Policing Black Film: Racism,Black Resistance and the Applicational Dexterity of Race Relations in Babylon

Introduction

For Britain’s black population, the 1970s were a period defined by increased public contestation over government responses to the ‘organic crisis’ of racism within Britain. The impacts of the 1976 Race Relations Act (UK Parliament, 1976) as a form of state intervention to manage particular manifestations of racism cannot be fully understood if confined to the increased legislation towards racial inequality within public life. In considering race relations in its wider political and cultural context, dissatisfaction among black communities at the inadequacy of race policy, escalated harassment of black youths by the police and the continued hostility and violence from white society catalysed the politicisation of the term ‘black’ as a unified reference for ‘a common experience of racism and marginalisation’ (Back, 1996: 4). Such a phenomenon was also accompanied by the increasing politicisation of narrative images of black youth found in a body of films providing a socio-political analysis of the racial discrimination inflicted upon Britain’s second-generation black youths. Throughout this period, the incendiary language of political defiance within black film’s lexicon was for many state-affiliated bodies considered as a social transgression accentuating the tensions between black people and the police and representing a fundamental threat to the establishment of good race relations and the prevention of civil disorder within Britain’s black communities. The very identification of race relations as a ‘discrete discipline’ (Solomos, 1988: 6) permits a conceptualisation of race relations as both a political command and a clandestine social methodology that, when applied to forms of black political expression, produced ‘policing’ strategies activated through a number of state agents.

While scholars have examined the ideological functions of late 20th-century race relations (CCCS, 1982; Gilroy, 1987; Solomos, 1988, 1989, 2003) there has been little academic investigation into how race relations affected and influenced the circulation of a particular form of black resistance. The politically informed black British film emerged in the 1970s as a challenge to the hegemony of media portrayals of black youths and in turn, aided the development of a critical black consciousness. Combining archival research with a contextual analysis of a key body of black British films that emerged in response to the crisis of race, this article offers a historicisation of how state anxieties over the potential for black political unrest reveal what I describe as the ‘applicational dexterity’ of race relations that would find such application in the policing of counter-hegemonic black British film narratives through censorship, withdrawal and the X certification of black film. The critical interrogation of British racism central to the 1980 film Babylon provoked a number of responses under the auspices of a race relations-imbued strategy to restrict the circulation of images of black rebellion, and this article is approached from two corresponding directions. First, I undertake an analysis of the emergence of black film as a radical intervention in the racial politics of the mid-1970s discursively representing a political threat to the authority of race relations. Second, in examining the instituting of film classification as a form of social compliance determining Babylon’s circulation, I consider the functions of two non-governmental organisations: the British Board of Film Classification and the Commission for Racial Equality, as symptomatic of the objective of constituting a ‘policing’ regime over black political and cultural expression. Cumulatively, such analyses disclose a modality of race politics which, as evidenced in Babylon, required the recruitment of political institutions to perform the state-driven epistemic praxis of race relations.

The above imperatives are equally indexed with this article’s own ambitions to intervene within its field of study. Given the potential of film texts to operate as a refraction of social discourses which structure meaning and mediate and frame social and individual identities, film bears a deeper sociological relevance to the analysis of the structure and functioning of social groups than its current presence within the discipline suggests. At this level of context, both Gilroy (1988) and Hall (1988) provided a sophisticated analysis of black film that located its critique within the political, social and cultural history of black struggle in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite these significant contributions, a framework which provides a coherent and sustained sociological analysis of black British film remains obscure within the orthodoxies of sociology’s intellectual paradigms, with black film generally positioned within the Film Studies/Black Cultural Studies theoretical nexus. This is of particular resonance in relation to blackness and methodologies towards the study of the ideologies used to legitimise the filmic rendering of black existence and the role of the state institutions in this field. Babylon’s sociological underpinnings venture beyond traditional analyses of negative race representation and towards its governance and circulation within a particular socio-political conjuncture. The reality of blackness as a negated identity influenced by social, cultural and political situations, renders the analysis of black film, whether foregrounding a textual or contextual analysis, as an inherently sociological endeavour. However, my own foregrounding of a contextual analysis is not to purposely neglect or denigrate the value of narrational-led readings of Babylon, and this undertaking has already been conducted in some detail by Malik (2002) and Newland (2010). While this study makes reference to these analyses, such a close examination of the textual properties of Babylon vis-a-vis the political backdrop of late 1970s Britain is beyond both the ambit and ambition of this article. Rather, my specific interest is in the discourse of race relations permeated through political and media institutions, and a sociological analysis is constructed by other means. First, I consider the concept of race relations as a strategy for the management of the politics of race and the legislations that organised such social relations. I examine how the construction of black youths as a social problem became the ideological basis for confrontations between black youths and law and order and the development of a black political language through black cultural expressions. This supports an analysis of how television and film texts became key repositories for black rebellion, leading to a sustained analysis of Babylon and the ways in which state actors performed a policing function over counter-hegemonic narratives of black oppression and resistance. Considering Babylon in the context of its circulatory effect within the politics of race in the late 1970s, this article extrapolates a further reading of Babylon to present an analysis of the social phenomena and processes culminating in the film’s X certification, situating Babylon’s classification as ideologically aligned with the broader race relations disciplinary practice.

