Hi All and Happy New Year,
I thankfully spent late last year luxuriating in the eastern Caribbean, visiting 9 islands in three weeks, only to have to come back to the damp and cold in the UK!
Old stalwarts of the London scene such as Bernard Witshere, who returned to Dominica in the 1990s after having been deputy leader at the Inner London Education Authority up to abolition, sends his love
and sympathies, as he says his quality of life has been improved immeasurably since getting out of the London rat-race, even though he is still one of the leading attorneys in his home country and works hard. Since his return he has pioneered the establishment of a nature trail through the rain forest and helped raise the $20m to help it get it completed. He now spends every opportunity he gets rambling round it and discovering the beauty of the natural environment in his home country.
He certainly doesn’t have to get involved in debates about the nature of racism and people of African origin’s capacity to exercise it!
I would recommend that you all consult the work of the Institute of Race
Relations and its in-house journal, Race and Class, that has spent many years researching and analysing the phenomenon and has helped to develop languages and concepts to understand it.
My understanding is that all human beings have the capacity to like or dislike others, both individually and collectively but Europeans in particular, have built up a massive structure of belief rooted in their enslavement and colonisation of the rest of the world, that argued that they were the pinnacle of human civilization and everybody else lined up in descending order with Africans and Africa at the foot of this social Darwinian edifice. While this conceptualisation was demolished following the Second World War that was foisted on the world by Europeans and their allies competing for world domination derived from this ideology, it
is still a large subliminal part of how Europe and it’s derived cultures see the world. This arms their prejudices with a particular power to oppress and exploit other peoples and cultures due to their social, economic and cultural power over the control and dissemination of resources and information. Consequently no matter how much a ‘Black person’ may dislike or have ‘irrational feeling’ about white people’, they don’t have the intuitional power to do anything but a personal act. So the invidious position is that even if a white person is actively anti-racist they still benefit from the unequal power relations that the state and other institution maintain. This is what McPherson hinted at and was vilified for, when his report was first published. Unlike Scarman, who couldn’t bring himself to cross the Rubicon and name ‘institutional racism’! His report claimed that Black people’s experience of racism was a
‘perception’!
Other forms of oppression have similar modalities including gender and class. For a working class person to transcend their position they have to leave their class and socially and economically swim in the bourgeois pond. Racism is so ubiquitous that it is almost impossible for a ‘Black person to escape it, hence the need for the crude categories of Black and white that Diane unfortunately tried to articulate, to form political alliances to combat it.
As Stuart Hall so carefully formulated, ‘Black people live their class through their race’. Additionally the cultural price that someone from an ethnic minority has to pay to join the mainstream in the ‘West’ can be so
painful as to drive a disproportionate numbers of those who experience it, into mental health difficulties. Hence Bernard’s satisfaction with his return to his roots and the continuing difficulty that young people trying to make the transition into Black Britons face.
The experience of the Lawrence family explores this terrain painfully but appositely. A young ‘Black Family’ moves out of the inner city to the suburbs of Eltham, trying to better their prospects and those of their children. Better access to schools and other social amenities and the ability to acquire better quality housing at a lower price. When you arrive there instead of the seamless progress up the social and economic ladder you find hostility and social and actual death. Many have tried top embrace the Thatcherite dream and with all the rhetoric
about how much race relations have improved since 1993, I remember the images of residents from Eltham last August, fighting the police to get to Catford and other neighbouring areas of Black settlement, to ‘show the niggers that they should behave themselves’! Not much different to when a branch of my family first moved to Catford in the 1950s and were painfully acquainted with these racial realities.
I would be given a detailed talking to, whenever I came to stay with them in my holidays, as I was sent to the ‘country’, as my parents used to refer to these districts, compared to our hometown in Brixton! I was entreated not to go any further up Brownhill Road, than the railway bridge and no further up Bromley Road, than the big pub, now thankfully closed and awaiting redevelopment.
It is invidious to judge whole neighbourhoods but even up to recent times when I was invited to make presentations or attend meetings in areas such as Downham and Bellingham I was still had extreme misgivings and steeled myself for the experience. This also applied to large swathes of the East End, many provincial cities and the rural parts of the UK.
Now I’ve travelled around this country extensively and spent much time in Wales, Scotland and Northern and Southern Ireland but still feel most wary in the outer parts of London.
This is something we need to consider carefully because in
addition to having to deal with the healing of the psyches of sections of our youth, I firmly believe that the situation will become extremely difficult as the recession worsens and those of us who have moved to more affluent areas may find that their neighbours may become less charitable and multi-cultural when their life prospects start to get squeezed and the school place they coveted is no longer available or the job they wanted has been taken by someone of colour. I’m sure that the political parties will also collude with this also as they’ve always done and continue to do, by using coded language and innuendo.
So racism is very much alive and will change its form as the times change.
I think that the UK is in for a rough time economically and socially and better prospects may well lie elsewhere as advised by my old mate Bernie!
Ajomase’ (May peace be with you)
D. Thomas
Devon C Thomas
The Griot
From: The Black and Asian Studies Association [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Anjijoy
Sent: 08 January 2012 10:57
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Are black people capable of being racist?
Are black people capable of being racist?
According to Liz Jones in 'The Daily Mail' on 7th January 2012:
"The furore over Diane Abbott’s remark via Twitter last week that ‘white people love playing divide and rule’ is even more ridiculous than me being castigated for being unable to hear. Are black people capable of being racist?
Of course. [...] The difference is that black and Asian people have every right to be racist, given our past form. I tell everyone I meet to read King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild – about colonialism in the Congo, and the Belgian monarch’s complex campaign of propaganda to depict Africans as lazy and stupid – because once you have done so, you couldn’t even dream of castigating Abbott. Or take a look at Late Victorian Holocausts, about how Queen Victoria imported food from India, meaning up to 29 million of her subjects there starved. [...] It’s not Abbott who should be saying sorry, it’s us."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083648/Diane-apologise-ask-King-Leopold-s-Ghost.html
Angela Allison
Coventry, UK 
