Breaking black: the death of ethnic and racial studies in Britain

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I examine the changing contours of racial and ethnic studies in Britain over the past forty years. Building on my 2002 ERS paper “Beyond Black”, I reflect on the transformation and fragmentation of political blackness, in and out of the academy, and consider the implications for racial and ethnic identities, solidarities and political action.

KEYWORDS:

• Political blackness
• Britain
• higher education
• Black Female Professors Forum

Introduction

On 23 February 2017, an email titled “Black Female Professors in the UK 2017” landed in my inbox. The message was from Iyiola Solanke, a professor of law at Leeds University, and contained an attached document of the same title. The document contained a list of twenty-four names, and accompanying photos, of women (full) professors of colour in UK universities – most concentrated in law and social sciences – which Iyiola had compiled through the highly scientific process of trawling through university websites, and building on personal contacts. In her message, Iyiola said –

I created it to act as an inspiration to the current generation of black female students, researchers and junior academics throughout the UK who may be facing the same, worse or different challenges to those we faced during our careers.

The response from the initial twenty-four women was overwhelmingly positive and over the next days and weeks, we added more names of people we knew. At the time of writing, we are up to 104 names, and the list is still growing, spanning a range of STEM and non-STEM subjects and across the spectrum of UK universities, however (and importantly) unevenly. The Black Female Professors Forum (BFPF) is primarily an online, loose and informal network, but provides an important space for highlighting both the presence and absence of senior women of colour in the academy, for addressing issues of under-representation externally – both institutionally and for emerging female scholars of colour – and for providing support and opportunities for its affiliates. At the same time, however, the Forum also provides a revealing lens onto a broader set of issues, complexities and dilemmas surrounding the experience and understanding of race/ethnicity, racism and identity in Britain at the current moment. In particular, it highlights a tension between two key – and often opposed – strands: the first focusing on institutional structures and racism; and the second, on what has most often been framed through identity and the politics of difference. Both, however, are confronting questions of how to deal with the complex and shifting racial/racist landscape of contemporary Britain, and with how to engage across these complexities and transformations.

Using the BFPF as a starting point, this paper seeks to explore the shifting contours of ethnic and racial studies in Britain over the past four decades through the lens of “black” as a category of analysis and as a mode of political praxis. The hope is to try and map some of the ways in which race, ethnicity and identity has been, and is, talked about in Britain, and particularly in the academy, and to highlight some tensions and dilemmas that confront us as scholars of race and ethnicity. In particular, I want to trace the fragmentation of “black” in the contemporary moment, building on my earlier Ethnic and Racial Studies paper “Beyond Black” (2002), reflecting on both continuity and change in the intervening fifteen years and highlighting four tensions:

1. The tension between issues of racism and issues of identity or ethnicity.

2. A related tension between the recognition of difference and the possibilities of solidarity – we might think of this as the tension between identity politics and the politics of difference.

3. The tension between the need to locate discourses of race and ethnicity historically and geographically, and the circulation and translation (or mistranslation) of ideas globally – particularly the ways in which “black” travels as a category, and whose experiences are included or excluded, when and where, and what we do when a politics of location is challenged by the circulation of a politics from elsewhere.

4. Finally, I want to think about how each of these tensions poses problems for politics and for political and social change.

The BFPF: dilemmas of inequality and difference in the academy

The BFPF forms part of a broader set of debates around racial inequality in Higher Education, which in turn reflects a tension between the shift in the ethnic makeup of contemporary Britain – with around 20 per cent of the population of England and Wales describing themselves as other than white British in the 2011 census and 14 per cent as of non-white ethnicity (CoDE 2012) – and ongoing structures of discrimination and exclusion. Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities – around seven million people in total – have a younger age profile, with around 17 per cent of school age (0–15 years), and recent years have seen them entering HE in larger numbers than the general population. However, they remain concentrated in less prestigious, post-1992 universities and are under-represented in elite Russell group institutions¹ (Alexander and Arday 2015), while entry figures show that all BME groups are less likely to be offered places even when they have the same grades as their white peers (Boliver 2015), are subject to an attainment gap of up to 20 per cent, and are less likely to obtain graduate level jobs on leaving university (Li 2015). While Universities have long struggled with an entrenched self-image as a beacon of social mobility and meritocracy (Warikoo 2016), recent years have seen institutional attempts to recognize and address racial and ethnic inequality. Universities, as public bodies, have had a statutory duty in the 2000 Race Relations Amendment Act to promote race equality and the 2010 Equalities Act has ethnicity as one of its “protected characteristics”. The introduction of higher student fees in 2010 placed (social and ethnic) diversification of student recruitment as an important feature, supported by OFFA (replaced by Office for Students), and the Equality Challenge Unit rolled out its Race Chartermark in 2015, though with limited sectoral buy-in to date. However, these more positive initiatives should to be set against increasingly draconian state-imposed measures around the monitoring and control of international student recruitment through UKBA and the surveillance of Muslim students through the Prevent agenda (Brown and Saeed 2015).

