The promise of political blackness? Contesting blackness,challenging whiteness and the silencing of racism: A review article

Introduction: Re-centring racism in Brexit Britain

Conceived within the epoch of America’s first black president, post-raciality took on a public presence by, as Goldberg (2015: 1) writes, ‘pronouncing itself the prevailing state of being, at least aspirationally.’ However, in an age of Trumpism that espouses Mexicans as rapists and imposes a travel ban for those from Muslim states, and Brexit that has been ushered through by an aggressive nationalism and anti-immigration sentiments, race is squarely back on the agenda, extinguishing the chimera of a post-racial world that the era of Barack Obama hinted might be on the horizon.

Despite apparent gains in racial equality in Britain following the landmark 1999 Macpherson Report which publically outed institutional racism and importantly, included in its remit covert and unwitting ways in which racist practices are enacted, and the Equality Act 2010, which legally protects people from discrimination within the workplace and wider society, the 2017 Racial Equality Audit has revealed evidence of ongoing structural racial discrimination including within education, work, housing and health (Asthana and Bengtsson, 2017). Performances of white dominance are perhaps most pronounced in increasingly stringent immigration legislation.

In her previous role as Home Secretary, Prime Minister Theresa May declared in 2012 that she aimed to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants,overtly signalling a policy agenda of aggressive, unsympathetic and unwelcoming treatment to those wishing to enter Britain for a better life, which has been felt more broadly by immigrants with legal status. The Home Office implemented a biometric identity card system for immigrants enforced by employers, landlords, hospitals, banks and others by the Immigration Acts 2014 and 2016, producing an environment in which everyday citizens become borderguards (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018) and immigrants are criminalized (Aas, 2011; Barker, 2017). These practices illustrate how racial governance is institutionalized by facilitating performances of racial exclusion and discrimination under the semblance of maintaining law and order, which raises important questions about the rights and terms of belonging for racial minorities in Britain, both new arrivals and settled communities. A stark example has been the Windrush scandal involving Commonwealth Citizens from the Caribbean who were invited to Britain between 1948 and 1971. As their arrival pre-dates new legislative demands, some do not possess the required documents to prove their right to remain, which has led to 164 citizens being deported or detained (National Audit Office, 2018: 23). The hostile environment in which current racial politics is framed is not new, but is illustrative of longstanding institutionalized hostility towards racial minorities in Britain. A key example is the Commonwealth Act 1962, which prevented the rights to free movement of citizens of the Commonwealth and the Colonies for those who were not born in the UK or held a British passport and subjected them to immigration control for the first time. The Windrush scandal presents an important case because the current hostile environment is also at ‘the heart of the Windrush scandal’ (Elgot, 2018). We must look to Britain’s colonial past therefore to understand how these histories continue to shape the experiences of Britain’s settled racial minority communities and persistent exclusion from belonging in Britain, both epistemically in terms of the ‘national imaginary’ (Anderson, 1983), and materially, in terms of the structural disadvantages they face to their life chances and opportunities. Although whiteness has been re-centred within current racial politics, it is connected to durable systems of privileges that are widely silenced because they are administered through covert means of structural and institutional disadvantages that are difficult to pinpoint and thus challenge.

Exemplifying the hostile environment, Brexit proposes significant challenges for Britain’s racial minorities and was mobilised by an aggressive nationalism indelibly linked to an imaginary white British past purged of its black and brown others (Abbas, 2019; Virdee and McGeever, 2018). As noted by the Trade Union Congress (2016: 3) report, Challenging Racism after the EU Referendum, ‘Immigration shaped much of the referendum campaign, repeatedly cited by the leave campaigns and often marked by highly divisive rhetoric and sensationalist appeals to racial and national sentiment.’ The EU Referendum result on 23 June 2016 resulted in a small minority of 51.9% being in favour of leaving the European Union and was followed by an upsurge in hate crime. Hate crime offences recorded by the police in 2017–2018 showed a 17% increase to 94,098 from the previous year (Home Office, 2018). This represents a 123% increase from 2012 to 2013. Although the increase is partly due to improvements to police recording procedures, the Home Office concluded that the spike in hate crime was linked to the EU referendum and recent terrorist attacks that have conflated issues of immigration, social welfare, and the terror threat, posing difficulties for both settled and new racial minority communities.

In response, black politics has been re-energised as demonstrated by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US which has also gained traction in Britain. However, black politics remains fraught with political tensions concerning who can be included within the category ‘black’ that risk undermining its achievements in challenging white dominance which have historically troubled the project of political blackness in Britain (Alexander, 2002; Brah, 2005; Modood, 1994). The texts explore concerns facing the ‘black’ British political subject that as Brah (2005: 13) writes, ‘emerged as a signifier of the entangled racialised colonial histories of “black” settlers of African, Asian and Caribbean descent, affirming a politics of solidarity against a racism centred around colour.’ I approach ‘black’ in two ways within the article that reflects competing articulations of ‘black’ as a category which refers to the experiences of people of African-Caribbean descent and political blackness based on an expansive notion of ‘black’ as a means of building solidarity with other racial minority communities in the UK.