The Discipline of Race Relations

By the early 1970s, the racism that had marked the post-war immigration in Britain continued to have a lacerating effect on the UK’s black population and increased pressure for effective Parliamentary responses to racial discrimination. While the Conservative Government of 1970–1974 dismissed demands for more comprehensive and legally effective responses to the heterogeneous forms of racial discrimination inflicted upon the UK’s black and Asian population, continued pressure from activist groups, liberal politicians, radical black organisations and publications meant that upon the Labour Party’s return to office in 1974, a number of reactive measures were placed onto the policy agenda for responding to racial inequality. What was essentially masquerading as a political debate about immigration was in fact about race and national identity; the UK population remained static during this decade, being 55.9 million in 1971 and 56.4 million by 1981, and there was a greater proportion of emigration than immigration into Britain during the 1970s (McSmith, 2010). A significant policy development marking Labour’s approach to race was the shift from an explicit focus on the rejection of immigration. This was a preoccupation that had dominated the political landscape for over a decade in the aftermath of the arrival of Empire Windrush in 1948 forming the reactionary basis for legislative measures to restrict Commonwealth immigration, notably the 1972 Commonwealth Immigration Act. What entered the political area was a discursive shift towards the management of settled black communities, with a particular focus on those living within the confines of Britain’s inner-city locales (CCCS, 1982; Solomos, 1988). The publishing of the 1975 White paper on racial discrimination, in response to demands for a more legally robust approach to racial injustice faced by Britain’s black population, became the basis for the passing of the Race Relations Act on 22 November 1976 (UK Parliament, 1976). For Labour, this represented its third iteration of Race Relations legislation, with the first, the 1965 Race Relations Act (UK Parliament, 1965) (and the establishing of the Race Relations Board in 1966 to respond to racial discrimination complaints) leading the Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice to declare to the House of Commons on the Act’s passing that it would be an ‘ugly day’ should Parliament ever require the extending of its legislative scope. However, given the general impotence of policy approaches to racial inequality in Britain and the inadequacy of common law as a protective mechanism against race-based discrimination, just three years later, the 1968 Race Relations Act (UK Parliament, 1968) attempted to amend the 1965 Act with a legislative extension that responded to the denial of public service, housing and employment motivated by racial discrimination. Given the linearity between the ameliorative aims of race relations and anti-immigration as an evolving policy focus, the Race Relations Act should be considered not in terms of the supersession of state racism but a legislative equivalency. The Race Relations Act of 1968 and the Community Relations Commission mandated to assist in cultivating good race relations was accompanied by both the Commonwealth Immigrations Act of the same year, where Labour’s Home Secretary James Callaghan would institute the racialisation of Commonwealth immigration policy through a cynical, emergency legislation to restrict Kenyan Asians taking legal residency in the UK (UK Parliament, 1968) and the 1971 Immigration Act which in effect further emboldened the legislative armour of racially discriminatory immigration restrictions (UK Parliament, 1971). Thus, Race Relations Acts were marked by a dualism; they represented both the Government’s legislative approach to remedying some aspects of racism within the nation sphere, while sustaining the discourse of white Britain through restrictive race-based immigration policy (Institute of Race Relations, 1977). The paradoxical nature of Labour’s legislative responses does not undermine arguments that the residual effects of immigration restrictions on Britain’s black population produced the racist social conditions that demanded a specific range of political interventions. For the Race Relations Act of 1976, its conceptual departure from previous Acts was evident in its political tenor characterised by the vernacular of crisis management, an approach that could be inimical to the spectacle of a developing racial tension beyond the legislative considerations of previous Acts. The advent of ‘second-generation black youth’ as the descriptive nomenclature for a section of Britain’s ethnic minority population particularly vulnerable to the extremities of socio-economic inequality and their emergence onto the political, social and media landscape, combined with the legacy of abortive Race Relations Acts, assisted in cultivating a British societal landscape prime for subjecting Britain’s black population to a multitude of race-based oppressions.

Beyond the structural exclusion of black people from participation in the labour market and the wilful concentration of ethnic minorities to deprived, inner-inner city enclaves, the allegation underpinning black civil unrest was the a priori categorisation of young black youths as a ‘problem social group’, setting the basis for the disproportionate policing, harassment, arresting and accompanying excessive violence applied by the police onto black youths. In addition, racialised media narratives informing public understandings about young black men and criminality further exacerbated divisions between black communities and the police and set the social conditions for potential retributional uprisings. Unable to attend to the discrete and sophisticated manifestations of racism (Institute of Race Relations, 1977) the 1976 Race Relations Act would recourse to the outlawing of overt discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, colour, nationality and national origin in employment, public functions and services, the provision of goods and education (UK Parliament, 1976). While the Act reiterated ethnic minorities’ legal right to equal treatment (which as black people found, did not correspond with an adherence to this legal right by racist agitators, either state-led or state-sponsored) crucially, this latest version of the Race Relations Act included the establishment of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) with greater subpoena powers to investigate racial discrimination cases alongside supporting some of the Act’s implicit aims of developing good race relations through an unstable celebration of racial integration (Gilroy, 1987; Solomos, 2003). Thus, the 1976 Act remained on the general continuum of successive governments’ management of racial difference, where policy responses continued to be outflanked by the social life of public racism, representing a collection of benevolent but equally benign legislative gestures behind the veneer of racial equality, and unified by a range of common ideological objectives. First, the Act and its supportive body to establish effective legislative command over anti-racist activity, in turn, reconsolidated the Government’s position at the axis of the race agenda through the pervasive discourse of race relations. Second, confronted with the prospect of urban conflict, the reflexive action is one of prevention by the containment of anti-racist disquiet through the authoritative command of the state. Therefore, the discipline of race relations points to an agenda that ventures beyond policing and judicial procedures to manage the uncertainness produced by the unchallenged circulation of black political rebellion by those categorised as the uncontrollable black other; it demonstrated efforts by Labour to redirect radical energies away from challenging racial inequality into chords that positioned the state as custodians of anti-racism.

Black British Youth Resistance

The above direction of analysis should not be interpreted as an attempt to denigrate the ameliorative intentions of the race relations enterprise; the Race Relations Act 1976 was constructed as a legislative response to some of the race-based discriminations experienced by black people and attempted to establish a clear legal framework for specific manifestations of racism (Home Office, 1977). However, the processes Gilroy et al. identified as the industrialisation of race relations (CCCS, 1982) indicate a version of racial politics which was seldom ‘relational’ beyond its application in discourse, and speak of an asymmetric relationship between black people and mainstream society. While the combinational effect of race relations and immigration restriction strived to produce a landscape of harmonious racial integration, such methods ‘failed to depoliticise the question of “race” as such’ (Solomos, 1988: 41). The political dimensions of race Solomos draws attention to – the associating of black youths with a predisposition to criminal activity – can be understood as the outcome of the interaction of a number of repertoires of racial subjugation. Such an association is made steadfast by a state-endorsed militarisation of the police, given intellectual patina via subjective academic research (notably, the publication of the 1977 report Shades of Grey (Brown, 1977), a study into the relationship between black youths in the Handsworth area of Birmingham and the West Midlands Police and later made into an award winning BBC1 documentary film in June 1978) and finally, telegraphed by mainstream print and TV media to produce a moral panic which, cyclically, legitimises the continued oppressive policing of black youths (Hall et al., 1978).

Such repertoires were further compounded by the continued presence of neo-fascist violence; the National Front had throughout the 1970s accrued political capital for their demands for the repatriation of non-white persons from Britain, culminating in relative successes in three by-elections in 1977, gaining 8.2% of the vote in Birmingham, 5.2% in the Westminster South and 3.8% in Ashfield (House of Commons Library, 2020). On Saturday, 13 August 1977, what is now known colloquially as the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ took place, where anti-racism protesters and the local community clashed with the police and the National Front, who were granted permission to march through the London borough. Such a provocation was ascribed political legitimacy through the National Front claim that the demonstration was in response to the Metropolitan Police’s inflammatory public statements on the volume of ‘black crime’ in the area, particularly the phenomenon of street ‘muggings’ carried out by young black men (Gilroy, 1982a). That the involvement of young blacks and the police became the central issue in the media reportage of the conflict, with black people portrayed as ‘the aggressors standing in the way of an improvement in race relations by “overreacting” to the “power crazed” Nazi’s who parade through their communities’ (Lawrence, 1982: 79) concretised a belief within the black community and radical black political groups that the prime objective of race relations by the Government was not an altruistic responsiveness to the plight of young blacks, but a form of control through crisis management, with the overall objective of ‘defusing a potentially explosive situation’ (Solomos, 1988: 125). In effect, dissidence against both fascism and state policies complemented the state-constructed public imaginary of the black ‘social time bomb’ by illustrating the ‘necessity’ of a social containment premise for race relations, drawing attention to how by the late 1970s strategies for the management of racial difference moved towards the prevention of young blacks from further instances of civil disturbance (CCCS, 1982; Hall et al., 1978) demonstrating a highly consequential alteration in the epistemic arena concerning the politics of race.