These institutional measures have been accompanied, pushed or overtaken by increased student demands and mobilizations, in particular, the NUS-led initiative to “liberate the curriculum”, a series of high-profile social media initiatives, such as “We too are Oxford” and its spin-offs, and internationally inspired movements such as the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign. The BFPF, in fact, started as a response to an ongoing debate on the British Sociological Association’s Race Forum around racism and under-representation of black staff in the academy, linked to the student-led “Why is my curriculum white?” and “Why isn’t my professor black?” campaigns. And with good reason: data from the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) for 2015/16 show that of the over 200,000 academic staff employed in the sector, only 8.5 per cent were UK BME background.² Of the nearly 18,000 full professors across the sector, just around 7 per cent were BME men, and less than 2 per cent BME women. In numerical terms, this equates to 1,310 BME male and just 345 BME female professors, of which only 210 were UK nationals (1.3 per cent) (ECU 2016).³ While the gender difference is particularly worth noticing, in terms of the need for an intersectional understanding of inequality and institutional change, there are also some startling inter-ethnic differences within the category of “BME”. For example, HESA statistics reflect a dominance of Indian and Chinese descent women professors, with small or negligible numbers of black Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi women – a situation even more stark in elite Russell group institutions, where only two institutions have any Bangladeshi descent women professors, and only six have any African descent women professors.⁴

Clearly, then, there is a problem – or rather a number of layered problems: the under-representation of BME academics as a whole, compared to white, the number of BME women compared to both BME men and white women, and the internal diversity of the category of BME and the under-representation of black and Muslim women in particular. Recognizing that Universities are sites for entrenched, but also complex and diverse, patterns of racial and ethnic inequality, perhaps the more challenging problem is how these multiple exclusions might be addressed, in what order, and in particular how one balances competing demands around inclusion, difference and equality, particularly with and between racialized individuals and groups.

This brings me to my second strand of the story of the BFPF, which is to consider the role of identity in these debates – to think about where, when and how race and ethnicity matters, and is made to matter. In this particular story, this centred on the “Black” in the BFPF, and who was considered – or considered themselves – to be part of this collective. One early response, from an African descent academic, queried:

I thought that I might flag up to you that some folks will take issue with how you’re defining “Black”, as in, “politically Black” rather than “people of African descent” … 

It’s not for me to police who is included on this list but I thought I’d give you the heads up that you’ll inevitably be challenged/critiqued on your definitions here.

What was striking was that it was most often South Asian women who were worried about being included. However, this was less a reflection of Modood’s assertion that Asians did not identify with “black” as a category (1992), but more a concern around being seen as culturally or politically appropriating a perceived black marginality. One participant wrote:

I worry about cultural appropriation and also how some of us outside the epidermal scheme are able to claim it and others not … I have no problem with the nomenclature for the group and myself but am wondering if the less poetic “person of colour” isn’t a better descriptor.

These internal “frontlines” (Hall 2000a) became even more complicated with the voices of international women professors, who did not share this peculiarly British history. One “Asian”⁵ international colleague said,

the meaning behind the “Black” will only be clear to those of you who have started the network. If you would like the network to grow and to be inclusive and also to be recognized publicly, then I still think the network should rethink and use a more clear name … I do know more Asian Professors but with the title now, I am not sure how many would like to join.⁶

This small, and unfinished tale, points up some broader complexities and difficulties in how we think about difference, diversity and inclusion at the current moment – it raises issues, of course, around how we recognize and negotiate ethnic and gender difference, about differential positionalities and experiences, and about how the most well-intentioned boundaries of inclusion can also be read as boundaries of exclusion, about visibility and invisibility, recognition and silencing. And all of these raise important issues for how we might think about confronting inequality, at all levels of society, including those with high levels of cultural and symbolic capital.⁷ So these are political and ethical as well as theoretical questions.

British black: a brief and contested history.

As Stuart Hall has argued, “Black is not a question of pigmentation … [It] is a historical category, a political category, a cultural category” (2000b, 149). As such, “black” needs to be understood in a particular time and space, as changing and contested, and as constructed and situational rather than taken for granted – as “without guarantees” (Hall 1992). British “black” thus has, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, its own “peculiar” history (1993a), which can be broadly divided into two phases – one which runs from the 1960s to the mid-1980s and the second, from the mid-1980s to the very early 2000s. The first should be understood as a political stance, and represents a coalition of groups and concerns, the second privileges identity, and sees the fracturing of this coalition around questions of ethnicity and later religion.