The contentious landscape of current racial politics has prompted interrogation such as by Alexander (2018: 1035) of ‘black’ as ‘political praxis’ in racial and ethnic studies. Alexander identifies four key tensions: firstly, between ‘identity politics and the politics of difference’; secondly, between historical and geographical situatedness or between a ‘politics of location’ and ‘a politics from elsewhere’; thirdly, exclusions or inclusions that this denotes as ‘black’ as a category travels and finally, ‘how each of these tensions poses problems for politics and for political and social change.’ This review engages with three books that examine how ‘black’ is being reconfigured as a political category and a mode of resisting racism. It addresses how whiteness has exerted dominance through both racialized epistemic and material violences that feature in an aggressive nationalism based on a sanitised story of immigration that sidesteps talk of the violences of Empire. Further, explores structural and institutionalized forms of racial governance which present a semblance of respectability and recognition towards protecting racial minorities through legislative gains, but which covertly exclude people of colour, facilitated by post-racial frames that silence their experiences of racism in Britain. The texts prompt important questions about the demise of political blackness (see Alexander, 2002; Brah, 2005; Modood, 1994) in the UK for failing to manage differential positionings and the potential of intersectionality for addressing multiple axes of deprivation facing different racial communities that can support a radical (self-) othering favourable to anti-racism. The review concludes with advancing a politics of discomfort as a mobilising position premised on destabilising whiteness from its seat of comfort by sensitising us to structural violences, both epistemic and material, that whiteness continues to enact against people of colour.

The postracial critique and white denial

The emergence of ‘the postracial’ can be traced to important shifts in the composition and governance of racial populations and introduction of anti-racism legislation experienced in the UK (Rhodes, 2013: 51) following the Second World War and mass immigration of Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan to help reconstruct Britain, and to conceptions of ‘colourblindness’ accompanying the US civil rights movement (Goldberg, 2013: 17), which Winant (2004: 51) argues introduced a period of unparalleled racial anxiety ‘in which competing racial projects struggle to reinterpret the meaning of race and to redefine racial identity.’ The postracial has developed contemporaneously and ideologically with the rise of neoliberalism and commitment to ‘individualising responsibility’ (Goldberg, 2013: 17) that renders individuals accountable for their actions and by extension, challenges ontological claims to racial group membership.

Postracial frames have been much debated in the field of race and ethnicity. Whilst pseudo-scientific notions of race have largely been discredited and race has predominately been recognised as a social construct by academics and activists concerned with race and racism, debate remains, as Warmington (2009: 281) observes, concerning how we work ‘both with and against conceptual tools of race and racism that have yet to be effectively replaced.’ Postracialism can broadly be distinguished by two main strands: firstly, ‘conservative postracialism’ which emphasises the declining significance of race and claims that society has arrived at a ‘postracial’ moment. I am not arguing here that writers within this strand are politically conservative in all aspects, but rather that their orientation to current racial politics reflects one or both of these traits. For example, in the UK context, Munira Mirza, previously Deputy Mayor for Education and Culture for London and Culture Advisor to former London Mayor, Boris Johnson, and Tony Sewell, independent educationalist consultant and CEO of the charity, Generating Genius, which supports disadvantaged young people study Science and Technology at University, both deemphasise racial discrimination as explanations for poor social attainment. For Mirza (2010), ‘Race is no longer the significant disadvantage it is often portrayed to be,’ instead citing class and socio-economic background as more significant factors. Sewell (2011) comparably, refutes structural explanations as ‘tired’ and ‘flawed’ research propagated by ‘white liberal mentors’ which position black and Asian people as ‘victims of institutional racism, never demanding any responsibility from the individual.’ Instead, he argues somewhat controversially that ‘more than racism,’ it is absent fathers resulting in ‘over-feminised’ (Sewell, 2010) parenting and inability for black youth to take responsibility for their futures that are the main causes of failure. Writing on the US context, Hollinger (2008: 1033, also 2011) argues that the ‘age of Obama’ signals the demise of race by presenting a challenge to the significance of colour lines and to ‘blackness itself,’ meaning that a possible future could be imagined in which:

Hollinger is more measured, sidestepping the pathology of blackness that Sewell, as a black person, is freer to entertain than white thinkers who would risk being thought racist. Hollinger demonstrates a neoliberal orientation that also places emphasis on individual choice and responsibility, which effectively erodes the efficacy of racial groups (see Goldberg, 2013: 17) for determining economic destiny. Although Hollinger shares an anti-essentialist account of race that is comparable to more radical strands, he is naïve in thinking African-Americans can strategically shed their blackness like a piece of clothing. Within conservative postracial frames, structural inequalities that persist on the basis of ethnoracial distinctions are obscured and instead attributed to individual failure. Such postracial assertions, as Paul (2014: 704–5) contends, ‘mystify existing racial stratification, dismiss the effects of racist discrimination and argue that racism has been legislatively overcome,’ thus rendering recognition of, and accountability for, racial inequalities a demanding pursuit. More conservative strands reference the ideological notion that contemporary liberal democracies have ‘transcended the logics of race and racism’ (Valluvan, 2016: 2241) so that any reference to race merely denotes a residual leftover of a bygone era or evidence of culpability in acts of racism that under neoliberalism, are understood as constituted at the individual level rather than illustrative of systemic racism. Within this framing ‘post’ suggests a new phase, the achievement of which is at the crux of the postracial debate.

The second strand is a more progressive, ‘radical postracialism’ that argues that we must abandon ‘race’ as a category in order to move towards universal claims to humanity. Advocates of this type of postracialism argue that attachments to raciology prevent us from moving beyond ‘race’ (Gilroy, 1998, 2000, 2004; Nayak, 2006; Paul, 2014) which is required in order to empower anti-racism and end, as Paul (2014, 704) argues, ‘the cyclical (re)production of race – a prerequisite for racism.’ In the UK, Gilroy (2000: 12, also 2004) has been prominent in presenting his case ‘against race.’ However, he recognises that political desire to ‘liberate humankind from race-thinking’ must be accompanied by historical reason. This involves understanding the different investments in race for beneficiaries of racial hierarchies who may not wish to relinquish their privileges compared to those subordinated by race-thinking who have used the categories of their oppressors in order to ‘resist the destiny that ‘race’ has allocated to them…’ Despite its challenges, postraciality remains the goal for Gilroy, even if we have not yet arrived there.

By contrast, Goldberg is adamant in his condemnation that the postracial is the problem. Goldberg’s (original italics, 2015: 127) Are We All Postracial Yet? describes the ‘postracial paradox’ whereby ‘racial erasures are coterminous with new intensities in racist expression.’ Postracial frames, rather than being coexistent with the demise of race, actually facilitate racism by silencing people of colour’s continued experiences of racism. Not unsurprisingly, all three authors attack postracial or colour blind accounts in their examination of current racial politics that stubbornly persist to do the work of racism whilst paradoxically denying its presence. Eddo-Lodge (2017: x) advances the term ‘white denial’ to describe the situation where white people ‘refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms’ derived from ‘a life oblivious to the fact that their skin colour is the norm and all others deviate from it.’ Her critique is reminiscent of Mill’s (1997: 18) articulation of an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ which he describes as a ‘pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.’ This inability, or perhaps ‘wilful ignorance’ (Eddo-Lodge, 2017: 79) to see the world they have created, prompts Eddo-Lodge’s (2017: xii) decision, as she outlined in her blog bearing the same title as her book, to stop talking to white people about race as an act of self-preservation against the frustration and anger of not being listened to. As she writes, ‘It must be a strange life, always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you’re finally asked to listen.’

Whilst Mills (1997: 18) suggests that ignorance of the reality of racism arises from psychological dissonance, Eddo-Lodge (2017: ix) believes it is from an ‘emotional disconnect’ which importantly, not only helps to explain her struggle to engage with whites, but the inhumanity which surrounds such failures to engage; white denial therefore challenges associations of whiteness with humanness (Dyer, 1997). Critical whiteness studies has brought to attention how whiteness operates as the ‘unmarked norm’ (Dyer, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993; Hartigan, 2005) so that race is understood as Dyer (1997: 1) contends, as applicable only to non-whites whereas white people occupy ‘the human norm.’ Echoing Dyer but incorporating the black experience, Eddo-Lodge (my italics, 2017: xvii) writes: ‘To be white is to be human; to be white is universal. I only know this because I am not.’ Eddo-Lodge (2017: 86) provides an important intervention to accounts of whiteness by highlighting that this representation is illustrative of white privilege; a safety net which protects whites from being excluded from ‘the narrative of being human.’ Her book is a reminder for white people that their experiences are not the norm for people of colour. White denial silences discussions of race by denying people of colour’s attempts to bring to attention how their lived experiences are negatively structured by racism. By reclaiming control of the censorship she has encountered from whites, Eddo-Lodge’s (2017: xviii) book offers an important intervention; ‘an attempt to speak’ and thus continue the conversation about race. Extending post-colonial imperatives of engaging subjugated voices (for example, Spivak’s (1998) renowned ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’), Eddo-Lodge shows that the ability not just to speak about race, but to be heard, is central to challenging racism.

