This is Not America E-Book

Tomiwa Owolade

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 372

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

*A TIMES AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR* '[Owolade's] argument has needed saying for years' Janan Ganesh, Financial Times 'Compelling and admirable' Sunday Times 'Passionate and timely' Observer 'Excellent' Telegraph 'Illuminating' The Times 'Timely [and] engaging' Guardian ***Chosen as a non-fiction highlight of 2023 in The Times, Guardian, Observer, Irish Times and New Statesman*** Across the West, racial injustice has become one of the most divisive issues of our age. In the rush to address inequality and prejudice, and to understand concerns around identity, immigration and colonial history, Britain has followed the lead of the world's dominant power: America. We judge ourselves by America's standards, absorb its arguments and follow its agenda. But what if we're looking in the wrong place? This is Not America is built on the idea that black Britons are British first and foremost, and thus are likely to have more in common with other Britons than with black people in other parts of the world. It argues that too much of the conversation around race in Britain today is viewed through the prism of American ideas that don't reflect the history, challenges and achievements of increasingly diverse black populations at home. To build a long-lasting and more effective anti-racist agenda we must acknowledge that crucial differences exist between Britain and America, and that we are talking about distinct communities and cultures, distinguished by language, history, class, religion and national origin. Humane, empirical and passionate, this book provides a bold new framework for understanding race in Britain today.

Leseprobe

‘An outstanding achievement... This is Not America is a deeply researched, passionately argued and original contribution to one of the most important debates in modern Britain.’

Amanda Foreman, author of The Duchess

‘Subtle, subversive and compassionate, this is a book not just for black Britons but for all Britons interested in the evolving character of our national identity.’

Tom Holland, author of Rubicon

‘A brave and utterly engrossing book. Nuanced, fair-minded and thoughtful... This is Not America is essential reading for anyone interested in some of the most contentious issues of our time.’

Ian Buruma, author of Year Zero

‘Powered by historical scholarship, This is Not America steers a course of cool intellectual rigour through a debate that is too often polarised and polemical.’

Rafael Behr, author of Politics: A Survivor’s Guide

‘Few books truly deserve to be called “necessary” but This is Not America is one of them.’

Ian Leslie, author of How to Disagree

‘A calm and insightful voice in an often overheated debate.’

Kenan Malik, author of The Quest for a Moral Compass

‘This is Not America is not only indispensable writing and indispensable thinking – it is essential to working out who we are in Britain today.’

Ben Judah, author of This is London

‘Well informed, nuanced and balanced, Tomiwa Owolade is the optimistic future of Britain’s race debate.’

David Goodhart, author of The Road to Somewhere

Tomiwa Owolade writes about social, cultural and literary issues for the New Statesman, The Times, the Sunday Times, the Observer, UnHerd and the Evening Standard. He has appeared on BBC Radio 4 and Times Radio discussing some of the ideas in this book. He won top prize at the RSL Giles St Aubyn Awards 2021.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023

by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in 2024

by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Tomiwa Owolade, 2023

The moral right of Tomiwa Owolade to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 623 3

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 622 6

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To Dr Adenle of Biket Hospital, Osogbo, Osun State

CONTENTS

Introduction: This is Not America

Part 1: This is America

1 Double Consciousness

2 American Integrationism

3 Critical Race Theory

Part 2: This is Britain

4 Immigration

5 Empire

6 Discrimination and Disparities

7 BAME

8 Mixed Race

9 Black and British

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION: THIS IS NOT AMERICA

I began to reflect more intensely than ever before on what it means to be black and British in the summer of 2020: this was the year that radically changed the conversation on race in Britain. One incident from that time stands out. An open-letter email, written by current students, accused the English department of my old university, University College London, of racism towards black people. I was astonished; I had witnessed no racism when I studied there the year before. But I swiftly discovered the letter wasn’t simply about that university. Neither was it about Britain in general. It was about America.

The year of 2020 was extraordinary. The Covid-19 pandemic led to many lost lives and isolated us from our friends and family. It was the year of the US presidential election. We fought bitterly over ‘cancel culture’. Brexit was done, or seemed to be, after four years of internecine political conflict; but the rancour of that debate still carried on into other issues. The letter by the university students was not in direct response to any of this. It was part of a wider response to the murder of a middle-aged black man named George Floyd in Minnesota by a police officer called Derek Chauvin. This atrocity was filmed and went viral around the world.

The students at my old university wanted to show they cared about black people. They demanded that the English faculty should hire more black staff and teach more texts by black authors. But something strange about this letter caught my attention. They used the term ‘BIPOC’ to describe black and ethnic-minority people in Britain. This acronym stands for ‘black, indigenous and people of colour’. BIPOC would make perfect sense in America: the United States has oppressed its black, Asian, Hispanic and indigenous people for centuries. But campaigning against the victimization of the ‘indigenous’ people of Britain makes one sound more like a far-right agitator than a progressive activist. It is more Nick Griffin, former leader of the fascist British National Party, than Molly, twenty-two, Labour Party activist from University College London. What was this acronym doing in a letter written by students to highlight the racism of a British institution?