The dominant story of British “black” starts in the late 1960s⁸ and runs through the 1980s as a form of political mobilization for migrants from the former British colonies in South Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, and their British-born descendants, based on a shared experience of oppression and discrimination, and a dominant discourse (reflected, for example, in Powell’s infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech) which positioned them all as “coloured” – and as unwelcome (CCCS 1982). And this was a powerful and significant moment, rooted in the complex tapestry of anti-colonial movements and intellectual exchange woven against a backdrop of British imperial traffic in people and ideas from the nineteenth century onwards. Hall’s evocative memoir, Familiar Stranger (2017) evokes the sense of pan-Caribbean encounter and dialogue that formed a sense of “West Indian” identity in Britain from the 1950s, while John Narayan’s post-doctoral work has explored the cross-racial/ethnic solidarities of the British Black Power Movement, which drew on US racial discourses to address racial discrimination for Asian, African and Caribbean arrivals to the metropolitan post-colony (Narayan 2017). These political formations had “roots” in specific national and ethnic identities and issues, but also formed the foundation of anti-racist/black coalition politics in 1970s and 1980s urban Britain (Virdee 2014) – for example, the Indian Workers Associations which mobilized Indian migrants in Britain in the Independence struggle and provided welfare support (Ramamurthy 2013) were central to the formation of the later (pan)Asian Youth Movements, which played a central role in black youth politics and resistance across this period (Sivanandan 1981/2; CCCS 1982; Alexander 2013; Ramamurthy 2013).⁹

A second phase of “home-grown” British black politics emerged in the late 1970s, when the mantle of resistance passed to a new generation of British-born young people (Sivanandan 1981/2). For those black and Asian young people coming of age in the 1970s and 1980s, political blackness offered a point of solidarity and resistance which viewed ethnicity with suspicion – as part of the colonial “divide and rule” policy designed to deflect attention from the racist structures that positioned and oppressed black communities at home (Sivanandan 1981/2; CCCS 1982; Hall 2000b). This constructed unity was evident too in the Marxian inflected (or post-Marxist) theorizations of race that emerged alongside these mobilizations, which rejected the ethnicist simplifications of the “race relations school” and turned their gaze outwards to the racial state and its social, economic, political and cultural formations (Hall et al. 1978; Sivanandan 1981/2; CCCS 1982; Gilroy 1987; Solomos 1987; Miles 1993). Best exemplified by Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978), The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS 1982) and, perhaps, the later There Ain’t No Black (Gilroy 1987), the significance of this work lay in its insistence on placing diverse racialized communities alongside each other, as part of a broader set of racial structures, histories and discourses, while emphasizing the agency and shared struggles of racialized groups, and, importantly, placing “culture” both as a form of political identity and action (Gilroy 1987, 1993a; Alexander 2002, 2014; Meer and Nayak 2015). However, the later foundational status of this work, and its iconic scholars – particularly Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby and John Solomos – should not blind us to the broader, and more problematic, accounts of racial and ethnic identities which dominated the field through this period.

As Benson (1996) has argued, the field of racial and ethnic studies during this period was broadly divided between sociological accounts of “race” which focused on African-Caribbean communities (particularly youth) and on structural disadvantage and discrimination, and anthropological understandings of “ethnicity”, which examined the “tribal” features of culture-heavy accounts of South Asian migration, which focused on the transplantation of religious rituals and cultural practices – gift giving, marriage, dress, language and ethnic politics (Dahya 1974; Werbner 1990; Werbner and Anwar 1991). As Benson pithily captured it, “Asians have culture, West Indians have problems”.

Studies of youth partly transcended this divide – perhaps reflecting the visibility of young men (and it was nearly always men) on the streets, discussed above. However, what these studies largely reflected was a shared framework of dysfunctional masculinity, generational conflict and cultural crisis (Alexander 1996, 2000, 2006).¹⁰ We might think of the pathologization of black and Asian youth identities in the “Between Two Cultures” paradigm (Watson 1977) which still informs popular understandings of racialized youth identities (Alexander 1996, 2000, 2006, 2008) – for example, in Pryce’s Endless Pressure (1979) or Troyna and Cashmore’s Black Youth in Crisis (1982),¹¹ or, indeed, Anwar’s account of Asian youth, Between Two Cultures (1976) and later reprise Between Cultures (1998). Nevertheless, it is worth noting that even here, black and Asian young people were positioned differently – and even in opposition to each other (CCCS 1982). While both apparently suffer identity crisis, for black youth this arises from a cultural “lack”, whereas for Asian youth it is the result of cultural “excess”, with both defined against an invisible white norm (Alexander 2016). As I argued in “Beyond Black” (2002), this hinged too on different and opposed versions of “culture”, or what Hall has framed as the difference between “old” and “new” ethnicities, or “cultural difference” versus the “politics of difference” (2000b).

