The problem of political blackness: lessons from the Black Supplementary School Movement

ABSTRACT

The Black Supplementary School Movement has a fifty-year tradition of resisting racism in Britain. Central to the movement is a construction of African Diasporic Blackness that is marginalized in British scholarship. ‘Political blackness’, based on the unity ethnic minority groups, is an important frame of reference in Britain. This article will examine the limitations of ‘political blackness’ in relation to research carried out in the Black Supplementary School Movement that involved interviews with key activists and an archival analysis of documents at the George Padmore Institute. Political blackness is based on an inaccurate understanding of the relationship between multiculturalism and anti-racism; a misreading of the complex and global nature of racism and a non-strategic essentialism. The concept also creates a form non-whiteism, which disempowers ethnic minority communities and works to delegitimize African Diasporic Blackness, which has a tradition of resisting racist oppression.

KEYWORDS:

• Political blackness
• Black supplementary schools
• multiculturalism
• anti-racism
• Black studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There are versions of political blackness which attempt to overcome the non-white aspect by defining the concept to include all those who are subject to racism and therefore include white groups who are subject to racism. However, as Cole (1993, 632) explained, ‘there are very, very few people of Irish, Chinese or southern European origin or Jewish people, for example, who would identify themselves as “black”, even in this “political sense”’. It is inescapable that the term ‘black’ is both used, and understood, to denote colour.