#beverley bryan

[blackbritishreader]

Beverley Bryan: the British Black Panther who inspired a generation of women

After her friend Olive Morris was assaulted by police in 1969, Bryan joined her in the civil rights group. Then she decolonised her classroom – and contributed to a groundbreaking book

[oooretha]

Beverley Bryan

[derica]

Any Black woman who has ever spent a day at the DHSS office trying to claim benefit or who has had a child taken into care quickly learns that once contact with the welfare agencies is made, her life is no longer her own. Despite this reality, our relationship with the Welfare State is presented as parasitic. We are described by the media as ‘scroungers’ and depicted as having a child-like dependence upon a benevolent caring (white) society.

The Heart of the Race, by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe, pp 100-11

[ladymazzy]

Beverley Bryan: the British Black Panther who inspired a generation of women

Beverley Bryan: the British Black Panther who inspired a generation of women

After her friend Olive Morris was assaulted by police in 1969, Bryan joined her in the civil rights group. Then she decolonised her classroo

[blackbritishreader]

There is no single area of our lives which better exposes our experience of institutionalised racism than our relationship with the various welfare services. Here we deal regularly with people who are vested with the power to control, disrupt and intervene with our lives on behalf of the State. Our relationship with the Welfare State is represented as parasitic. We are described by the media as ‘scroungers’ and depicted as having a child-like dependence upon a benevolent caring (white) society. Social workers are seen as the twentieth-century missionaries who come into our communities to challenge ignorance and poverty. The images does not, however expose the extent to which social and economic factors outside our control have forced us into this cycle of dependency on the State; nor does it convey the true nature of our contribution to this society. Black women’s labour has propped up this country, not only over the past four decades but for centuries. Far from draining its resources, we have been the producers of its wealth.

The Heart of The Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain; Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie & Suzanne Scafe

[blackbritishreader]

When Black women began arriving in Britain after the Second World War to provide the new-established National Health Service with much-needed labour, we came into a service which regarded us not as potential clients but as workers. Our role was to become the nurses, cleaners and cooks who would supply and maintain the service for others. From the very beginning, the NHS had one purpose - to replenish this country’s labour supply with fit, white, male workers. Six years of war and devastation had led to a renewed popular demand for ‘homes fit for heroes’, and this demand could not be ignored, particularly by a Labour government keen to establish itself as the champion of the working classes. The creation of the NHS enabled the needs of capitalism to be reconciled, albeit temporarily, with the demands of the people, and the import of Black women’s labour was the convenient short-term means by which this goal would be achieved. Since we were never identified as potential consumers of the service, our health needs did not enter the debate about the kind of health provision the country would establish. The NHS was geared first and foremost, to meeting the needs of the white man as economic producer and - to a lesser extent - those of the white woman, as re-producer. These priorities have remained enshrined within the NHS ever since. They are reflected in every facet of the service, from the allocation of its resources to the structure of its workforce. As such, our treatment within the NHS is probably the most clear and damning indictment of our social and economic value to Britain.

The Heart of The Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain; Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie & Suzanne Scafe

[blackbritishreader]

The impact of the Slave Trade on Britain was not confined to the material. Our presence in eighteenth-century England was an accepted reality. Black women and men were sold openly at auctions; the busts of ‘blackamoors’, emblems of the trade, commonly adorned local townhalls. Black servants were common too, and our children were the inevitable appendages of slave captains and high-society women. Freed and runaway slaves were conspicuous among London’s beggars and were known as ‘St Giles Blackbirds’. Though in constant fear of recapture, we lived side by side with the white working class, intermarrying with them and taking part in life of the community. Indeed, many Black communities today, such as those in Bristol, Liverpool and Cardiff, were established long before the post-war immigration of recent years. And even when isolated and dispersed. we still made our mark on Britain. Black people were speaking out against racism and participating in British life as writers, musicians, actors, soldiers, nurses and in any other profession which was not barred to us, over two hundred years ago. Mary Seacole, the Black Crimean nurse, and William Cuffay the Chartist, made as great a contribution to Britain’s history as Florence Nightingale and Feargus O’Connor. This country’s past is littered with the names and deeds of Black women and Black men, frequently anonymous and unsung, who have helped to shape it into what it is today. By no stretch of the imagination can we be described as new arrivals.

The Heart of The Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain; Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie & Suzanne Scafe

[yonafro]

"You have to write it and you have to tell it and nobody can tell it as well as you can"