Broadly speaking, then, research on Asian communities in Britain has remained distinct from, and untroubled by, the sociological writing which, inflected by the cultural turn in the late 1970s, engaged with a more structural account of culture. The focus on “ethnicity” and “culture” can be traced from the early work of Dahya (1974) or Anwar (1976) to Modood’s claim to a distinctively Asian cultural (and later conveniently Muslim) “mode of being” (1992, 1994), and which explicitly eschewed “black” as a mode of engagement and solidarity, politically and theoretically. At the same time, however, it is also true that even for the proponents of an inclusive “black” category, this was never a seamless unity and the question of “culture” and “difference” remained a troubling one. Hall argued in 2000 that:

A decade ago … African-Caribbeans and Asians were treated by the dominant society as so much alike that they could be subsumed and mobilised under a single political category. But that is no longer the case. Today we have to recognise the complex internal cultural segmentation, the internal frontlines which cut through so-called Black British identity. (2000a, 127)

As Gilroy had noted in “The peculiarities of the black English” over a decade earlier,¹² Britain’s black communities have “significant differences” in histories, religions, languages, ethnicities and cultures (1993a, 54), continuing:

It is economically stratified and politically split. Most important for political purposes is the experiential divergence between “Afro-Caribbean” populations and “Asian” ones. (p55)

Gilroy himself treads a careful, and perhaps ambiguous, line between wanting to retain an inclusive notion of “political blackness” as a bulwark against the “retreat into the dubious comfort of ethnic particularity” (1993a, 31), acknowledging the political and economic fissures within the category, and equating “black” with African diaspora – particularly around questions of cultural and political exchange. While this approach can be seen as pragmatically (or strategically) contingent, one unintended consequence of the reluctance to delineate the boundaries of political blackness theoretically and empirically has been, then, to downplay or subsume these tensions, and particularly to fail to critically engage questions of, or claims to, Asian cultural distinctiveness and ethnic authenticity. Modood (1992, 1994), for example, has long argued that political blackness and a focus on racism ignored issues and qualities specific to Asian (and later Muslim) communities, and that most Asians did not identify with this label or cause.¹³ It is interesting, and perhaps more striking, to see these arguments rehearsed by Hall (2000a) or Gilroy (1993a), and perhaps reflects a broader discomfort in challenging authenticist or essentializing claims across the “black” ethnic/cultural divide (a discomfort perhaps mirrored in the current discomfort of South Asian professors in claiming “black” marginality, discussed above). An unforeseen consequence of this conceptual delicacy has been, unfortunately, to cede the field to the ethnic absolutists of Asian culture and identity, and has had further repercussions for the study of race and religion in the current context (Alexander 2017).

The always-already fraught alliance of (mainly) African-Caribbean and Asian constituencies under the banner of “black” splintered from the mid-1980s onwards around three dimensions: first, the resurgence of culture and ethnicity under the auspices of state-sponsored multiculturalism, in the wake of the youth movements of the late 1970s and the urban unrest of the early and mid-1980s, which splintered political alliances and promoted ethnic and religiously based constituencies and hierarchies (Kundnani 2002); second, the fracturing of shared socio-economic position and disadvantage, which was understood as “Asian” advantage, but which was actually Indian and East African Asian advantage (Modood 1992); and third the emergence of religion as a clear, if unexpected, faultline in anti-racist and leftist alliances, in the wake of the Satanic Verses affair in 1989, concerns around the emergence of a “Muslim underclass” and the protests around the Gulf War (Modood 1992; Runnymede Trust 1997; Alexander 1998; Meer and Nayak 2015). Indeed, when I began my “Art of Being Black” fieldwork in the late 1980s, one of my main informants, Darnell, commented, laughing, “you know, Claire, Blacks and Asians don’t get on”.

Sivanandan (2000) has evocatively characterized the shift from the unified notion of “a radical black political culture” as towards “ethnic enclaves and feuding nationalisms”, and has been particularly scathing of the “cultural turn” which, he argued, shifted the focus away from racism towards identity. While we might resist his characterization of this work, and want to retain the important focus on culture and discourse in its articulation with structures of state racism (CCCS 1982; Gilroy 1987), it is also true that many of his reservations around the uncritical retreat to essentialized ethnic identities has proven right – in practice, if not in theory. From the late 1980s through to the current moment, this second phase was characterized by the split between “black” (mainly Caribbean) and South Asian groups, each viewed through opposed cultural lenses, and then the fracturing of these categories internally, and in particular around national, regional and religious differences.¹⁴ As I argued in “Beyond Black”, one impact of the cultural turn was to reclaim and revalue black cultures and identities through a global circulation of hypermodern black identity centred in the US, while Asian, and later Muslim, communities remained mired in a culturalist framework which set them apart from, and in opposition to, the nation, and the modern. It is telling that very little work on Asian communities in Britain through the 1990s engages with the “new ethnicities” frame in any serious empirical manner – the exception being my own work on The Asian Gang (2000). However, it is also true that very little work dealt empirically with black identities either: my The Art of Being Black (1996) and Back’s New Ethnicities and Urban Cultures (1996) are perhaps the exceptions, and are both, significantly, focused on youth.

