Why Black matters
We live in an age when self-identification is all the rage. And yet, for many years, there has been a storm growing in sound and fury about the use of the label ‘Black’ by racialized minorities in the UK. It is a Very British Debate which even our US cousins struggle to understand. I say ‘even’ because of the disproportionate influence that American ways of thinking about race wield in this country. The US failure to understand the debate implicitly dismisses the significance of it within the British context and can undermine it, particularly for younger activists.
We both crave and shun labels. We crave them because we want to control our own narratives. We shun them because they can be reductive, particularly when imposed by others. But the history behind the label ‘Black’ is infused with political struggle. Many of the younger people who find the concept of ‘political blackness’ irrelevant to their activism today complain that there has been very little handed down to them about that history. I hope to unpack some of that history.
But is it just a question of ignorance? There are those who zealously police the use of the word ‘black’ and who has the right to use it. The paradox is that race, which does not exist as a biological category, can be so strictly monitored, and yet there is a growing consensus that gender, which is not a biological category either, can be changed through self-identification.
My own personal journey to ‘Black’ began with me self-identifying as Indian when I first arrived in the UK in 1975. This slowly morphed into ‘Asian’ as a way of situating myself within the national discourse and stayed that way until I joined the anti-racist struggle and adopted ‘Black’ gratefully almost overnight as a marker of my politicization.
The long tail
One of the most influential thinkers on race, A Sivanandan, Director of the Institute for Race Relations from 1972 onwards, articulated a definition of ‘black’ which left its mark on a generation of activists. For him, it was a political colour. It stood for an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics rooted in the Global South and the independence struggles in British colonies, many of whose representatives were based in London and understood the strength that comes from unity and collective action. This premise opened the way for inclusion of the Irish too, which reveals the extent to which Sivanandan wrenched ‘black’ away from its literal moorings. However, the concept of Black, then as now, but more so now, was shot through with tension between its ‘ethnic’ and ‘political’ roots.
As an umbrella term, Black had been knocking around in the anti-racist and independence movements for a while. The Black Panthers who came into existence in the UK in 1968 had Asian, African and Caribbean members. Farrukh Dhondy, an Indian member of the group, said in a podcast interview with Reni Eddo-Lodge: ‘There was no colourism 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