The letter confirmed the dominance of America’s racial politics over the rest of the world. Every continent, including Antarctica, saw protests expressing solidarity with black Americans. The summer of 2020 was characterized for many of us by reading articles, essays, tweets, memes, images, private messages and public announcements that expressed dismay at racism. Actors, musicians, sports stars, politicians, third and fourth cousins and influencers took to social media to denounce the mistreatment of black people. Corporations advertised their commitment to greater racial diversity in their workplaces. Museums promised to decolonize their collections. British retailers such as Sainsbury’s and ASOS made donations to anti-racist organizations.1 Many football clubs in the English Premier League adopted ‘taking the knee’ before the start of every match. Many responses were also personal. Many white people asked after their black friends, expressed shame that they had hitherto been quiet about racial injustice and committed themselves to speaking out against any racism they encountered among their family and white friends. Floyd was not the first black person to die recently after an altercation with the police. And it’s true that there were some protests in 2014 after the death of another black man: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But in their scope and intensity, the reactions to the events of 2020 dwarfed anything that had gone before.2

This is not a bad thing in itself. Much of this comes from a benign place: solidarity is worthy of praise rather than scorn. From the Civil Rights Movement to the fight against apartheid in South Africa, from the Arab Spring to the recent uprising by Iranian women against sexist theocracy, solidarity has played a vital role in animating social-justice movements throughout the world. But solidarity should not come at the expense of the truth. Expressing moral indignation at the murder of George Floyd is one thing; invoking the term BIPOC to condemn a liberal university faculty in England is another. The former is a moral response to tragedy and injustice. The latter trivializes this tragedy and undermines the case for social justice. If we lose sight of who and what we are fighting for, what is the point of fighting? This is why the truth matters. The response to George Floyd’s murder abdicated this responsibility: it looked at race in Britain through the perspective of America.

Why did the death of George Floyd trigger the response it did? I think there were three overlapping factors. The Covid lockdown probably played some role. We were cooped up inside, as a matter of law, to prevent the spread of a mysterious new disease. This was uncharted territory for all of us; we probably needed some sort of collective release. Another factor was the growing role of social media in our political and personal lives. When something spreads through Twitter and Facebook, it can easily morph into reality. In fact, it is reality. The greatest factor, however, was that we live in the shadow of America’s culture and politics. When something significant happens in America, it reverberates across the rest of the world, and many of us interpret what is specific to America as true of our own country. The students at my old university, isolated from human contact by the pandemic, stuck online, and incubated in American culture from birth, condemned the racism of a British institution by following the script of America.

***

America is the most influential country in the world. During the night of the 3 November 2020 US presidential election, Britain and the rest of the world were hooked. It seemed like the most consequential night of the year. Like countless others, I was transfixed by the drama. I went to sleep at 1 a.m. just as Florida was called for Donald Trump. I woke up six hours later at seven and immediately checked Twitter. I was delighted when it was announced, a few days later, that Trump had lost the election and Joe Biden had won; I even considered buying champagne and ordering in pizza. All for an election in a country 3,000 miles away. I’m sure even the colonies of the British Empire did not treat the 1945 British general election with this level of rapt attention.

Britain watches America and sees its own politics through an American prism. Whenever a scandal breaks out, we affix the term ‘gate’ at the end of it – Beergate and Partygate – as an echo of America’s infamous Watergate. When an important decision on a contentious issue like abortion is made – such as Roe v. Wade being overturned in the summer of 2022 – many British women are so devastated by the decision that they feel as if it is an attack on their own rights. The Supreme Court leak made the front cover on both centre-left and centre-right British national papers: the Guardian and the Telegraph. Many of us mourned Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death like she was one of our own: a beloved elderly relative rather than a senior judge in a foreign country.

Many of Boris Johnson’s enemies call him the British Trump. His supporters, meanwhile, claimed he had a personal mandate when there was pressure on him to resign in early July 2022 over his lying about lockdown parties. But we don’t have a presidential system; we have a parliamentary democracy. As Fraser Nelson put it in the Telegraph: ‘Boris Johnson failed because he tried to impose a presidential model on a parliamentary democracy.’3 Many young right-wing men in Britain view American conservative leaders as more worthy of emulation than their British counterparts. As the writer Will Lloyd wrote in an essay for UnHerd: ‘These young Tories are stripping the American Right for parts. They believe that until the British Right comes out fighting, it will keep losing the culture.’ One young British man said to Lloyd that ‘Once the [United] States are taken back, it will influence conservatives here. Then the Tories will stop being so shit.’4 Americans also look at our politics through the prism of theirs. A New York Times article in May 2022, for instance, wrote about the Labour Party’s plan to win back the ‘Rust Belt’ seats of England from the Tories – as if the American Midwest and the English North occupy the same landscape.5 Even if we are genuinely uninterested in what goes on over there, we can’t escape the force and influence of American culture. We share the internet with them. As the British writer Helen Lewis puts it, ‘sharing the internet with America is like sharing a rhinoceros. It’s huge, it’s there, and whatever it’s doing now, you sure as hell know about it.’6

