was black. And when you look at the Caribbean, when you look at the Caribbean countries, the kaleidoscope of ethnicities which emerged from the independence movements of the Caribbean that we were looking outwardly as internationalists. And we took that back to the UK and began this black political which meant that people of colour faced a particular type of discrimination, broadly say racism. And that an Asian struggle was an African Caribbean struggle or an African struggle and that we were stronger united. Yes, we'd have our differences, yes, most of them we celebrate and our challenges. White supremacist society was built upon divide and rule. And so we knew we had to confront that. But what it meant was that non-white collective could be galvanised in such a way that one would support each other and too politically we could be uniquely extremely strong. Is that the context of the operation black votes still works under? It is, I think particularly since 9/11 when divide and rule was that it's zenith that the focus was on Muslims. And so other religions said we're not Muslim, they're the bad is. And so there's been a push to fragment our different communities. Some of young black activists have said we're African, we're not this political black, it's outdated. And I'm a little bit about that. I mean, yes, I want to see black empowerment, African empowerment, but that golden thread of unity to confront persistent racism is true back then as it is today. Diane Abbott spoke to me about that change in perception that Simon speaks of. I think that as I say the rise of a more individualist politics has its merits, but we've lost the notion of collectivism. So what people want to know is, I mean, a few years I ran two projects in parallel. One was London Schools in the Black Child, which is about Black Children Education. And the other was black women in business, which is black women on troupe nerves. And with black women in business, we always found that the most popular events which were events about, how to make money. If the emphasis on individual advancement, which is very part and parcel of that year's and new Labour, hasn't helped to have a coherent and unified movement in the black community. And yet people can see what is happening to them as a community and they lament what is happening to them as a community, but they don't quite see that unless we come together as a community, there is no real remedy. You can talk about it, you can write about it, you can say how dreadful it is, but unless you come together as a community, there's no real remedy. I'm usually not the one calling for unity. And I think it has to be carefully done here, so as not to flatten differences or ignore existing discrimination. But it's really clear to me that there needs to be some intergenerational dialogue. There may never be a consensus on political blackness, but we could learn a lot from each other. Angelica from Sister's Uncart is hopeful about the situation. There's a problem with knowledge, not being passed down from our older activists, for mothers and fathers. And I think sometimes with younger activists, myself included, there's a bit of an arrogant, we feel like we've got to all figure it out. Like the older generation, they don't know shit, like the old school, when I'm actually going through experiencing a lot of the same things again and again. And they did like think they were dealing with similar things. More vicious. More violent. More viciously. And like there's this incredible like radical activist tradition in the UK. And I don't think all of that like knowledge has been completely like uncovered and passed down. We're doing something new on about race, which is using the platform to signal boost other podcasts as to do an excellent work. One of the first that I want to shout out is Stance Podcast, a really excellent arts, culture and current affairs podcast hosted by Crystal Genesis and Heta Fell. I really like it. It's a bit like a really interesting Saturday supplement. So I'll definitely tune into that. You can hear more on StancePodcast.com. About race with René Edo Lorde is written by me. It's produced by René Richardson. Our researcher is Res Marie-No. And our research assistant is Isis Johnson. Original music is by Matt Cedizo and artwork is by Kevin Moroski. You can join the conversation using the hashtag about race with René. Four transcripts and episodes are available on our website aboutracepodcast.com. If you like what you hear, please rate and review an Apple Podcast and subscribe to the show on your favourite app. This podcast is funded by Arts Council England.