Others traced both the historical and diasporic roots and routes of Asian settlement, traditions and politics (Bhatt 1997, 2001; Kalra 2000) which disrupted ahistorical and essentialized ethnicized accounts, while there were also important, if short-lived, attempts to reframe and subvert culturalist understandings of Asian identities, such as Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma’s seminal DisOrienting Rhythms (1996) collection, Kaur and Hutnyk’s edited book Travel Worlds (1999) and later Ali, Kalra, and Sayyid’s (2006) A Postcolonial People, which played with ideas of TranslAsia and BrAsian identities as hybrid and contested formations. However, there was no wholesale reinvention of Asian identities to compare with the iconoclastic reimagination of black cultures and identities, most importantly, of course, through Hall’s groundbreaking “new ethnicities” (1987/1992) and “cultural identity and diaspora” (1990), or Gilroy’s paradigm-shattering The Black Atlantic (1993b) and later Between Camps (2000). And, indeed, these attempts were largely superceded by the rise of Islamophobia and the manifold global and domestic targets of the War on Terror.

There are several consequences to this division: first, there has a split between empirical and theoretical work on racialized identities – with the former focusing on Asians and the latter on black (mainly Caribbean descent) identities; second, there has been a parallel shift from issues of racism to questions of culture and identity; third, an implicit, and increasingly explicit, opposition, between the people-formerly-known-as-black, reflected in a growing tension and suspicion between black and Asian groups, and within these (notably around a Muslim/non-Muslim and African/Caribbean divide); fourth, an increased obsession with difference within groups – with intersectionality and with mapping difference, and with new hierarchies of oppression and discrimination; fifth, a re-location of British “black” in relation to new global circulations of ideas, ideologies and identities – most notably, of course, externally, in relation to the Black Atlantic diaspora and the global umma, but also, internally, through the impact of new forms of migration (Africans, Arab and North Africans, Chinese and “other” Asians, refugees and asylum seekers), whose position within even political blackness is uncertain and precarious.

Breaking black: twenty-first century political blackness?

The new Millennium offered some brief moments of optimism in the struggle for racial equality in Britain, with the publication in February 1999 of the long awaited Macpherson report into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, the Runnymede Trust’s report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (Runnymede Trust 2000) and the Race Relations Amendment Act in 2000. Together, these reports/Acts pointed at once to the entrenched and enduring nature of systemic racial and ethnic inequality in Britain, to a seeming government commitment to redressing these injustices, and to an alternative vision of multicultural Britain which chimed momentarily with the optimism of new Labour’s post-imperial “Cool Britannia” national rebrand. Such optimism proved short-lived, however, when the urban unrest of 2001 and the attacks on New York in September that year ushered in a new, intense phase of the War on Terror. This refocused attention away from ongoing racial and ethnic inequality and social injustice towards the seeming failures of multiculturalism and the apparent inability of Britain’s ethnic minorities (now largely recast as “Muslims”) to “integrate” into wider modern society (Meer and Nayak 2015). While questions of race and racism largely fell off of the agenda, issues of religion, ethnicity and identity moved centre-stage, with evocations of “parallel lives” and “community cohesion” conjuring familiar and well-worn tropes of cultural difference and incompatibility that resonated strongly with the earlier “race relations” framework (Kundnani 2002; Alexander 2004), but now with a global securitized sheen (Kundnani 2014).

At the same time, the profile of Britain’s formerly “black” communities was shifting: the 2001 “riots” had thrown the economic fragmentation of Britain’s long settled South Asian communities into stark relief – largely along a Muslim/non-Muslim divide¹⁵ – while new forms of migration were rapidly diversifying not only the country’s urban centres, but also its ex-urban peripheries. New classifications emerged in the Census – always a sign of where new “problems” were being identified – with the 2001 Census including questions on religion and mixed race for the first time, and the 2011 Census including new categories of “Gypsy or Irish Traveller” and “Arab”. Such classifications can be read as not only reflecting the desire to know where and who British Muslims are, but concerns around the proliferation of secondary whitenesses (particularly in the wake of increased migration from Central and Eastern Europe), and the ongoing anxieties around racial mixture and transgression. The 2011 Census also highlighted important shifts in Britain’s demographic profile, with the BME population doubling in size from 1991 to eight million people (14 per cent) in 2011. Importantly, this was not only the growth of long settled Caribbean and South Asian communities, but also reflected the increase in African groups (by 100 per cent), mixed (by more than 80 per cent), “Other Asian” (by 238 per cent) , “Other Black” (by 186 per cent) and “Other” (by 46 per cent) (CoDE 2012). There were also 230,600 Arabs (CoDE 2012) while the “White Other” category increased by over one million people – the largest increase in any ethnic group category, and including 579,000 Polish migrants (ONS 2015).¹⁶

