Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

... It is a pity
that so many
of those who
were active in
that period but
in other factions
of the movement
have now
‘gone home’,
some have died,
some left the
fray or otherwise
shunned publicity
and accounting
for Black
Power in Britain.
The full story is
yet to be written.
Staying Power: the history of Black People in Britain (1984) reissued
in 2010 and Ron Ramdin’s The Making of the Black Working Class
(1987) and more recently (and not always uncritically) Black Star:
Britain’s Asian Youth Movements by Anandi Ramamurthy (2013),
and, more sociologically, The Changing Pattern of Black Politics in
Britain, Kalbir Shukra (1998) and Racism, Class and the Racialized
Outsider by Satnam Virdee (2014).
The kind of dispassionate analysis based on lived experience
was continued in two key areas looking at the fight-back in the
period under review – in relation to women’s experiences and local
studies. Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain by Amrit Wilson
was published in 1978, followed by the collectively researched and
written Heart of the Race: Black women’s lives in Britain by Beverley
Bryan, et al. (1985).
And local community histories, too, were a way of setting black
agency into a historical material context: for example, the two
pamphlets published by the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism
(CARF), and distributed by IRR, ‘Southall: the birth of a black community’
(1981) and ‘Newham: forging a black community’ (1991). Four
films, produced by Race & Class Ltd and directed by Colin Prescod,
Struggles for Black Community, covered Cardiff, Notting Hill, Southall
and Leicester (1983, reissued 2008). (23) Also in this area fall
Lambeth Council’s ‘Forty Winters on: memories of Britain’s postwar
Caribbean immigrants’ (1988), ‘The longest journey: a history of
black Lewisham’ by Joan Anim-Addo (1995) and Brick Lane 1978 by
Kenneth Leech (1980).
With the move in academia away from political sociology and
towards cultural studies, the interest in political blackness in the
main gave way to discourse analysis, identity and ‘otherness’ studies
during the 2000s – which also explains the fact that the ‘looking
back’ books that came out commemorating the half century
since the Empire Windrush are easily misread as the start of Black
Studies in the UK. Windrush: the irresistible rise of multiracial Britain
by Mike and Trevor Phillips (1998) is a useful journalistic narrative
based on fifty interviews with members of the Windrush generation;
Hurricane hits England: an anthology of writing about Black Britain,
edited by Oneykachi Wambu (1998), is an anthology of previously
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