Diangelo’s book White Fragility (2018) provides a useful rejoinder to Eddo-Lodge’s explication of the challenges she has endured to talk to white people about race in its attempt to address, as the sub-heading states, ‘why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism.’ Offering a counter-point to Eddo-Lodge’s exploration of white denial, Diangelo advances the term ‘white fragility’ to encapsulate the fragility white people demonstrate in conversations about race, particularly where attempts are made to link them to the system of racism. By challenging whites’ role in this system, white fragility actually re-centres white dominance by returning white people to an equilibrium of racial comfort undergirded by a refusal to see the negative impacts of racism on people of colour, and importantly, whites’ complicity in their enactment. Diangelo (2018: 2) argues that rather than white fragility demonstrating vulnerability therefore, it is ‘born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.’ White fragility closes down conversations about race as Eddo-Lodge’s book has examined, and returns the gaze to the white subject as victim, which paradoxically reaffirms their position of superiority and leaves racism and its effects on people of colour unexamined, and thus belligerently intact. Central to addressing white fragility is expanding the narrow association of racism with overtly racist acts by approaching racism as a system in which ‘whites hold social and institutional power over people of color’ (Diangelo, 2018: 1).

The difficulty to identify and thus to name racism, and importantly, the vested interest of whites in both the denial of racism and perpetuation of the racist system that they benefit from, means that the power of structural racism to negatively impact people of colour’s life chances persists. As Eddo-Lodge (2017: 65) writes:

The covert nature of structural racism is difficult to hold to account. It slips out of your hands easily like a water-snake toy. You can’t spot it as easily as a St George’s flag and a bare belly at the English Defence League march. It’s much more respectable than that.

The failure for whites to locate themselves within the system of racism facilitates what Bonilla-Silva (2003) astutely describes as ‘racism without racists’; a situation which Hirsch (2018: 117) knows all too well: ‘The era of racism without racists is the story of my life.’ Growing up as a mixed-race person of Ghanian and German Jewish heritage in the white space of Wimbledon, she describes how Wimbledon is characterised by respectability imagined as quintessentially British (and tacitly white):

[Wimbledon is] a microcosm of how British society sees itself, polite, wholesome, home to what we imagine to be ‘British culture’ – an obsession with the weather, picnics and deckchairs, umbrella in hand, eating strawberries and cream, cheering the underdog, forming endless orderly queues.

Aggressive nationalism and (post)colonial hauntings

Race scholars have long been pre-occupied with the failure of racial minorities to be included within the national imaginary (for example, Gilroy’s (1987) seminal There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack) and the place of race within nation construction (Goldberg, 2002). Historical situatedness raises important tensions concerning ‘black’ as a category (Alexander, 2018). Hall (2000) argues that ‘black’ is ‘not a question of pigmentation… [It] is a historical category, a political category, a cultural category’ (149). As such, ‘black’ needs to be situated within a particular time/place which poses significant challenges for the diaspora who are often cut off from their heritage and erased from the history of Britain and legacy of Empire; these epistemic violences have profound effects on belonging. Eddo-Lodge (2018: 9) devotes a whole chapter to ‘Histories’ to address a profound and troubling question which has haunted her existence in Britain: ‘what history had I inherited that left me an alien in my place of birth?’ In order to do this excavation work, she has to confront the violences of Empire, both material (Eddo-Lodge, 2018: 3–5, cites the brutality faced by generations of black people stolen into slavery from Africa whilst British society reaped the economic profits from sugar plantations in the Caribbean) and epistemic violences, for example, erasures of the contribution of citizens of the British Empire from narratives of the First World War (Eddo-Lodge, 2017: 10). For her, this historical remapping is central to challenging the system of racism because it highlights the ways in which white privilege operates: ‘through being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances’ (Eddo-Lodge, 2018: 2). Only by whites understanding their role in the system of racism which has dictated the life chances of people of colour can racism be addressed.

Hirsch (2018: 125) too shows that the legacy of Empire is crucial to understanding and challenging current racial politics. She argues that Britain presents a complex case because of the lengths we endure to avoid naming and confronting the problem of racism that is connected to our disconnect with our racist past of Empire and its legacy: ‘We want to be post-racial, without having ever admitted how racial a society we have been.’ She recounts that her daughter will know more about Britain’s role in slavery than her generation because some excavation work has happened. For example, David Olusoga’s 2016 BBC Two series Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners charts the untold history of British involvement in the slave trade which permeated more sections of society than we were led to believe, cutting across the British royal family, aristocracy, as well as banking and industrial classes. Slavery brought Britain great wealth having fuelled Britain’s economic development including the Industrial Revolution and key infrastructures that continue to benefit us today. The persistent absence of counter-narratives of ‘Great’ Britain however, helps to explain why a 2014 YouGov poll found that the majority of Britons ‘thought the British Empire was something to be proud of,’ three times more than the number who ‘felt it was something to be ashamed of.’ This disavowal marks an important distinction between Britain and the US to its slavery history ¹ ; Britain’s colonies were offshore enabling us to distance ourselves from the horrors of slavery in a way that Americans cannot: ‘most British people saw the money without the blood’ as Eddo-Lodge (2017: 5) writes.

