Abstract
In the past decade, British Black Power (BBP), which began in the late 1960s and reached its apex in the early 1970s, has gone from obscurity to having a TV mini-series complete with Idris Elba as its star. The re-emergence of BBP has been accompanied by a range of historical work on BBP groups, such as the Black Panther Movement and the Black Liberation Front, and individuals such as Olive Morris and Darcus Howe. This academic work itself has been produced from archives and oral histories that were often saved within the Black community when academic winds were blowing in different directions. Thinking Black brings together a vast array of these sources to provide what will become a foundational text for anyone researching the history of BBP.
One of the beauties of Thinking Black lies with Waters’ use of historical events (speeches, protests, court cases) to punctuate wider discussions of the intellectual and political trajectory of BBP. In the first chapter, for example, Waters uses a video of James Baldwin’s speech at the West Indian Student Centre in 1968 to highlight the attendance and background of future Black Panther Movement leader Althea Jones-LeCointe. These vignettes serve as excellent entry points into the discussion of the entanglement of US ideas of Black Power with the issues of New Commonwealth immigration, Powellism and anti-colonial politics at the heart of BBP. Thinking Black does an excellent job of showing how BBP was not a cheap imitation of US Black Power but generative of its own legacy. Waters, for example, provides an enlightening chapter on Political Blackness – which sought to unite Asian, African and Caribbean communities in Britain under the signifier of the ‘Black’ subject – against not only British state racism, but also wider forms of capitalist imperialism abroad. To ‘think Black’ centred on a revolutionary rethinking of Britain, Britishness and the wider world.
Thinking Black also does a wonderful job in recreating how BBP created an alternative civil society (bookshops, supplementary schools, youth groups) and culture (music, literature, poetry) that drew the British Black community together at home. Indeed, it becomes clear that the idea of ‘urban multi-culture’ popularized by sociologists such as Paul Gilroy has part of its origins in culture created by movements such as BBP. Waters best sums up this overflow from BBP into wider academic currents in the penultimate chapter, where he rightly draws out the connections and diffusions between BBP and intellectual sites of production such as the Institute for Race Relations (Sivanandan, Bourne) Race Today (Howe and Dhondy) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Hall, Carby, Gilroy). Thinking Black serves to remind readers that BBP’s ‘communities of resistance’ were fundamentally also intellectual communities of resistance.
If there is one drawback to Thinking Black it is the fact that it is very much a work of history. That criticism may seem odd given that the book is written by a historian and is being reviewed in a history journal, but the history of British Black struggle cannot be reduced to events that have passed. This history of racialization, state racism and of possible liberation is not dead but very much alive in underpinning our current conjecture. The conclusion of the book is a good example of where Thinking Black exhibits this tension. Here Waters eloquently charts the demise of the BBP movement and the wider Black struggle it engendered throughout the 1960s to the 1980s. This includes the geo-political realignment caused by the death of the Third World Project’s expression in the Caribbean and institutionalization of the ‘Black’ identity in the British state. This also includes the rise of British multiculturalism and move towards the state funding for self-help rather than structural change. The constant in the conclusion, as it is for British anti-racism more generally, is Sivanandan rebuking the hokum of such new times.
The book ends with a wonderful vignette where Paul Gilroy interrupts an audience member’s attempt to dismiss the immediate relevancy of Huey P. Newton as a contemporary by stating: ‘He is mine’ (p. 221). But leaving this historical chasm between generations as the parting shot of the book raises more questions than answers. The history of political Blackness of the BBP era has become a sharp point of division in contemporary anti-racism. The politically black collective subject and its anti-racist politics have been disarticulated and reconstituted around ethnic communities (e.g. Black, Asian, Muslim) and the racisms they specifically suffer nationally and transnationally (e.g. anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, xeno-racism). This has led to a constant problem of forming solidarities within and between these communities who are now often seen as antagonistic rivals or oppressive towards one another.
What does it mean to recover the history of solidarity and internationalism at the heart of Thinking Black and what advantages does it hold over the present formation of anti-racism? How does this history, for example, allow us to understand the colonial and post-colonial racisms of Brexit? And why might its recovery help form solidarities that could deal with rampant state racism both within and at the edges of Britain’s borders? Indeed, in the spectre of Grenfell Tower – where so many Black and Brown bodies perished partly due to the racialized contours of British neo-liberalism – what does it mean to Think Black?
Even if I think Waters should have asked these questions as a matter of urgency, perhaps the best compliment I can pay to the text is that many of the answers to these questions are buried within Thinking Black. For that reason alone, I implore you to get hold of the book and go looking for them!