‘Is it because I’m black?’: personal reflections on Stuart Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

ABSTRACT

This article adopts a similar two-fold approach to Hall’s memoir by discussing my personal biography as a racialised Black woman culturally displaced in the national context and, making links to the broader social/historical approach to the teaching of History, which this article argues is based upon White supremacy. Identities, and the recognition of the problematic nature of an essential Black subject has been fundamental to making sense of my own biography, but also my critical race research on Black students’ experiences of studying Black History Month and Black History in English secondary schools. The article ends by revealing that curriculum changes to Key Stage 3 History have been structured upon erasing Black History, but where the research schools have engaged with elements of it, this provided an inferior counter-weight to the Whiteness-as-normal historical narrative of Britishness.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• White supremacy
• critical race theory
• Black History
• anti-racism
• social cohesion

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Professor Claire Alexander (University of Manchester) for the opportunity to contribute to this symposium and for her insightful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.