The increasing complexity of Britain’s social and cultural ethnoscape is, in part, reflected in the explosion of racial and ethnic studies, which has seen a rapid expansion of its borders, across disciplines and spanning terrains from the diasporic to the microcosmic (Bhattacharyya and Murji 2013; Meer and Nayak 2015). The growth of what has been termed the Ethnic and Racial Studies “journalplex” (Winant 2015, 2176) across the past forty years is one marker of this increase globally, as well as nationally,¹⁷ while the British Sociological Association’s “race, ethnicity and migration stream” is the largest and one of the most active in the discipline.¹⁸ At the same time, and ironically, it can also be argued that the growth of the field has also led to its fragmentation and dilution, with the proliferation of inter- and intra-disciplinary subfields, study groups, conferences, forums and which, increasingly, speak only to each other and no longer speak across areas of shared concern. So we have the explosion of work on migration which seems to believe, with UKIP, that it is possible to talk about migration without race (Schuster 2010); on religion and Islamophobia, which, with the notable exception of Meer (2013), sees this as distinct from racism (Alexander 2017); the empty empiricisms of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007; Hall 2017); human rights (Nash 2015), refugee studies (Schuster 2010), and some strands of urban studies (Knowles 2010; Millington 2011; Hall 2013) which place race and racism as wallpaper – the acknowledged but unscrutinized backdrop to more pressing and, perhaps, more engaging theoretical, empirical and political issues. And of course – because this is Britain after all – the resurrection of inequality research which is actually class research and, in which, if it appears at all, race and ethnicity is an inconvenient complication, acknowledged in passing and then ignored (Skeggs 2004; Savage 2015), or in which “white” is appended to “working class” as an alibi for, or disclaimer of, racial privilege and racism (Mckenzie 2015; see Bottero 2009; Gillborn 2009 for critiques of this position).¹⁹

At the same time, the earlier hierarchy between theoretical and empirical research has been inverted, with race theory having largely dead-ended after “new ethnicities”, or being handmaidened into the service of an increasingly inward looking empirical field, and stripped of much of its transformative and unsettling potential (Knowles 2010; Bhattacharyya and Murji 2013). We have seen the proliferation of new theoretical pathways – post- and de-colonial studies, whiteness studies (sometimes critical, often not), diaspora studies, superdiversity, post-race, black studies, genomics, and CRT. We have focused on new forms of racism (Islamophobia, asylophobia, pre- and post-Brexit Europhobia) without thinking sufficiently about how these different experiences, histories and constituencies connect, or do not (McGhee 2005; Meer 2013; Alexander 2017). We have recoded our concerns with racism and inequality into conceptually diluted versions of post-race, of conviviality, of affect, of everyday multiculturalism, of intersectionality, of no-longer-new ethnicities, which have been thinned out and narrowed down to the most micro of analyses of encounters and interactions, and which have focused on multiplicity, contingency and complexity without what Brenner et al. have termed “the context of context” (Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth 2011, 225).

The turn to what Caroline Knowles refers to as “the identities period of race theory” (2010, 26) has, then, effectively decoupled questions of culture from issues of structure, while the “politics of difference” (Hall 1992) has become focused more on the detailed elaboration of “difference” than on the “politics” which shape and contest it. As Knowles has argued, “the politics of identity … [has] offered neither targets for social reform, nor a constituency mobilised in political struggle against racism” (2010, 26). For me, the main problem is the way in which our understandings of both race and ethnicity in Britain have run aground on the question of culture and difference. This is true whether we are talking about older bounded ideas of cultural difference rooted in ethnicity and descent, or in its “newer” forms, where it has often morphed into a highly individualized, commercialized or privatized notion of identity or subjectivity or lifestyle. While in its more benign form, this pays attention to the kinds of specificity discussed above, it can also lead to the erection of cultural barricades or the endless refinement of hierarchies of oppression and experience that makes any kind of collective identity impossible. And while we should be alert to the dangers of “groupism” (Brubaker 2006), we need to recognize too the perils inherent in the recursive move towards the individualization of marginality and discrimination; as if racism and inequality were simply a matter of choice or preference – of the “wrong” kind of identity or lifestyle, rather than social and structural and political. The separation from broader questions of power and inequality has underpinned emergent forms of “racial equivalence” (Song 2014) – from the nativist claims-staking of white working class marginality, through the polite evasions of “dinner-table” Islamophobia, to the wilful universalized colour blind erasures of #AllLivesMatter.

This is not to deny the important insights that a cultural approach to difference can offer – depending, of course, on which version of “culture” is being deployed. On the contrary, Hall’s “new ethnicities” framework still offers important critical insights into the possibilities of a politics of identity and the dangers of “identity politics”. However, this requires a careful account of how we think of identity and culture, and in particular the inseparability of culture from the social, historical and political conditions of its formation – culture is, to quote Hall, “something which is deeply subjective and personal, and at the same moment, as a structure you live” (1996, 488). It is always political, always materialist, always contingent, requiring both a taking of position and a recognition of its consequences. But this is easier to “think” than to “do”.

Conclusion: back to black?