Black Film and Censorship in the 1970s

Perhaps the most visible consequence of an increased policing of black people was that by the mid-1970s Britain’s ethnic minority communities had developed a political vernacular in response to the racism that ventured beyond the binds of ameliorative race relations practices. In addition to the establishing of a number of community-based black organisations, black youths were coming under the influence of emergent UK-based Black Power movements that, while having a concrete presence within black Britain since Stokey Carmichael’s visit to London for a series of public talks on black power in 1967, had taken on greater significance in Britain as black youths adopted a more politicised identity in response to increasingly aggressive action by police against black communities, particularly towards all forms of black cultural expression. While the targeting of black restaurants (such as Mangrove in Notting Hill), youth clubs and other cultural hubs which were identified by the police as a locus for criminality had been a common feature for black communities in Britain, the developing political nature of black cultural and artistic practices became an additional focus for police. By the mid-1970s the annual Notting Hill Carnival had grown in significance for black youths both as a site of black solidarity and the coalescence of black subcultures, and a crucial factor accompanying the growth of a political culture was reggae music. For O’Gorman (1972: 52) reggae music ‘mirrors the Jamaican condition with the kind of psychological clarity of which only music is capable’. In particular, the sound system became the main outlet for popular reggae music, demonstrating the great significance attached to politicised reggae music among black youths in the UK (Jones, 1988; Plummer, 1978). Sound clashes would resultingly attract the attention of the Metropolitan Police, who by the late 1970s had identified such black youth cultural practices as a form of political defiance and resistance, and resultingly, an immediate threat to mainstream British society that necessitated heightened policing (Bradley, 2001; Gilroy, 1982b). I want to emphasise that the politicising, and therefore policing of black British culture must be considered in the context of an expansion of racialised authoritative strategies in order to reveal the epistemic dissonance at the centre of the state project of race relations; anxieties produced by black cultural forms and practices functioning as sites of mass black identity. That is to say, the congregating of black youths as representing a challenge to law and order must also be considered in the context of the identification of black culture as a political mobilising experience.

My use of the term ‘applicational dexterity’ conceptualises race relations as a discipline comprised of a range of thematic variations and its alertness to the products of rapid cultural change, particularly popular mainstream culture, permitted race relations to enter another discursive context. By the mid-1970s television had emerged to become the dominant medium for representing British race relations, overwhelmingly manifest through the one-dimensional optic of sociological documentaries and current affairs programming (Malik, 2002) providing the spectacle of racial othering for Britain’s white audiences, or sitcoms where black and ethnic minorities featured solely as the subject of white ridicule. Love Thy Neighbour (1978–1980), Mixed Blessings (1972–1976) and Till Death Do Us Part (1965–1975) became popular television programmes with black characters and racial themes during this period. British television’s investment in representations of racial difference during this period, where comedic value provided justification for the reductive stereotyping and peculiarising of blacks, demonstrated TV’s ability to ‘operate in tandem with the state in “managing” the growing race relations crisis’ (Pines, 1992: 12). In particular, in Till Death Do Us Part, the character of Alf Garnett, the series’ racist ‘anti-hero’ who achieved cult status in Britain, performed as the narrational repository for the racist sentiment of the era, with Pines (1992: 12) describing Garnett as ‘Enoch Powell’s alter ego’ and ‘a liberating force for certain sections of the white working class, in the way that he embodied many of their attitudes and desires’. Further, mainstream print media, current affairs programming and factual documentaries such as the BBC1’s Tonight show were producing negative, unbalanced and disproportionate portrayals of second-generation black youths.

The emergence of black independent film liberated black representation from a racially reductive TV commissioning process with the sole didactic purpose of (re)representing race within a broader political project, one that must resist subsumption into what Gilroy and colleagues describe as ‘a narrow model of political action which assumes that liberal-democratic forms of government are the only forms possible in late capitalism’, but a crisis to be resolved through a critical black consciousness, producing a political resistance which ‘has been conditioned by popular racism, state racism and the intensity of the racist attack against black communities in many inner city areas’ (CCCS, 1982: 34). The violent confrontations at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, where up to 1600 officers were drafted to police the event, catalysed what Friedman (1993: 126) describes as ‘double-binded strategies of containment’. I share Gilroy et al.’s trepidation towards an evaluation of race relations as a simple binary that posits state responses as either conspiratorial attempts at control or ameliorative social measures (CCCS, 1982). However, such a position is in itself inherently binary, and much of these strategies existed on a spectrum of these two modalities; first, the militarisation of the police against black youths in British cities, and second, the investing of ‘fiscal resources into the depressed areas to help with specific social problems by initiating schemes to deal with what are seen as the causes of increasing violence and a breakdown of law and order’ (CCCS, 1982: 30). These strategies were rarely either covert or social democratic, and often existed in tandem. One area where the latter strategy made an imprint within black cultural life was the use of public resources (primarily through the Greater London Council, Arts Council and the British Film Institute (BFI) for the authentic, if not fully autonomous, production of black arts, and Pressure (Horace Ove, 1974) became the first film by a black director to be fully financed by the BFI (see Mercer, 1988). Set in London’s Ladbroke Grove, Trinidadian born Ove’s film acts as a reference to the racism and burgeoning black radical political culture of the late 1970s via the story of black teenager Tony’s crisis of identity, narrated as the choice between the radical black politics of his older brother and the Black Power movement and the humiliating assimilation desires of his Trinidadian parents. Pressure opens up the very marrow of British race relations through an exploration of Tony’s ‘second generational’ exposure to racial discrimination, one producing an experiential discord as he considers a black political identity distinct from ‘complex dualism’ adopted by their parents as ‘a means of survival’ (Plummer, 1978: 28). This authenticity of black representation is developed through its engagement with the combinational experience of both social and institutional racial antagonisms; Tony is marginalised from white friends and denied employment on the basis of race. Further, Pressure’s use of natural vernacular specific to Afro-Caribbeans produces a verisimilitude more akin to documentary film practices than the fictionalising of racism. Pressure references the Metropolitan Police’s targeting of young black males, notably in a scene where police are seen conducting an unlawful raid on a Black Power meeting where the young men in attendance suffer a severe, unprovoked violent assault by the police prior to being arrested. Later in Pressure, the members of the Black Power group listen as they are described as criminals in radio reports, the film engaging with the media’s portrayal of black youths as lawless, violent degenerates (Hall et al., 1978). Completed in the summer of 1975, Pressure would not receive theatrical release for nearly three years, a delay attributed to the apprehension of the Metropolitan Police about its filmic content; specifically, concerns were raised about the scene featuring the police raid on the Black Power meeting, with the film judged to having the potential to incite racial unrest between blacks and the police (Mercer, 1988). As Young (1996: 142) notes, ‘it was also reported that both Scotland Yard and what was then the Race Relations Board had requested to see the film before its release’. Pressure would finally open at Notting Hill’s Coronet Cinema prior to a very limited theatrical release in early 1978.

