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

Sisters began. These two organisations have been challenging both racism from white
communities, but also issues around sexism, patriarchy and religious fundamentalism
within our own communities. As we shall see, progressive political and cultural change
necessitates that these issues are tackled in tandem with the struggle against racism.
We found it difficult to talk about the events of 1976, without examining and charting the
journey before this year. Afterall, each generation continues the story from where their
elders left, and in part 1 of this book we have tried to chart the story from the racism in
1919 through to 1976. Throughout the period from 1919 to 1976 black and asian communities
often faced a onslaught on violent racism, enduring attacks upon either their person
or their property, and yet we now teach that ‘British values’ equates with tolerance and
harmony. Jacqueline Jenkinson, in the opening chapter, examines the circumstances which
led to the 1919 race riots and she begins to unpick how ‘British values’ play out when there
is a deep crisis in the country. In 1976 the journalist Paul Foot argued that “race hate and
race violence does not rise and fall according to the numbers of immigrants coming into
Britain. It rises and falls to the extent to which people’s prejudices are inflamed and made
respectable by politicians and newspapers.’ (’What the Papers Say’, Granada TV 4 June 1976).
In post Brexit Britain, do we think that our politicians and press have learnt from the past?
In ‘Racialised Outsiders’, Satnam Virdee argued that after the defeat of the radical Chartist
movement in the mid-nineteenth century, racializing nationalism began to permeate the
working class imagination. This was carefully constructed through Britain’s policy in art and
culture, as much as politics and economics. We only have to walk around our own towns and
look at the statues, look in the museums and galleries to see evidence of this even today.
It was Martin Luther King who reminded us form a prison cell in a Birmingham jail
that, “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one
directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you
ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...
This is the inter-related structure of reality.” Yet, our structures of
reality is distorted, since we have been woven out of British historical narrative.
As we write, there are protests taking place near the statue of the Confederate General
Robert E Lee in Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. The protests started
after the local city council voted to remove the statue and change the name of the space
from Lee Park to Emancipation Park, sparking protests from white nationalists, neo-Nazis,
the Ku Klux Klan and members of the ‘alt-right’. During the protests Thirty-four
people were injured in clashes and one person, Heather Heyer, was killed, when a Nazi sympathizer
plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. Our cities and town are also lit-
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