Bring It Back Home! Black British Intellectuals and BHM
One thing can be guaranteed about Black History Month. Each year BHM will end with a call to ‘make every month Black History Month’. It’s a plea from the heart and one that captures our annual dilemma. In short, most of us will admit that, at the end of BHM, after having celebrated Claudia Jones or CLR James or the Indian Workers Association, there is a sense of academic life returning to business as usual. By business as usual I mean an academic world in which it’s taken as read that white intellectuals do the thinking and writing and people of colour feature, if at all, as bit players, as objects of sociological scrutiny.
For instance, a year or so ago, I attended a seminar given by graduating BME social science students. Reflecting on her intellectual experiences as an undergraduate, one speaker sighed, ‘It was Foucault, Foucault and more Foucault!’ Now we all love bald French transgressives but where in our students’ reading lists were Aimé Césaire, Manning Marable or Patricia Hill Collins? More to the point, beyond the grandees of the black Atlantic, how often do our reading lists and seminars engage with black British thinkers? Ask most moderately interested British academics to name a black intellectual and chances are the response will be an American or, just maybe, an African name. By contrast, black British thinkers are routinely marginalised. Yet the UK has its own robust and cantankerous tradition of black intellectual creation, rooted in dialogues with Marxism, feminism, anti-racism, post-colonialism and critical pedagogy. Towering figures include George Padmore, Una Marson, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby and Paul Gilroy. In my own field of educational studies there is the work of John La Rose, Bernard Coard, Gus John, Maureen Stone, Heidi Safia Mirza and many other thinkers and activists.
Too often it is assumed that black histories and communities are problems to be theorized only by white intellectuals. And Britain as a whole pays the cost of that neglect. In the 1980s and 1990s I spent a lot of time working with black publishers, bookshops and community educators. For me, it was a second university and it provided me with a seemingly boundless library. At that time there was a powerful momentum in reclaiming black British history and making available the work of its great teachers. Reading and re-reading the diverse work produced by black British thinkers is a key to moving beyond the problem-victim lens through which people of colour in Britain are still too often understood, and instead towards appreciating black communities as agents of social change. If there is a responsibility Britain’s universities have in relation to BHM it is to insist upon well-read understandings of black life. This means that if, as educators and researchers, we are willing routinely to use Gramsci, we must also be willing to draw on Fanon; if we routinely cite Bourdieu we should also use bell hooks. However, we must go beyond these touchstones and engage also with black thinkers who have wrestled with the particularities of Britain’s post-war context, both within and beyond academia: among them Ann Phoenix (psychology), David Dabydeen (literature), Kobena Mercer (cultural studies) and Gita Sahgal (women’s studies). I am not the first to point this out but, like BHM itself, it bears repeating.
Dr Paul Warmington, School of Education, University of Birmingham UK.