Failure to teach Britons about their colonial past has meant that white Britons are unable to understand the rightful presence of Britain’s post-colonial subjects who in turn, find it difficult to navigate their histories so that they might enjoy a position of belonging within the national story to which they rightfully belong: ‘Black Britain deserves a context’ (Eddo-Lodge, 2017: 55). As Eddo-Lodge (2017: 3) reminds us, disinterest in Britain’s violent colonial past is characteristic of white privilege and marks a profound disjuncture between her and white Britons: ‘To me [as a black Briton], this didn’t seem like information you can opt out from learning.’ The writing out of black and brown people from Britain’s history and the national story that we are taught, except in the marginal space of Black History month, comprise epistemic violences that induce feelings of non-belonging. To redress epistemic violences suffered by Britain’s post-colonial subjects, (post)colonial amnesia must be challenged. As Eddo-Lodge (2017: 55) rallies: ‘Faced with a collective forgetting, we must fight to remember.’ There are important questions raised also about how to carve out a place of belonging in the present that reposes the question asked by Brah in Cartographies of Diaspora (2005: 1): ‘What does it mean to think about the politics of diaspora in the current historical moment?’

Culture and blackness: (non)belonging and the politics of place

There has been longstanding debate in racial and ethnic studies concerning questions of ‘culture’ and ‘difference’ (Alexander, 2018: 1040; Hall, 2000) and how they trouble the inclusivity of ‘black.’ The tendency to view culture through the lens of ethnic absolutism posits culture as a line which divides racial groups from one another (Gilroy, 1987: 17). Gilroy (1987: 17) argues that racial meanings are salient aspects of how culture ‘mediates the world of agents and the structures which are created by their social praxis.’ Hirsch’s (2018) text offers useful insight into the complexities of culture as a resource for developing a strong black identity. Speaking as a mixed-ethnic person of Ghanian and German Jewish heritage she shows how ‘black’ is splintered along lines of race, class, gender, religion and place that propose differential positionings and challenges. This point is well illustrated through the opposition which Hirsch (2018: 7) sets up between growing up as black body in the privileged white space of Wimbledon compared to her partner Sam, also of Ghanian heritage, in Tottenham, which she sees as the epicentre of an authentic black British culture epitomised by the grime ² -music subculture where black Britons may feel ‘in place’:

Sam’s generation created a subculture of almost unparalleled influence; a black, inner-city language and grime-music scene that has since the turn of the century been progressively taking on the world. It’s a society with black roots, grounded in strong African and Caribbean influences, but transcendental in popularity, shaping identities that range from northern working-class Asian masculinity, to white working-class youth culture in Glasgow.

Andrews’ (2018) text, Back to Black, sets out a detailed treatise for reclaiming the politics of black radicalism for black people with African descent independent from other groups (Andrews, 2018: 288) by connecting contemporary struggles to historical black freedom movements. He dismisses the role of culture in fashioning a black politics. Describing the destruction of African culture under the transatlantic slave trade, Andrews (2018: 105, 107) writes, ‘We are a broken people.’ He details how blackness has suffered a ‘cultural genocide’ that haunts the present, comprising African names being replaced with European ones and the banning of African religions and languages. Andrews (2018: 108, 109) notes that cultural nationalism was perceived as a void to fill the gap left by the absence of African culture in black life. Central to this approach was ‘reclaiming Africa’ to enable ‘not only a fuller appreciation of the African self but also to restore African knowledge in the “global village.”’ Yet whilst Andrews believes that re-establishing a connection to Africa is central to a progressive black politics in the diaspora, he warns against finding salvation in Africa since here too, cultural genocide has infected the society, citing the prevalence of skin bleaching as symptomatic of the internalisation of black inferiority that has taken root as an effect of western influence (which also effects the African diaspora as Eddo-Lodge and Hirsch’s personal accounts of the damage they experienced to their self-esteem due to the predominance of western standards of beauty attest).