A similar analysis of state-sponsored racism is conducted in the film Blacks Britannica (1978), a documentary by an American filmmaker David Koff and commissioned by the Boston, Massachusetts-based PBS TV network. Framing an understanding of racism from an explicitly black working-class optic and within the context of Britain’s colonial history and post-war economic decline, Blacks Britannica offered a striking analysis of Britain’s black community’s understanding of racism and their own position within the country’s economic structure. More significantly, the documentary permits an engagement with the rejection and resisting of racism among black youths and the development of a new, defiant black political identity and their subjecting to the racism of state institutions such as the police, the judiciary and the media who perform as disciplining devices against black youths. Using footage from the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival where confrontations took place between black youths and the police, the documentary interrogates the disproportionate use of ‘sus’, by the Metropolitan Police, who had been maximising section 4 of the 1834 Vagrancy Act which effectively granted omnipotence to stop, search and arrest civilians on the mere suspicion that they may be planning criminal activity. In 1978, 3800 were arrested on this pretext, the vast majority being black (McSmith, 2010). This is discussed in the film by a group of black youths, a shocked white lawyer and the Metropolitan Police, who justify the practice as a necessary preventative measure. Such oppressive state-endorsed tactics, combined with the abortiveness of the Race Relations Act leads the black political activist Colin Prescod to declare in the film that:

‘Britain is stuck with a rebellious black presence in its centre. And there is no way Britain can get out of this situation . . . If one weren’t weary of talking about conspiracy, one would say there’s a conspiracy against blacks.’

For Prescod, the expressions of racism permeating British society were an outcome of Labour’s general legislative continuity with the anti-black sentiment of both Powellism and the Tories, a view endorsed in the film by both the activist Darcus Howe and the Race Relations Institute, who had been highly critical of the British government’s race relations approaches and in 1979 submitted an extensive 68-page report to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, detailing racist approaches used by police against blacks (Institute for Race Relations, 1979). However, PBS would refuse to air the film as intended by the filmmaker, broadcasting a heavily edited version in August 1978 and later launching a lawsuit against the director to prevent the further distribution the film. More significantly, an underlying motivation for successive Race Relations Acts, particularly its 1968 iteration, had been the influence of the American race situation, where the Act would be passed just weeks after violent riots had taken place in a number of US cities. Sir Dingle Foot, then Labour Solicitor General, would stress to the House of Commons that the passing of the Act would align Britain with both Civil Rights policy in the USA and the United Nations position on racial injustice, and restore the UK’s image globally as an exemplar of racial integration. By the late 1970s, such an ambition had been curtailed by the circulation of images of civil unrest within black British communities, with racial disturbances in Brixton, Notting Hill and Handsworth being ‘compared to the streets of Harlem, Watts and other ghettos’ (Solomos, 2003: 128). It is on the basis of the protection of the national imagery that Blacks Britannica came to the attention of Lawrence O’Keeffe, the deputy director of the New York-based British Information Service (BIS) in the USA, which served as an extension of the British Embassy’s Public Affairs department in Washington, located in New York due to its status as the epicentre of US media activity. Upon watching the film in his capacity to assess and report back to the Foreign Office on ‘British publicity directed toward foreign countries’ (The National Archives, 2020) he would label Blacks Britannica as ‘dangerous’, drawing particular attention to its negative representation of Britain as a citadel of systemic racial violence against blacks and the film’s depicting of the burgeoning militancy within Britain’s black community as a response to racial harassment by the police and violence from fascist organisations. Subsequently, on the BIS’s insistence, the film was banned from being screened in the UK.

Dread Beat and Blood (1979) was a 45-minute documentary film to be shown on the BBC’s flagship arts and culture documentary show Omnibus on Thursday, 5 April 1979 at 10.15 p.m. From its initial broadcast in 1967, Omnibus had become a key repository for profiles of significant cultural movements and figures, and this episode offered a timely portrait of 27-year-old Jamaican-born dub poet, musician and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson as he provides a powerful analysis of the racial violence experienced by Black and Asian communities in Brixton and beyond, and how his own poetry performs as a political weapon against racial injustice. The film, drawing its title from Johnson’s book of poetry released in 1975 and seminal 1978 album, had been funded by the Arts Council and captures the oral tradition of the West Indies through a distinctive Jamaican creole address that for Johnson, was the only means of articulating the sense of racial injustice among Britain’s black working class. Footage shows him reciting his poetry at an anti-racism march in Bradford and engaging in community work in Brixton. However, in-keeping with the general trajectory of the treatment of images that do not conform to the accepted characteristics of race relations, the BBC would later postpone the broadcasting of the documentary, a decision that for the film’s director, white Anglo-Italian Franco Rosso, was tantamount to ‘censor’ (Anon, 1979: 3). With the 1979 General Election approaching, and the centrality of race, racism and immigration within political debates, the BBC felt Dread Beat and Blood would be too politically provocative and may potentially influence the election and incite a violent response from the West-Indian community the film sought to represent. While by the late 1970s official Conservative policy had shifted from overt anti-immigration measures, with the Tory manifesto of 1979 stating that while they would ‘help’ immigrants wishing to leave the UK ‘there can be no question of compulsory repatriation’ (Conservative Party, 1979: 5), during the period leading up to the election triumph, Margaret Thatcher had made a number of inflammatory interventions on the subject. Questioned about immigration on the ITV investigative current affairs show World in Action by journalist Gordon Burns on 30 January 1978, Thatcher famously stated the British people were afraid they ‘might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’. Throughout Dread Beat and Blood, Johnson makes vitriolic references to Thatcher and the Conservatives’ attitude towards race and immigration and crucially, the prospect of urban uprisings as a response against racism. Directly addressing the experiences of racism for blacks in the UK, Johnson suggested that the UK is ‘gonna be in for some dread times’ and prophesised the coming of ‘The black rebellious night’. Such overt statements on the imminence of racial conflict were not only ruinous to the BBC’s aim of establishing the required political balance to chime with its general rhetoric of impartiality in relation to political opinion, but they also sustained the charge of racism as a central tenet of Conservative ideology, an association the Tories had sought to dismantle via the use of a more conciliatory political language segregating themselves, at least in discourse, from the erstwhile extreme National Front in the lead up to the General Election. More significantly, by forecasting an impending moment of ‘black rebellion’, such language evoked a black political uprising as a justified reaction to racial injustice to further destabilise the race relations discipline.

