Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race Read online

  The image of the slave ship Brooks, first published in 1788 by abolitionist William Elford, depicted typical conditions.1 It shows a well-packed slave ship: bodies are lined up one by one, horizontally in four rows (with three short extra rows at the back of the ship), illustrating the callous efficiency used to transport a cargo of African people. The Brooks was owned by a Liverpudlian merchant named Joseph Brooks.

  But slavery wasn’t just happening in Liverpool. Bristol, too, had a slave port, as well as Lancaster, Exeter, Plymouth, Bridport, Chester, Lancashire’s Poulton-le-Fylde and, of course, London.2 Although enslaved African people moved through British shores regularly, the plantations they toiled on were not in Britain, but rather in Britain’s colonies. The majority were in the Caribbean, so, unlike the situation in America, most British people saw the money without the blood. Some British people owned plantations that ran almost entirely on slave labour. Others bought just a handful of plantation slaves, with the intention of getting a return on their investment. Many Scottish men went to work as slave drivers in Jamaica, and some brought their slaves with them when they moved back to Britain. Slaves, like any other personal property, could be inherited, and many Brits lived comfortably off the toil of enslaved black people without being directly involved in the transaction.

  The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was founded in London in 1787, was the idea of civil servant Granville Sharp and campaigner Thomas Clarkson. Sharp and Clarkson formed the society with ten other men, most of whom were Quakers. They campaigned for forty-seven years, generating broad-based support and attracting high-profile leadership from Members of Parliament – the most famous being abolitionist William Wilberforce. The public pressure of the campaign was successful, and an Act of Parliament declared slavery abolished in the British Empire in 1833. But the recipients of the compensation for the dissolution of a significant money-making industry were not those who had been enslaved. Instead it was the 46,000 British slave-owning citizens who received cheques for their financial losses.3 Such one-sided compensation seemed to be the logical conclusion for a country that had traded in human flesh.

  Despite abolition, an Act of Parliament was not going to change the perception overnight of enslaved African people from quasi-animal to human. Less than two hundred years later, that damage is still to be undone.

  After university, I was hungry for more information. I wanted to know about black people in Britain, post-slavery. However, this information was not easily accessible. This was history only available to people who truly cared, only knowable through a hefty amount of self-directed study. So I actively sought it out, and I began by looking into Black History Month.

  The existence of Black History Month in the UK is relatively recent. It wasn’t until 1987 that local authorities in London began putting on events to celebrate black contributions to Britain. Linda Bellos was born in London to a Nigerian father and a white British mother, and it was under her leadership that a British Black History Month came to exist. At the time, she was leader of south London’s Lambeth Council and chair of the London Strategic Policy Unit (part of the now defunct Greater London Council). The idea for Black History Month was put to her by Ansel Wong, chief officer of the Strategic Policy Unit’s race equality division. ‘I said yes, let’s do it,’ she explained to me from her home in Norwich.

  ‘I thought Black History Month was a great idea. What I wasn’t going to do was make it like the American one, because we have a different history . . . There’s so many people who have no idea – and I’m talking about white people – no idea about the history of racism. They don’t know why we’re in this country.’

  Ansel organised the first Black History Month, and Linda hosted the event. It was a London-wide affair. The decision to hold it in October was largely logistical, the United States have held their Black History Month in February since it began in 1970. ‘Our guest of honour was Sally Mugabe,’ Linda explained. ‘It was insufficient time to invite [her]. If we’d done it two weeks [later], then we wouldn’t have got the people we needed.

  ‘We were more inclusive,’ she added. ‘Black was defined in its political terms. African and Asian.4 We only ran it for two years, because Thatcher was cutting all our budgets. It would have been an indulgence.’

  After two years of central funding and leadership from the London Strategic Policy Unit dried up, Black History Month continued in Britain, albeit sporadically. Today, Black History Month is firmly established in Britain, and has been running for thirty years. It tends to consist of exhibitions of work from artists from the African diaspora, panel events debating race, and softer cultural celebrations, like fashion shows and food festivals. Speaking to Linda, it felt like she was sceptical of the values of current-day Black History Month activities. When I asked her why she wanted Black History Month in Britain, she said it was to ‘celebrate the contribution that black people had made in the United Kingdom. It wasn’t about hair . . . it was history month, not culture month. There had been a history, a history that I had been aware of, from my own father’s experience.’

  The history of blackness in Britain has been a piecemeal one. For an embarrassingly long time, I didn’t even realise that black people had been slaves in Britain. There was a received wisdom that all black and brown people in the UK were recent immigrants, with little discussion of the history of colonialism, or of why people from Africa and Asia came to settle in Britain. I knew vaguely of the Windrush Generation, the 492 Caribbeans who travelled to Britain by boat in 1948. This was because they were the older relatives of people I knew at school. There was no ‘black presence in Britain’ presentation that didn’t include the Windrush. But most of my knowledge of black history was American history. This was an inadequate education in a country where increasing generations of black and brown people continue to consider themselves British (including me). I had been denied a context, an ability to understand myself. I needed to know why, when people waved Union Jacks and shouted ‘we want our country back’, it felt like the chant was aimed at people like me. What history had I inherited that left me an alien in my place of birth?