For Andrews, conceiving Africa as the locus of a progressive black politics limits the potential for radical change because of the co-option of African nations into colonial forms of governance by the west. He cites how Pan-Africanism delimits radicalism by keeping the ‘Uncle Toms at the table’ (referring to black people who have been co-opted into serving white western interests):

National unity within the colonial nation state was used to control the independence process in the same way that Pan-African unity has been used to bring the continent into the global system of oppression. Unity is not enough; we need clear politics and ideology if a movement is to produce radical change. (Andrews, 2018: 66)

Advancing the ideology of blackness as a country is linked to Andrews’ rejection of the black liberal tradition which is premised on reforming the system from within. Although black liberals accept the existence of racial inequality, they argue that these can be addressed by improving access to the system such as through legislation and challenging discrimination. Within this analysis writes Andrews (2018: xvii), ‘The system is not the problem … just the fact we are not part of it. If Black faces were in high places then of course a different set of decisions would be made and equality would emerge.’ Conversely, Andrews (original italics, 2018: xvii) supports the black radical tradition epitomised by Malcolm X which identifies that ‘the system is the problem’: ‘we want no part of integration with this wicked race of devils’ (Malcolm X, 1963 cited in Andrews, 2018: xvii), and thus to end oppression, the system itself must be overturned. Co-option of black people to carry out the dirty work of white supremacy highlights how their entry into the system does not lead to its dismantling. Citing hip hop artist KRS-ONE (1993 cited in Andrews, 2018: xvii) in the context of apartheid in Johannesburg, it was the ‘Black cop killing Black kids in Johannesburg.’ Black people entering an intrinsically racist system is not the answer it would seem to improving the life chances of black people.

There is much to admire in Andrews’ unapologetic style which forces us not to let ourselves off the hook in our fight for change; this includes being distracted by poetics above politics. However, it is significant that he cites a hip hop artist to bring this point to attention which suggests that cultural forms are not divorced from political expression. Andrews argues that cultural forms should not be the basis for resistance because they risk divorcing black people from the ‘real’ problems they encounter in the streets and the political and socio-economic system. Yet, cultural forms such as grime may offer an important intervention since they speak of the structural disadvantages facing black Britons. The co-option of these forms of black cultural expressions into reaffirming stereotypes of black criminality however, and compartmentalising black youth into the straightjacket of gang culture and crime limits the potential of these spaces for offering a transformative poetics if not politics, that can speak to black youth’s social and political exclusions. As the hip hop artist and author of Native (2018), Akala (cited in O’Connor, 8 August 2018), says about the recent moral panic around drill music ³ being linked to the spike in London street violence, ‘it’s ‘juvenile – the idea that teenagers will just listen to a drill track and say “right I’m gonna kill someone…” like there are no pre-existing problems.’ The point is not to condone violence but rather to argue that focusing on street violence as a problem endemic to black communities eclipses broader structural inequalities facing black people, potentially meaning they are not adequately addressed. These representations are evident of longstanding associations of blackness with criminality and institutional racism that Andrews (2018: xvi) addresses: ‘To be Black is to be a suspect. To live in a Black neighbourhood is to be a target.’ He accounts how despite statutory police reforms, black ⁴ people in Britain are 18 times more likely to be stopped and searched. Although only making up 3% of the population, black people comprise 13% of prison inmates (Andrews, 2018: xiv).

Nonetheless, cultural expression can offer a space that is supportive of Andrew’s ideology of ‘Black as a country’ by connecting blackness beyond national boundaries where black diaspora retrace and reintegrate their roots through music. Discussing his next album which he hopes to heavily feature Caribbean influences, Akala (cited in O’Connor, 8 August 2018) says he wants to: ‘have a very British-Jamaican-American hybrid. Tell the story of the Caribbean diaspora in Jamaica and America via that soundscape.’ Although this is not the radical black politics that Andrews has in mind since the structures remain the same, it does perhaps go some way to achieving what one would hope the outcome of black radicalism to be – a feeling of belonging in the world that is attentive to how we are multiply positioned.

This leaves us to interrogate how we might address the complexities facing Britain’s racial minorities which cut across issues of ‘race’, place (symbolic and material, past and present), class, gender, religion to name a few. Intersectionality provides an important tool for theorising these multiple and interlocking deprivations; I move on to discuss its potential for productive racial analyses and recuperating internal divisions that pose a risk to an effective black politics.

Intersectionality as recuperative

Crenshaw (1991) introduced the term intersectionality to address the multiple axes of deprivation affecting African-American women that are not reducible to race or gender but are experienced through their intersections. Through its attentiveness to points of connection affecting differentially marginalised groups, intersectionality potentially offers a promising political praxis that could address the tensions identified by Alexander (2018) such as between ‘identity politics’ and the ‘politics of difference.’ This would require attending to ‘unresolved paradoxes’ (Nash, 2008: 11, 10) that limit intersectionality’s explanatory power concerning how identity is conceptualised, whether it captures the ways in which subjects experience and enact identity, and how positions of subordination and dominance intersect in complex ways. Intersectionality is recognised by all authors as an important tool for understanding the complexities of racial positionings. However, there are exclusions which persist concerning the formulation of ‘black’ that arguably undermine the project of challenging white supremacy and structural racism on which it is premised as this section explores.