October 2017 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Black History Month (BHM) in the UK, celebrating the contribution of Britain’s black communities to the national (hi)story. The anniversary itself captures some of the tensions and travails of “political blackness” discussed above: on the one hand, BHM illustrates the global circulation of black cultural politics, from its roots in Civil Rights America and the ongoing circulation of black political activism marked today in #BlackLivesMatter or the #RhodesMustFall campaigns (Andrews 2016). It illustrates too, the routing and re-rooting of blackness in a more national context in the mid-to-late 1980s, where it was linked both to a history of anti-racist education and to a more troubling compensatory “multicultural” account of black identity crisis and pathology (Rattansi 1992, Doharty 2015). The following three decades have seen black History subject to attack and attempted erasure from without – particularly around its place in the National Curriculum (Alexander and Weekes-Bernard 2017) – and the narrowing of its ambit internally around whose history counts as “black”. This has increasingly read “black” as synonymous with “African descent”, which works to exclude or erase racialized others (for example, Asians and the imbrications with north Africa). This can be seen, for example, in the new Birmingham City University “Black Studies” degree which explores “the history, popular cultures, artistic and social movements of people in the African diaspora,”²⁰ but also claims to speak to/stand for a broader set of decolonial knowledges that seems to hark back, not always comfortably, to an earlier era of African and Asian exchange and solidarity as a way of challenging racism and inequality (Andrews 2016).

October 2017 also saw the publication of the government’s much vaunted “Race Disparity Audit”, which to mixed political and media reception²¹ and no-one’s real surprise demonstrated the ongoing facts of racial and ethnic discrimination across a range of public service and arenas, including education, work, housing and health (Asthana and Bengtsson 2017a). The report demonstrated – again – that BME communities fare worse as a whole in British society, but that there are also some clear differences between these groups: for example, that black men are more likely to be arrested and found guilty in court than whites; that Chinese and Indian children do better at school than whites, while white Gypsy and traveller children perform significantly worse; that all BME groups have higher rates of unemployment, but this is particularly true for Pakistani and Bangladeshi women. A report released by the Runnymede Trust and Women’s Budget Group on the same day found that the poorest black and Asian families have suffered the largest hit by austerity measures – a drop in living standards of 19 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively. There are also significant regional variations, with a “vast postcode lottery” in educational performance and a deep north–south divide in unemployment rates (Asthana and Bengtsson 2017a).

These two recent events starkly illustrate the challenges confronting scholars of race and ethnicity in Britain today: on the one hand, there is clear and consistent evidence of entrenched discrimination against BME communities and individuals, and, not unconnectedly, of the continued marginalization of BME cultures, identities and histories in the narration of Britishness. On the other, we have an increasingly complex and fragmented tapestry of inequality within and between BME groups; a picture further fractured by intersectional considerations around gender, age, religion, region, sexuality and so on. “The culture question” looms large over both (Alexander 2016), used to categorize and divide people who may share similar experiences and concerns, and providing a handy off-the-peg explanation for structural neglect and racism. Ironically, this same version of “culture” becomes the basis for a narrowly conceived politics of self-interest – a clash of ethnicized constituencies and claims, if not of civilizations. At the same time, “identity” has been increasingly individualized, privatized and domesticated into a matter of lifestyle and “choice”.²² One unfortunate consequence, indeed, of the turn to identities has been to play into neo-liberalized agendas of the personal, the subjective and the affective – something we can see clearly as much in the rise of the alt-Right as the more traditional champions of identity politics and the politics of recognition. Increasingly, I think of this as the “Humpty Dumpty” moment: that having successfully smashed the grand modernist narratives around race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and so on, we are now left with the seemingly impossible task of putting the pieces back together. Of reconstruction, rather than deconstruction. Of re-engaging seriously with the critical insights of the cultural turn, which was to insist on the mutuality of structure and culture and the centrality of power to the formation and contestation of both (Hall 1990). While the personal may indeed be political, the political cannot simply remain at the level of the personal. What I see instead is a failure to communicate across difference, a failure of empathy, or perhaps a failure of sociological and political imagination.

This is an intellectual and a political but also an ethical question. And it requires us to take a stand, to come out from behind the cultural barricades, to not be afraid to take positions, while asserting the contingency of this position taking – to build alliances, to maintain openness, while attending to specificity and difference: what Zimitri Erasmus has described as coming to know “Race otherwise” (2017). This involves stepping back from the personal, from our own experience, as sufficient in and of itself: it is, Erasmus asserts, a politically charged act of imagination and of love (2017).

Of course, “political blackness” was the product of a particular “moment” and a particular place, and, as Hall cautions us, that moment has passed, even if its original impetus has not. Of course, too, it carried silences and erasures – particularly around gender and sexuality (Mirza 1997) and an unbending leftist secularism that stumbled in the face of a changing global and national religio-political context (Hall and Back 2009). What political blackness in Britain did offer us, however, was a recognition of the contingency of race and ethnicity, and of the necessity and possibilities of looking across, of empathy and of solidarity. So, while maybe resurrecting “political blackness” may not be possible, or even desirable, there is a need to find some form of expressing solidarity and resistance to racism, even – or especially – in a complex and shifting and contradictory contemporary Britain.