  On 1 November 2008, at an event marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Institute of Race Relations, the institute’s director Ambalavaner Sivanandan told his audience: ‘we are here because you were there’. That phrase has since been absorbed into black British vocabulary. Wanting to know more about what it meant, I reached back, searching for evidence. The first answer I found was war.

  Britain’s involvement in the First World War wasn’t just limited to British citizens. Thanks to its rabid empire building, people from countries that weren’t European (apart from colonisation), were caught up in the expectation of dying for King and Country. When, in 2013, the British Council asked people about their perceptions of the First World War, they found that most Brits didn’t have an understanding of the international impact it had, despite the moniker ‘world war’. ‘Because of the reach of empires,’ the council’s report reads, ‘soldiers and labourers were enlisted from all over the globe.’5 Of the seven countries6 the British Council surveyed on the First World War, the vast majority of respondents thought that both western and eastern Europe were involved. In comparison, an average of just 17 per cent thought that Asia was involved, and just 11 per cent of respondents identified Africa’s involvement.

  It could be that this misconception about exactly who fought for Britain during the First World War has led to a near erasure of the contributions of black and brown people. This is an erasure that couldn’t be further from the truth. Over a million Indian soldiers – or sepoys (Indian soldiers serving for Britain) – fought for Britain during the First World War.7 Britain had promised these soldiers that their country would be free from colonial rule if they did so. Sepoys travelled to Britain in the belief that they would not only be fighting for Britain, but by doing so they would be contributing to their country’s eventual freedom.

  Their journey t
o Europe was unforgiving. They travelled by ship, without the appropriate clothing for the shift in climate. Many sepoys suffered from a bitter cold that they’d never before experienced, with some dying from exposure. And even during the war, sepoys didn’t receive the treatment they were expecting. The highest-ranking sepoy was still lower in the army hierarchy than the lowest-ranking white British soldier. If injured, a sepoy would be treated in the segregated Brighton Pavilion and Dome Hospital for Indian Troops. The hospital was surrounded with barbed wire to discourage wounded sepoys from mixing with the locals. Around 74,000 sepoys died fighting in the war, but Britain refused to deliver its promise of releasing India from colonial rule.

  A much smaller number of soldiers travelled from the West Indies to fight for Britain.8 The Memorial Gates Trust, a charity set up to commemorate Indian, African and Caribbean soldiers who died for Britain in both world wars, puts the number at 15,600. These soldiers were known as the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). In the Caribbean, the British Army recruited from poor areas, and, similarly to India, there was a feeling among some would-be recruits that taking part in the war would lead to political reform at home. But this opinion wasn’t widespread, and there were a significant number of Caribbean people who were set against the West Indies fighting, calling it a ‘white man’s war’. Despite the resistance of some, thousands of West Indians quit their jobs to travel to Europe.

  Again, the long boat journey was unforgiving. Britain needed the extra labour, yet the government failed to provide West Indians with adequate clothing to survive the journey, just as they had with the sepoys. In 1916, the SS Verdala, travelling from the West Indies to West Sussex, had to make a diversion to Halifax in eastern Canada. Hundreds of West Indian recruits suffered from frostbite, with some dying from exposure to the harsh, cold climate.

  When they arrived, the majority of the British West Indies Regiment did not initially fight alongside white British soldiers on the battlefield. Instead, they were relegated to supporting positions, doing drudgework for the benefit of white soldiers. Their duties included strenuous labour, such as digging trenches, building roads, and carrying injured soldiers on stretchers. As white British ranks were depleted in battle, West Indian soldiers were given permission to fight. Almost two hundred men had died in action by the end of the war.

  By 1918, resentment among West Indian soldiers was widespread. While the BWIR was stationed in Taranto, Italy, some men got hold of news that white British soldiers had received a pay rise that the West Indian soldiers had been excluded from. Outraged at their treatment, the soldiers went on strike, gathering signatures for a petition to be sent to the Secretary of State. This quickly evolved into an open rebellion. During the Taranto mutiny, a striker was shot dead by a black non-commissioned officer, and a bomb was set off. The rebellion was quickly crushed and sixty suspected rebellious members of the British West Indies Regiment were tried for their involvement in mutiny. Some were jailed, and one man was sentenced to death by firing squad.

  Mistreated West Indian soldiers returned home, and the crackdown on the Taranto mutiny contributed to a push for a black self-determination movement in the Caribbean. But there were also black soldiers who chose to stay on in Britain after the war. As the fighting came to an end and soldiers were demobilised, black ex-soldiers living in Britain began to be targeted.

  Riots always seem to kick off in the summer. On 6 June 1919, seven months after the First World War had ended, rumours were doing the rounds in Newport, south Wales. It was alleged that a white woman had been slighted by a black man. As increasing numbers of angry and agitated white people shared the news among themselves, a braying mob assembled and then descended on homes of black men in the area. Some of the black men shot back with guns. Fights and scuffles over the next few days led to a Caribbean man stabbing a white man.