Eddo-Lodge contests the longstanding antagonism which has been set up between class politics and race by interrogating the category of ‘white working class’ in order to show that working class is a multi-racial category. The reinvigoration of what Hirsch (2018: 264, 273) terms a ‘politics of demonisation’ and immigration becoming ‘weaponised’ within the context of Brexit focuses blame on immigration for the social ills affecting ordinary white Britons, which effectively pits class concerns against race (see Jones et al., 2017: 148–162; Tyler, 2013). A way out of this bind needs to be found otherwise the racial Other will always be imagined as an adversary to the ordinary white Briton rather than someone who may share their experiences, including of socio-economic disadvantage. The ‘enemy’ then might find a new face and a more nuanced politics could emerge that looks for other answers to Britain’s social ills than just the supposed ‘problem’ of immigration. Important to breaking this bind is re-thinking who comprises the ‘working-class.’ The association of being working-class with whiteness masks important intersections of race, class (and geography) which supports the misguided rhetoric of white victimhood and even gives reverse racism space to breath. As Eddo-Lodge (2017: 201) writes:

We should be rethinking the image we conjure up when we think of a working-class person. Instead of a white man in a flat cap, it’s a black woman pushing a pram. It’s worth questioning exactly who wins from the suggestion that the only working-class people worth our compassion are white, or that it’s black and ethnic minority people who are hoarding scant resources at the expense of white working-class people who are losing out.

A significant aspect currently neglected in theorisations of intersectionality identified by Nash (2008: 12) is ‘the ways in which privilege and oppression intersect, informing each subject’s experiences.’ This is important not only for understanding the experiences of racial Others vis-à-vis white communities, but variations within black and minority ethnic communities. As Hirsch’s (2018) text shows, her position as a middle-class black person places her differently within British society compared to Sam, a working-class black person who does not have access to the same benefits such as a private education that Hirsch enjoys. As discussed, their different positionalities mean that how they navigate belonging in Britain is also different – her privileged economic status gives Hirsch access to white spaces which in part accentuate her sense of being out of place but nonetheless, which she benefits from. If belonging can be understood as a privilege, then Sam is a greater beneficiary within his social milieu (but importantly, not within wider British society), despite Hirsch’s (2018: 239) higher social status. Hirsch’s class status offers her opportunities that Sam does not enjoy, but nonetheless, her class status cannot be divorced from her racial position, meaning that although she wears the clothes of the white middle class Briton, her blackness still marks her as suspect; an exclusion which is institutionalized through police practices of stop and search:

I was on my way to work experience with a law firm … for me to get stopped and searched in a suit, it kind of broke my heart. It made me feel like even when I’m wearing the uniform, the uniform of the corporate, of the upper class, going to the law firm, I still cannot get away from injustice because I’m a black person.

Comparably, Andrews (2018: 80) argues that an analysis of racism in Britain needs to be attentive to different levels of success exhibited by different ethnic minority groups. He gives the example of Indian and Chinese students outperforming Whites in education at 16 whilst Pakistani, Bangladeshi, African and African-Caribbean consistently under-perform. He argues that these distinctions are connected to the different (colonial) trajectories of these groups: ‘Different groups have different levels of access to success in British society, which should be no surprise given the different histories and experiences of colonialism across the former colonies.’ Geography as a marker of inequality needs to account for intersections of local and global positionings to understand how different migratory or colonial histories might impact the life chances of racial Others within their current geographical location, which has important implications for black politics. Andrews (2018: 81) argues that the potential to unite different minority ethnic communities under the banner of ‘political blackness’ was undone by ‘the regressive nation state logic of race relations.’ For Andrews, political blackness cannot withstand the restraints of the nation state. Black radicalism conversely, offers a more useful race politics because it transcends national borders.

Yet, the black radicalism offered by Andrews also proposes its own prescriptions that questions who can be included in ‘black;’ a problematic that has troubled the project of political blackness. For Andrews (original italics, 2018: 288), to ‘claim Blackness’ is based on an Afrocentric formulation: ‘the link to Africa is to tie ourselves into a shared heritage, the “unbreakable umbilical cord” across the Diaspora.’ The exclusionary formulation of ‘black’ within his black radicalism project is perhaps most apparent in its dismissal of Islam as holding any hope for a liberatory black politics. Despite Andrews’ key proponent of black radicalism, Malcolm X, converting to Islam, for Andrews (2018: xviii), Islam can only be considered outside the frame of radicalism: ‘A radical version of Islam would do away with the principles of the religion and cease even to be Islam.’ This interpretation implies that Muslims cannot be radical, and further, poses a problem for black radicals who are also Muslim of which there are many in both Africa and the diaspora. Haider (2018: 4) by contrast, argues Islam offered Malcolm X a path ‘beyond fanaticism’ and ‘toward a solidarity with the whole world’ that supported drawing connections beyond categories of difference and geographical and historical spaces: ‘I for one will join in with anyone, I don’t care what colour you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth’ (Malcolm X, 1964 cited in Haider, 2018: 4). Relegating Islam outside the frame of radicalism erases the history of decolonial political struggles within Islamic countries that could offer useful resources for challenging racial logics of white supremacist systems (Sayyid, 2014).