The final word goes to Iyiola Solanke, Founder of the BFPF, which held their inaugural meeting on 5 October 2017.²³ In response to the queries around her naming of the Forum, she commented:

I made a conscious decision to use black in the political sense. Perhaps we can leave that question to the next generation of black women academics? Right now, I think we need to work together to simply ensure that there is a next generation of black female professors. (23/2/2017)

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article were given to the British Sociological Association Conference (April 2016), the Mellon Foundation Colloquium on Diversity, Difference and Inclusion (June 2017) and the ERS 40th Anniversary Conference (July 2017). Thanks are due to John Solomos, Satnam Virdee, Nasar Meer, James Rhodes, Ajmal Hussain, Wendy Bottero and Iyiola Solanke for their comments on earlier drafts, and to Rob Berkeley, Anoop Nayak, Bridget Byrne, Sivamohan Valluvan, Omar Khan, Brett St Louis, Caroline Knowles and Brian Heaphy for ongoing discussions which helped shape and refine the arguments. Thanks to Chris Orme for being a sympathetic sounding board and constant support through the writing process. Special thanks to all members of the BFPF for their inspiration and courage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 White students make up nearly 83 per cent of students attending Russell group institutions (80 per cent of student population), only 0.5 per cent of black Caribbean students are at Russell Group universities (despite making up 1.5 per cent of the student population), 1.8 per cent of Pakistani and 0.6 per cent of Bangladeshis (2.4 and 0.8 per cent of students, respectively).

2 Compared to 45 per cent women, 29 per cent international. I am grateful to Patrick Johnson and the Equality and Diversity Unit at University of Manchester for these and following data.

3 This is compared to 3,895 white women (21 per cent) and 12,455 white men (70 per cent). http://www.ecu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ECU_staff16.xlsx

4 Exact figures are not available because for small numbers HESA rounds up or down to the nearest five. This means in some categories the numbers appear as ‘0’ where there may be one or two people. Where there are no individuals in this category, there is a space. This does not include people who identify as mixed, or where ethnicity is not given.

5 This term seems to have been used to include South, East and South-East Asian women, which is itself problematic in the British context, where ‘Asian’ has been historically largely synonymous with South Asian.

6 Personal communication 7/3/2017

7 Other current examples might include the controversies about BME under-representation in Oxbridge, Parliament, the BBC, the arts and the City.

8 The Black People’s Alliance and the British Black Panther Party were both established in 1968, and the Indian Workers Association also referred to Indian workers as “black”. Thanks to Satnam Virdee for these insights.

9 http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain

10 Two notable exceptions would be Amrit Wilson’s 1978 Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain and Heidi Mirza’s 1992 Young Female and Black

11 Or even Hall’s 1967 piece The Young Englanders, written for the Community Relations Commission, later the Commission for Racial Equality

12 This chapter is published in Gilroy 1993 but is based on a conference paper given in 1989.

13 Although Modood (1994) does draw a distinction between the idea of “black” as a basis for political action, and as an ‘identity’. Thanks to Nasar Meer for this clarification

14 One publication which traces these shifts is Mirza’s 1997 Black British Feminism. Mirza writes “Strategic multiplicity and contingency is a hallmark of Black British feminism … As long as there is exclusion … there will be a black feminism” (p21)

15 Non-Muslim South Asians have, in contrast, been positioned as “model minorities” – as a yardstick against which South Asian Muslims can be measured, and found wanting.

16 http://visual.ons.gov.uk/ethnicity-2011-census/, accessed 26 September 2017

17 The first volume of ERS had only four issues, and carried 26 papers; the latest 2016 volume comprised 15 issues (including 3 Review issues), with 115 main articles (not including book reviews, or symposia). Thanks to Amanda Eastell-Bleakley for this information. Contributions from UK-based authors across this period, according to the new inventory of ERS being undertaken by Chris Husbands, stands at around 31 per cent (although this does not define topic/focus). Thanks to Chris for this information.

18 Based on submitted papers to the annual conference since 2015, comprising around 15–16 per cent at each conference. There is also an active online Race and Ethnicity Study Group (personal correspondence with Aaron Winter, convenor from 2013–2017, 27 September 2017)

19 While there is some excellent contemporary work coming from the race field on the intersection of race and class – for example Bhattacharyya 2015, Virdee 2014 - this work continues to remain at the margins of class research in Britain.

20 www.bcu.ac.uk/courses/black-studies-ba-hons-2018-19

21 Labour MP Chris Bryant dismissed the report as “a load of sententious vacuous guff” (Huffington Post 10/10/17)

22 Communities Secretary Sajid Javid has already claimed that the differences in employment for Pakistani and Bangladeshi women could be traced to English language competency and “That might be through choice in some cases, a cultural issue” (Asthana & Bengtsson 2017b).

23 The event was supported by the Equality Challenge Unit and Wellcome Trust, and we are grateful for this support.