  Just five days later, on 11 June, the South Wales Echo reported: ‘a brake [vehicle] containing a number of coloured men and white women was going along East Canal Wharf. It attracted a crowd.’9 Cardiff, another port city, had been whipped up in anti-black sentiment. On seeing these black men and white women together, a frenzied mob of white people began throwing rocks at the vehicle. It’s not clear if anyone in the vehicle was injured. Days later, in violent protest at the audacity of interracial relationships, another angry crowd of white people set upon a lone white woman, who was known to have married an African man. They stripped her naked.

  In the port city of Liverpool, similar race hatred was gaining ground. Post-war employment was scarce, and over a hundred black factory workers suddenly and swiftly lost their jobs after white workers refused to work with them. On 4 June 1919, a Caribbean man was stabbed in the face by two white men after an argument over a cigarette. Numerous fights followed, with the police ransacking homes where they knew black people lived. The frenzy resulted in one of the most horrific race hate crimes in British history. Twenty-four-year-old black seaman Charles Wootton was accosted by an enraged white crowd and thrown into the King’s Dock. As he swam, desperately trying to lift himself out of the water, he was pelted with bricks until he sank under the surface. Some time later, his lifeless body was dragged out of the dock. It was a public lynching. The days after Charles Wootton’s murder saw white mob rule dominating Liverpool’s streets as they attacked any black person they saw.10

  These acts of vicious race hatred did not go unseen by the British government. Concerned by the levels of unrest across the country, the state responded in the only way it knew how – a repatriation drive. As a result, six hundred black people were sent ‘back to where they came from’ by September 1919.11

  Despite its best efforts to pretend otherwise, Britain is far from a monoculture. Outward-facing when it suited best, history shows us that this country had created a global empire it could draw labour from at ease. But it wasn’t ready for the repercussions and responsibilities that came with its colonising of countries and cultures. It was black and brown people who suffered the consequences.

  But some of those people fought back. Born in 1882 in Kingston, Jamaica, Dr Harold Moody was not one of the young Caribbeans who fought for Britain in the First World War. Instead, he arrived in Bristol in 1904, aged twenty-two, with a focus on advancing his education. He had his heart set on becoming a doctor, and had spent time working at his father’s successful pharmacy business in Kingston to save up the funds for his studies. With Jamaica still under British rule, his move to England wasn’t a surprise; among Jamaicans, Britain was seen as the ‘Mother Country’.

  Upon his arrival, he boarded an express train to London Paddington and took himself to a hostel – the Young Men’s Christian Association, now known as the YMCA – until he found somewhere more permanent to live. It was during these first days on British soil that he learned the mother country wasn’t going to be as hospitable as he’d been led to believe. He struggled to rent, and was turned away from a number of potential lodgings before managing to find a place in Canonbury, north London.

  Once settled, Harold began medical training. He graduated in 1912 and set about looking for a job. He applied for a position at King’s College Hospital, but his potential employers did not want to hire a black man.12 He tried again, applying for a position in south London, with the Camberwell Board of Guardians. The board was part of Camberwell’s Poor Law Parish, a local government organisation that oversaw the well-being of the area’s most elderly and vulnerable residents with an infirmary, as well as managing children’s homes and workhouses. He was turned away from this job too, but not before being told ‘the poor people would not have a nigger attend to them’.13 Determined to serve the community, Harold responded to these knock-backs by setting up his own private practice.

  A year after qualifying, Dr Moody’s practice opened at 111 King’s Road in Peckham, south-east London. Although he’d faced overt acts of racist discrimination, it was his Christianity rather than his politics that drew Dr Moody to his activism. For him, racism was a reli
gious issue. He was active in the wider Christian community. His respectable, middle-class job positioned him as a beacon for black people in 1920s and 1930s Britain. He advocated on their behalf, quickly becoming known as a man who would help if you were in need. That popularity and momentum led Dr Harold Moody to form the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931.

  The League was both a Christian mission and a campaigning organisation. Its objectives, published in its quarterly journal The Keys, were:

  •To promote and protect the social, educational, economic and political interests of its members

  •To interest members in the welfare of coloured peoples in all parts of the world

  •To improve relations between the races

  •To cooperate and affiliate with organisations sympathetic to coloured people14

  First published in 1933, The Keys served as the written arm of the League, campaigning against racism in employment, housing and wider society. In 1937, The Keys published a sternly worded exchange with the Manchester Hospital about the barring of black nurses’ employment. The letter questioned a quote from the hospital’s Matron L. G. Duff Grant, who had written, quite openly, ‘we have never taken coloured nurses for training here. The question was once raised at Nursing Committee, and there was a definite rule that no one of negroid extraction can be considered.’ Dr Moody, then President of the League, wrote to the hospital’s board, only to find that no such rule was in place. ‘There is’, read the reply from N. Cobboth, chair of the board, ‘no rule against the admission of coloured women for training as nurses at the Manchester Royal Infirmary and the Board wish it to be understood that each individual application will be considered on its merits.’15

  Dr Moody’s work with the League of Coloured Peoples was quite possibly Britain’s first anti-racism campaign in the twentieth century, and it would have far-reaching implications for Britain’s race relations in the future.