The contested position of Muslims within racial politics relates to older issues concerning the demise of political blackness explored by Modood (1994; also Brah, 2005). Aside from Modood’s (1994: 859, 868) criticism of ‘black’ when applied to British Asians for falsely equating racial and colour discrimination and obscuring the cultural prejudices they face, he argues that a pro-black position risks becoming an anti-Muslim one arising from ‘secular prejudice against religious mobilisation’ and accusations that it diverts attention from racial equality work. Whilst the securitisation of Muslim identities poses particular challenges within the contemporary counter-terrorism context, current focus on Muslims as the ultimate Other in articulations of Britishness also highlights the importance of bringing religion into an intersectional analysis to understand how religion is racialised and to challenge Islamophobia; the effects of which do not fit neatly within the hegemonic racial grammar of white/black binaries, further highlighting how ‘race’ is socially produced.

In reclaiming a radical politics that might overturn white imperialism, it is important not to commit epistemic violences that might hinder productive alliances. At other points, Andrews (2018: 150) illustrates the recuperative potential of intersectionality that Crenshaw first envisaged by critiquing the omission of black women’s contributions from narratives of radical black politics. This is not to say that patriarchy is the reserve of these movements, but rather that by highlighting how patriarchy risks damaging relations within racially oppressed groups, an intersectional analysis can be productive in challenging both epistemic and material violences facing black women, including from black males.

Intersectional analyses therefore invite us not only to look at the complex ways in which groups experience disadvantage, but to be reflexive about how differentially marginalised groups may oppress each other (Higgenbotham, 1992: 253), and the damage that does to forging effective alliances that in effect, does the devil’s work which they are seeking to undo. Intersectionality is recuperative where it draws attention to the multifaceted ways in which structural racism operates to oppress Others and the ways in which our multiple struggles can be connected to challenge white supremacy.

Closing remarks: The politics of discomfort

It is uncomfortable to know that you benefit from a system premised on structurally disadvantaging others symbolically, discursively and materially. Discomfort proposes an important politics because it works to unseat people from a position of comfort and privilege so that a new order can be imagined. However, a politics of discomfort holds different demands depending on your place within the racial terrain – giving up the white privileges which you have inherited versus risking hard-fought privileges by refusing to be silent about the racist structures that continue to shape yours and others experiences even when you appear to be a beneficiary – a dilemma which Andrews (2018: 216) emphasises well as a successful black academic within the white institution of higher education.

Eddo-Lodge’s (2017) ultimate refusal to give up talking about race to white people and find a way through the wall of white denial highlights the significance of putting oneself back in the firing line; a position of discomfort. Andrews (2018: 221) similarly argues that discomfort is mobilising in challenging white dominance. Rather than black people striving to achieve a position of comfort, they should maintain a degree of discomfort; otherwise they are merely made into a guest at the master’s house. As Andrews (2018: 221, 223–224) observes, ‘You cannot build a revolution by trying to make it more comfortable for the lucky few to endure the master’s house.’ Finding a place of comfort within an otherwise rotten system only perpetuates white supremacy by allowing us to be blinkered into thinking that our success is symptomatic that the system is changing. Since we have more at stake once we have passed the threshold, we risk being co-opted into maintaining our privileges at the expense of those who have not found their way to the table. Instead of finding a place of comfort, Andrews (2018: 224) argues that discomfort should be used to challenge and propel us: ‘Embracing our suffering is key to our resisting it.’

Hirsch’s (2018: 214) journey to find a place of belonging outside of an exclusionary, racist Britain forces her to realise that returning (or perhaps escaping) to Ghana is not the answer. She must endure the ‘threat of exclusion’ that accompanies being a non-white person in Britain until Britishness gives up its ‘roots in ideological whiteness’ and acknowledges the ‘pain that has inflicted on blackness.’ Such an undertaking, as Diangelo’s (2018) exploration of white fragility attests, requires discomfort for white people in order to confront their complicity in a white supremacist system. The legacy of black Britons is a politics of discomfort that accompanies their exclusion from structural advantages and national belonging; the future of whiteness, by contrast, needs to embrace a politics of discomfort to unsettle the seat of white privilege and ultimately reject its complicity in perpetuating its violences, both epistemic and material.