Dread, Beat and Blood would finally be screened on Thursday, 7 June, a month after the 3 May elections where the Conservative Party ousted the incumbent Labour Government of James Callaghan with a parliamentary majority of 43 seats, with the swing to the Tories of 5.2% being the largest since 1945 (House of Commons Library, 2020). Speaking in the Evening Standard (Friday, 6 April 1979) in response to the postponement, Rosso would state that ‘this, just before an election, is the time when people should be discussing race and politics – it shouldn’t all be swept under the carpet as usual’. Rosso’s own frustration at the perpetual depoliticisation of race through the editorial sanctioning of black political film was with justification: the Greater Manchester Police had denied Dread, Beat and Blood a late-night cinema licence, his documentary on a black youth in Borstal, House on the Hill (1973) was censored by Associated Television, and he received an injunction for a previous film on racism in the UK by the BBC in 1976. Thus, the BBC’s postponing of Dread, Beat and Blood demonstrates not solely the authoritarianism within the social democratic spheres of public service broadcasting, where the public value of narratives of racial injustice are determined by the subjective interests of the hegemon, but equally the disciplinary agility of the politics of race relations. In this example, the arresting of the potential of counter-hegemonic narratives through the mass-medium of television to both disrupt ‘common-sense’ images of black youths and expose the racism within Britain’s electoral politics.

It is of particular salience that the films central to this analysis – Pressure, Blacks Britannica, Dread, Beat and Blood – were made and released between 1975 and 1980, a period where their immediate responsiveness to the experiences of Britain’s black population rendered the films authentic forms of black resistance, invoking a political film culture that Wayne (2002) defines as the ‘Anti-National, National Film’. For Wayne (2002: 45), such texts can be described as ‘national’ through their fidelity to ‘the specific social, political and cultural dynamics within the territory of the nation’, but are equally anti-national as such national territories are framed as ‘a conflicted zone of unequal relations of power’. These films’ interrogation of the myth of equality underpinning race relations revealed the reality of a racially fractured Britain, in turn exposing race relations as an ideological gambit for the preservation of social order, and signalled the possibility of a new intervention in the dominant and very tangible modes in which the self imagines the other in white society (Hall, 1988; Malik, 2002). The mid-1970s were a period of ‘increased vivid images of the particular crimes and criminals that [were] understood to be the anti-social effects of black settlement’ (Gilroy, 1987: 74). Images of black youth resistance and rebellion through film played an important role in the formation of black politics in the 1970s and the process of bringing anti-racist resistance and an interrogation of the futility of race relations into a fusion and alliance through text. Images of blackness functioned as a way of breaking with the atomistic vision of both race relations and the hegemony of the pathological criminalised black youth, imagining a new form of rationality that Hall (1988) correctly identifies as a new dialogic space within which the black subject is able to finally speak. Equally, it also allowed film to orchestrate the relationship between Britain and black cultural identity at a community level, and is seen as a normatively impactful form of representation producing narratives for an emerging, politicised black population. And the counter-activity of black resistance within sites of racial conflict that these films aimed to inspire is a rebellion to be directed towards the polymorphous racial crisis located fundamentally within the political, cultural and economic infrastructures of the state.

The BBFC, CRE and Policing Babylon

It is this reality of the black circumstance and the possibility of a more cogent rearticulating of the relationship between the state and black Britain that Babylon’s narrative draws on, and the growth of Rastafarianism in Britain, which was providing a guiding principle in which black youths found a political articulation reflecting their experiences within a racist society is inscribed throughout (Plummer, 1978). The relationship forged between racial Britain and the social conditions the language of Rastafarianism addresses is evident in the film’s title, with the word Babylon used to describe ‘the whole, evil, Godless, white western world, and includes all those who are agents of Babylon, whether black or white; Priest, politicians and policemen all fall into this category’ (Plummer, 1978:14). The film’s identification of Britain as the second Babylon and the adoption of the values and practices of Rastafarianism by black British youths, including the religio-social command of the permanency of Rastafari identity, including not cutting dreadlocks (Nettleford, 1972) constituted an aesthetic of black resistance that for the state, represented a continued threat to both the established ‘characteristics’ of white society and the fragile structure of race relations. Indeed, by 1980, the very confrontations between the police and black youths the state had sought to prevent had begun to come to pass in UK cities. In Bristol, on 2 April 1980, conflicts took place between predominantly (but not exclusively) black residents and the police in response to the disproportionate use of sus on the St Paul’s Black and White Cafe. By September 1980, groups of up to 30 constables from the Metropolitan Police Special Patrol Group (SPG) had within five years made six sweeping early morning raids in Brixton, carrying out arbitrary street checks without consultation with the local police division or community representatives before dispatching unit officers, undermining the very race relations culture the state had advanced. In May of that year, Linton Kwesi Johnson would release the album Bass Culture, of which the song ‘Reggae fi Peach’ was dedicated to the anti-racism campaigner Blair Peach, killed by a SPG officer during the Anti-Nazi League counter-demonstration to a National Front election meeting in Southall in April 1979. Lyrics such as ‘The SPG them are murderers . . . we can’t make them get no further’ positioned black reggae music as inherently ‘prescriptive’, with its imbedding in a political context representing ‘an alien essence, a foreign body which implicitly threatened mainstream British culture from within’ (Hebdige, 1979: 64). In this sense, Johnson’s words function not simply as metaphorisations for police brutality, but a call to arms to repel racist oppression.

Babylon attempted to capture precisely this rebellious sentiment and the social tensions occurring in London between black youths, white residents and the police. Filmed on location in Brixton and Deptford, Babylon follows a group of young black reggae sound system artists responding with defiance to the everyday racism they encounter; unemployment and racial discrimination in the workplace, police brutality and racial antagonism from the local white community. Black resistance is made evident through the politicised reggae music within South London’s sound system culture. In Babylon’s powerful final scene at a sound system clash, and to the soundtrack of defiant reggae music, black youths barricade themselves inside a warehouse, preventing a police raid in a demonstration of black political rebellion (the actual filmed clash between them and the police was cut from the final edit). The original Babylon script, written by Martin Stellman was commissioned in its embryonic form as a Play for Today, however the BBC would refuse to produce the story due to concerns that its account of racial injustice was potentially inflammatory within the current political conjuncture (Newland, 2010).

It is this depiction of the reality of the black experience through image streams that unveil the futility of the modalities of race relations that renders Babylon politically necessary for the representation of racial injustice to a broad, black community in the UK, and it is this ambition that became the primary point of contention when Babylon was submitted to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in May 1980. From its establishment in 1912, the BBFC had maintained an intimate, if not formal, relationship with the Government, notably prior to the Second World War when the Home Office oversaw the political censoring of films in recognition of the emerging power of cinema as a highly influential and potentially dangerous mass-medium. Due to the threat of the wilful misuse of cinema as political propaganda as witnessed in Nazi Germany, the BBFC were mandated to censor British films that expressed controversial political perspectives. This function was absorbed into the Films Division of the Ministry of Information during the Second World War, and by the 1960s, the post-war liberal zeitgeist reflected in narratives and the influx of American films diverted the BBFC’s remit from censoring overt political expression to concerns with the depiction of violence, sex and moral indecency in film (Barber, 2011a; Brown, 2012; Petley, 2011; Robertson, 2005). By the late 1970s, an expanding legislative framework, including an increasing number of films being subjected to the 1959 Obscene Publications Act and the 1977 Home Office Report of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (the Williams Committee) meant that, for the BBFC, film censorship and classification was to exist in a new political orbit determined by state responses to new socio-cultural formations. However, due partially to the paucity of black film production in Britain, race representation had yet to be a consideration for the BBFC and the changing social dynamics that the politics of race produced equally demanded a different form of governmentality. In considering Babylon, the BBFC emerged responsive to the hegemony of race relations, mass hysteria over black youths and the prospect of urban revolt. The appearance of race, or more specifically, race relations into the classification landscape posed an unprecedented challenge for the BBFC, one in this instance motivated not by concerns over notions of public decency and sexualisation, but the imminent threat of civil unrest motivated by racial animus. Given the film’s aims to present an analysis of racism via the optic of black youths, Babylon’s producer, Gavrick Losey, had wanted the film certified at AA, permitting those aged 14 and above, the very demographic being subjected to the kinds of racial experiences Babylon framed its realism against, to see the film. However, such an ambition for the wide circulation of Babylon as a radical pedagogical tool for black resistance was not shared by the BBFC Director James Ferman who, having taken up the position in 1975, had gained a reputation as a circumspect censor, exhibiting particular moral conservatism in the classification and the prohibiting of a number of films as a result of their depictions of violence and sexual indecency. Further, while legislation referring to the safeguarding of the young from harmful imagery had been in place since the Cinematograph Act of 1952 which included a requirement to censor particular films for children, the idea of broader social anxieties guiding the BBFC’s classification decisions can be related to an increased governmental concern over the protection of children from the potentially damaging effects of film, culminating in the passing of the Protection of Children Act of 1978, which also brought filmic and televisual images of minors to within its legislative scope.

Babylon would controversially be given an X certification, excluding anyone under 18 from viewing the film. For Ferman and the BBFC, a younger, black youth audience would feel ‘confused and troubled’ and respond with anger and an increased sense of injustice, resentment and marginalisation from British society, through exposure to images that mirror the police harassment, brutality, institutional and public racism experienced within Britain. More significantly, Ferman believed that black youths, upon watching Babylon, may judge retributional violence towards Britain’s white population and the police as the justifiable response to racism. Further, the BBFC considered Babylon as ‘potentially inflammatory in its reinforcement of racial stereotypes’ (The Gavrik Losey Archive, 1980). The significance of the stereotype/race nexus as the influential apparatus upon which the BBFC’s decision was constructed will be addressed later in article. At this stage I would like to draw attention to the moral grandeur in which ‘confused and troubled’ seeks to frame and telegraph the BBFC’s own motivations within a protective veneer of social paternalism, where the natural cohesion of state agents set the ideological conditions for a renewed racial discourse that, in the example of the BBFC, exhibits a legislative regurgitation of the authoritative impetus.

One can conceptualise the above conditions within an Althusarian framework, and situating the BBFC’s performance of race politics within an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) is not without justification. The manifestation of race relations as an emergent ideology invaluates Althusser’s (1971) identification of the state as the locus where the political ideology has the most efficacious form. However, for the political ideology to be very effective, it requires some purchase on aspects or agents of the state; it needs to produce some kind of manifestation within the cultures of civil society. The unprecedented interaction between the politics of race and the aesthetic of black filmic protest points not just to the very heterogeneity of race relations, but that no one state apparatus can lead on its own. The political culture of race relations, as industry, requires a coordination between differing apparatuses, but all ideologically situated somewhere between state and society. Here, the ideological politics of race transmitted to within the institution surfaces as the racial politics of point of view, and the BBFC, in an unprecedented move that speaks both to the politicisation of film censorship and its alignment with trajectory of race relations, sought the assistance of seven members of the CRE, six of whom were black. According to archive files, the CRE viewed Babylon at the BBFC’s Central London offices in order that the decision could be invaluated by the public endorsement from those considered to possess an authentic and authoritative analytical position on race (The Gavrik Losey Archive, 1980).

My argument that the decision was embedded in the race relations discipline is supported by the BBFC’s consultation with the CRE, a Non-Departmental Public Body (NDPB) for a guidance on black youth rather than the now grassroots-focused and politically autonomous Institute for Race Relations (henceforth IRR). By 1980, the IRR had spent nearly eight years under its new Director, Ambavalander Sivanandan who, in April 1972 succeeded in a power struggle to liberate the IRR from its intimate relationship with the Government which had determined the ideological structure of the IRR’s research and arrested the freedom of expression and criticism staff could enjoy in response to racial conflict. In particular, IRR researchers criticised the methodology behind Colour and Citizenship (Rose, 1969) a landmark study on race in the UK which would influence the 1976 Race Relations Act. Commissioned by the Government, some felt its clandestine research methods were tantamount to the IRR preforming as a proxy for government surveillance on black people. In addition, researchers challenged attempts by its Board to close the IRR-affiliated monthly magazine Race Today, which was accused of political bias (Field et al., 2019). The subsequent resignation of the Board permitted a reorientation of the IRR away from advising the Government and towards independent community activity and anti-racism, a shift in ideology and function that paradoxically, proved conducive to its more radical ambitions, including funding by local authorities such as the left-wing Greater London Council (GLC). My interest in the different ideological approaches by the IRR and the CRE assists in analysing how the discipline of race relations would inform the BBFC’s assessment of Babylon. Indeed, the influence of the publication of Endless Pressure, Ken Pryce’s (1979) ethnography of Afro-Caribbean behaviours in the St Paul’s area of Bristol was evident in the CRE’s own contribution to race relations literature, The Fire Next Time which revealed a shared rhetorical position on young blacks, noting the potentially ‘extremist and destructive’ trajectory that politicised mobilisation among black youths may adopt (Commission for Racial Equality, 1980: 9). Having been established as a government-funded body intended to vindicate the state’s interventions on racial discrimination by installing within British society an adamantine practice of race relations as a technology of cultural cohesion, the CRE now identifies black filmic expression as an emerging variant of anti-racist political rebellion and incorporates it as part of its normative societal view, one in which the means of black political representation is to be brought to within its sphere of control. Indeed, seven CRE members would vote five to two in support of the BBFC’s X certification for Babylon (The Gavrik Losey Archive, 1980) and in this endorsement, the CRE represented the organic actualisation of BBFC intentions to occlude the status of black film as an anti-racist struggle.

Existing scholarship has holistically ignored the profound resonance of race to the question of Babylon’s certification. Notably, Barber (2011b: 124) makes an unstable and unresolved array of concessions to the BBFC, primarily that the anti-race struggle inscribed within Babylon was no exception to the BBFC’s general rationale, arguing that ‘Babylon was a clear example of the board refusing to grant a lower certificate because the material it contained was considered too inflammatory, but the same argument was also applied to Oh Calcutta!’. Here, Barber draws attention to the 1972 Broadway musical-comedy adapted for the screen, and drew the BBFC’s X classification due to its frequent instances of nudity and sex references. Barber (2011b: 124) attempts to unify both texts under the rubric of standardisation through an insistence that the BBFC’s objectifications ‘were informed just as much by prevailing social and cultural conditions as they were by the text itself’. However, Oh Calcutta! is an inappropriate analogue for Barber’s ambition to apply universality to the BBFC’s certification and such a thesis suffers from a number of critical lacunas. First, Barber crucially disregards the importance of race in her ontology of film classification, overlooking just how significant race relations and irrational social concerns performed in informing the X classification. Barber (2011b: 124) partially acknowledges that the BBFC recognised the film’s commitment to black representation, noting that in Babylon ‘it was the level of violence in the film and the racial stereotypes which the examiners found uncomfortable’ so the evacuating of race from entering the general topology of film classification disallows for an examination of how images of black violence bifurcate Babylon from other texts. Second, a key theoretical component absent in Barber’s analysis is the generic departures between Babylon, Oh Calcutta! and the vast majority of films within the BBFC’s taxonomy. While the BBFC did not holistically accept the presence of societal violence as the natural index of filmic violence, Ferman would concede that film classification must be ‘aware of the connections between what happens on screen and what could happen off screen’, identifying film as ‘a cyclical process as the media reflect society and, in reflecting it, they offer back, usually as glamorised images, models of behaviour’ (quoted in Barber, 2011b: 111).

Such a perspective bears a particular consequence for on-screen blackness. The historic progress towards black film censorship and restriction as serving the agendas of race relations is in perfect accordance with Hall’s (1988: 27) notion of black cinema as a site of continuous contestation within ‘the relations of representation’, and the citation of both violence and stereotype in the BBFC’s reasoning for the X certification is of particular importance. Babylon’s black realism produces an epistemic viscerality of violence quite different from the highly stylised violence of A Clockwork Orange (which the BBFC had censored in 1973) and black skin functions as a key signifier of the alterity of black cinematic realism, a concern refenced by both Pines (1981) in his sociological analysis of Pressure’s black stereotypes and Mercer (1988) who identifies the paradoxical effects of black independent film’s reliance on documentary realism aesthetics. Homi Bhabha (1983: 22) sought to nuance traditional understandings of the stereotype as a ‘secure point of identification’ in his landmark Screen article ‘The other question’, stressing that the cognisance of the inaccuracy of the racial stereotype cannot rupture its social impact. For Bhabha, it is precisely the arresting and manipulation of a reality, or its distortion, that ensures the effectiveness of the stereotype within the colonial discourse. Bhabha (1983: 31, emphasis in original) accepts that the stereotype may function as a ‘fixated form of the colonial subject which facilitates colonial relations, and sets up a discursive form of racial and cultural opposition in terms of which colonial power is exercised’. However, Bhabha applies scepticism to the fixity of spectator identifications, advancing ambivalence, contradiction and complexity as the key determinants in the structure and uptake of the stereotype and thus, disallows a homogenous reading of the black spectatorship. Such an analysis chimes with Hall’s (2001: 274, emphasis in original) later problematising of the ‘positive/negative strategy’ for black representation, in which the presence of progressive images amid the ‘largely negative repertoire of the dominant regime of representation does not necessarily displace the negative. Since the binaries remain in place, meaning continues to be framed by them.’ The BBFC’s trepidation over race-based stereotypes finds its genetic origin in these limited considerations of the processes of black identification, and is marked by contradiction. The depictions of black youths in Babylon emerge in a tenor and visual characterisation diametrically opposed to the dominant forms of representation that had subjected black characters to the simplifications forming the precise epistemic basis for the BBFC’s own apprehensions over racial stereotypes, and would be challenged by Losely in a letter written to the BBFC on 11 June 1980 in response to the X classification, stating that ‘none of the characters in the movie are portrayed as angels yet none of their overt actions are unreasonable in the context of the story’ (The Gavrik Losey Archive, 1980).

Subsequently, the BBFC’s response to Babylon is composed of two parallel dimensions of the race relations discipline. First, there is a dimension of structure which attempts to suture broader political concerns over race with a moralistic attentiveness to society’s conditioning of young minds. This concern with youthhood is explored by Lawrence (1982: 54–55) who identified society’s inflexible and universal categorisation of childhood and adulthood, with youthhood existing within ‘that area of transition between these two apparently fixed states’. It is within this province of youthhood that one can locate the interaction of moral panics, violence and race and the convergence of these anxieties around the idea of a threatening black uprising within the BBFC’s assessment of Babylon. Lawrence’s (1982: 55, emphasis in original) analysis of the general description of the transition from youthhood to adulthood as a period of development marked by ‘highly charged emotions’ [sic], psychological instability and idealistic naivety’, entwines with the BBFC’s citing of black youthhood as particularly vulnerable to the influence of violent film images, and such a treatment of black youth bears an additional prejudice as a result of its alignment with the hegemonic description of black youths as ‘inherently emotional’ and predisposed to react with violence ‘at the slightest provocation’ (1982: 79). That such psychosocial corruptions of black youthhood now include visual stimuli through politicised black cinema, the BBFC performs a definitive curatorial position over black film; the BBFC affirms its fidelity to the race relations discipline while simultaneously restating its fundamental disengagement with racism as a systemic injustice that produces, in the example of Babylon, a cumulative effect on the black youth psyche provoking a violent reaction to racist violence.

The above structure operates in a symbiotic relationship with the second dimension of race relations within the BBFC; a dimension of erasure, or narrational capture. Here, my specific interest is in the discourse of state-influenced racial quasi-censorship that is invoked by, among other things, the iconography of racial violence, resistance and retribution, a range of visual polemics that finds its acme towards Babylon’s conclusion. The stabbing of a white racist man by Blue is a particularly significant moment and contributes, one can suggest, to the BBFC’s policing of Babylon, with the scene constituting a potential uprising’s inciting incident. Blue, having been pursued through the night, apprehended, racially abused and physically assaulted by the Metropolitan Police, on his return home and against the backdrop of racist National Front insignia, stabs his white racist neighbour during a physical altercation after being subjected to a tirade of racist abuse before being attacked. Ferman had stated that:

there is no cast iron evidence for a one to one cause and effect relationship between violence in the media and violence in society. But there is undeniable evidence for a correlation between the two. Those societies which have a high incidence of media violence have also a high incidence of social violence. (quoted in Barber, 2011b: 111)

For the BBFC, the myopia influencing the prophesy that young blacks would watch Babylon and conclude that violent retaliation against white racists is the only, and necessary means of protest, is the idea that such an incubus (in accord with the BBFC logic) will no longer be within the minds of black youths by 18. In effect, the certificate reduced the film’s exposure to members of the very black community who potentially could be galvanised by the film’s message of defiance. On this basis, and in keeping with Gilroy et al.’s general caution at bien pensant citing of machination as the basis for the state’s management of race (CCCS, 1982), it is neither possible nor an ambition to construct a conspiratorial collusion between the BBFC and the CRE. Rather, the decision established both institutions as chief arbiters, not just within the specific evaluation of Babylon’s societal threat, but in the more common rivalry between the momentum of anti-racist resistance and the contesting science of race relations.

In considering the public reaction upon its release on Friday, 7 November 1980, a paradox is observed in mainstream media’s abandoning of its own racialised genealogy as Babylon’s critical reception was met with universal praise from the very media outlets responsible for the pervasive narrative of the synonymity of blackness and criminality. Between Wednesday 6 and Sunday 9 November, Babylon received widespread national coverage, with positive reviews in the Daily Telegraph (Anon, 1980b), The Times (Robinson, 1980), the Daily Express (Anon, 1980c) and the Observer (French, 1980), unprecedented for a film that had been made on a £357,000 budget and reduced to just three cinemas: the Gate in Bloomsbury, the Classic in Chelsea and Ace Cinema in Brixton. Described as ‘one of the best British-made films for years’ (Brien, 1980) in a cover feature for the London publication Time Out during the week of its release, the film’s black actors, ‘Beefy’ (Trevor Laired) and Blue (Brinsley Forde) were pictured on the front cover over the title ‘Great Black Hope’ where the film was described as the ‘Rastafarian Wednesday Play’ (Time Out, 1980). The associating of Babylon with the BBC’s Wednesday Play which, between 1964 and 1970 was the highly influential anthology series for producing radical, politicised television dramas (with the examination of homelessness in Cathy Come Home (1967) a notable contribution to this strand) is of particular importance. A juxtaposition of black politics invoked in the use of ‘Rastafarianism’ with a recognisable tradition of visual socio-political enquiry exhibits an attunement to the societal function of black film and an attempt to position racial inequality at the centre of British public consciousness.

Babylon’s critical interrogation of racism was also acknowledged by the Daily Mail who, although throughout the 1970s had been co-authors in the media’s propagation of the black youth mugger narrative, contributing to a moral panic that Hall et al. (1978: 16) described as the ‘official’ reactions to events that are ‘out of all proportion to the actual threat offered’, would describe Babylon as ‘the most unflinching film about race relations that has yet been produced in Britain’ (Anon, 1980a). Such a proclamation would be tempered however by their suggestion that Babylon tells ‘a selective truth, concentrating on the black side of the conflict’ and shared the BBFC’s consternation by stating that ‘this provocative film illuminates our race problem, but the solution it threatens, through its hero, is scarier for both British white and blacks’ (Anon, 1980a). Such a forecasting was conditioned somewhat by the Sunday Telegraph, who interpret the stabbing as a violent act carried out ‘not out of neurosis but desperation’ (Castell, 1980). For others, the BBFC’s assessment of Babylon invoked a further moral crisis – that of the very practice of race-based authoritative censorship. In a particular polemic, Andrew Walker of the Evening Standard would point to the unjust actions of the BBFC in its X classification, and drawing attention to the Board’s judgement, declared that the decision is ‘the old, shameful story of censors who claim a paternalistic wisdom and a condescending right to “protect” anyone they think stupid or immature enough to misread that message’ (Walker, 1980). Describing the X certification as an ‘objectionable and dangerous procedure’, with particular reference to the contribution of the CRE in the decision, Walker (1980) went on to argue that:

The Commission for Racial Equality was not constituted to act as second hand film censors over the rest of us. Its members’ decision in this instance encroaches on individuals’ rights that have nothing to do with equality, racial or otherwise, but everything to do with one’s freedom to see the film.

In his implicating of the BBFC and CRE as partakers in the disingenuous social actions that Cohen (1972: 9) described as ‘manning the moral barricades’, Walker (1980) would conclude by declaring that ‘I believe the film has been banned less because it may confuse young blacks, but, than because it didn’t correspond to the wistfully benign thinking of the censors and the race policy makers.’ This contention over Babylon’s certification reflected not just the sophistry within the public management of race, but demonstrates how the ideology of race relations dominated some of the literalistic ideological departments of the state, where the reactionary moralism of neo-conservatism towards the social phenomenon of black resistance configured race relations as a technology of governmentality, instruction and adherence. By situating Babylon within this political context, the policing of black film emerges as the index of a strategic ideological construction, one capable of subsuming the competing ideology of black political dissidence.

Conclusion

Throughout this article I have explored the processes through which political anxiety over the ‘social time bomb’ of black youth uprisings framed the constricting of political blackness via the medium of film, and identifies the ways in which the polymorphous practices of race relations cascaded to within the functions of state institutions. This presents race relations as a multi-dimensional construction which equally advanced multi-dimensional manifestations. In doing so, this article identifies a critical variation of those discrete and yet influential repertoires of race relations, and the visualising of political blackness should be regarded as a key component of the state-agenda for suppressing black politicisation and urban uprisings. Further, this reinforces the significance of filmic texts within the discipline of sociology, and the validity of a sociological analysis of Babylon as a variant of political communication is located in how filmic representations (and the forms of state governance determining them) are implicated within the processes of structuring social relations and identities, with particular relevance in regard to racial difference. Black film was precisely the antidote to the crisis of race in the late 1970s through its pedagogical momentum and the intensification of a black political consciousness that guided new narrational forms and a more provocative representation of British society, foregrounding film as a new epistemology for blackness and racism within the public arena. However, the technology of race relations possessed no language of black self-narration and verisimilitude, and instead translated Babylon’s depiction of racial injustice as a consequential power struggle between the peripheral experience of racism and the paradigm of race crises. To this end, the imbricating of non-governmental organisations within the state’s quixotic project of race conflict management, even at the granular level of black film as represented in the BBFC’s X classification, suggests that the policing of Babylon resided very much within the applicational dexterity of state-led race relations, one which emerges in the interplay of organic cultural expression and governmental suppression: first, in the interplay of black resistance and race relations and, second, in the interplay of black film and censorship. This allows for a consideration of how radical, politicised black films became a key focus of the state-driven management of the organic crisis of race, and the significance of the under-analysed sociological context of the policing of political black film throughout this decade.