I can name all of America’s presidents from 1933 till today. I could not do the same for the prime ministers of Holland or Belgium over the same time period: two nations just across the English Channel. This might be an anglophone prejudice, but I doubt many people can name the past or current political leaders of Australia and Ireland without checking (New Zealand’s former prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is the exception – she is very popular).

When the England football team was facing America in the group stages of the 2022 World Cup, the England players took the knee – the gesture conceived in America to protest against police shooting unarmed black men – but the American players did not.7 This is an apt symbol for the current relationship between the countries. They set the trend; we follow.

This is about power. America is at the top of the cultural and political tree. And its influence is not simply confined to Britain or other anglophone countries. It is global. When the mandarins of the Académie française – the institution that closely monitors the health of French language and culture – complain about anglicisms corrupting the French language, what they mean are Americanisms. After the Second World War, one article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde declared that ‘Coca-Cola is the Danzig of European Culture.’8 The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told the Guardian in 2022 that she thinks ‘Europe imports America’s cultural battles.’ She adds that ‘in some ways, America sets the standard of what we should be talking about and caring about. Europe should also take responsibility. And say, “You know what? No, thank you.”’9 Even Russian president Vladimir Putin, who defines himself as opposed to what he views as the decadence of American civilization, is utterly obsessed with American culture wars. As the writer Aris Roussinos puts it: ‘How much weaker and more pathetic does Putin seem for the growing fixation on American culture war issues that manifests in his speeches? Rather than being outside the system of America’s cultural power, he has revealed himself as trapped here with the rest of us.’10

But we are all influenced not only by America’s political power; many of us are also seduced by the grand American Story. The nation has a set of ideals characterized by renewal and transformation: Manifest Destiny, the American Frontier, the American Dream, the City upon a Hill. Thomas Paine, the Englishman who became one of the most eloquent defenders of the American Revolution, wrote in his book Common Sense: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.’11 A redemptive arc is integral to how America sees itself: it was under the yoke of colonialism, but it became the land of liberty; it had slavery, but it abolished it. We are intuitively fascinated by such narratives. They possess the satisfying structure found in classical myths. The struggles of life are not fixed; they can be overcome.

The unvarnished truth is that America is an old nation. It was founded on written ideals, but it has the oldest codified constitution in the world still in use. The average age of a constitution in the world since the 1780s, when America established its founding document, is only nineteen years. As the British political philosopher John Gray states: ‘American institutions have changed less over the past centuries than those of practically any other country.’12 The American historian Timothy Snyder, meanwhile, has said that ‘America is an old nation, but we claim to be new. We are the mid-life crisis of nations.’13 What makes America attractive to the rest of the world is that Americans have claimed their values to be universal: everyone should aspire to them. In 1941 Henry Luce, the influential publisher of Time magazine, wrote an essay entitled ‘The American Century’, in which he argued for the United States to be a political, social and cultural world leader. After the Second World War, this vision became a reality.14

Britain, exhausted and facing steep imperial decline, passed the leadership of the anglophone world to America after the end of the Second World War. At that time, America possessed two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves. Its per-capita income was four times larger than the combined per-capita income of Great Britain, France, West Germany and Italy. It was a leading producer in steel, electronics and aeroplanes. It was also a leader in military technology; it had a monopoly on nuclear weapons.15 Janan Ganesh, the Financial Times columnist, has written that ‘there is a case for Harry Truman [the US president] in mid-1945 being the most powerful human being who has ever lived’.16 China might be the most powerful country within the next few decades. As of today, though, America still remains supreme.

And because America is the most influential country in the world, it makes sense that its racial politics are exported to the rest of the world. As Alastair Bonnett argues in Multiracism: ‘The Americanization of the language of racism’ reflects the ‘cultural power of the USA’.17 He adds that ‘global institutions, such as the World Bank and the UN, have disseminated US-models of racial categorization and racism’. Black Americans are the most influential black people in the world. This is not because they are black. It is because they are American. The American story of race, in the decades after the Second World War, spoke powerfully to Britain’s newly arrived black citizens. Most of them were black Caribbean. This meant that most of them were – like black Americans – the descendants of enslaved Africans taken to the New World. Many of them were also profoundly alienated by the racism they faced when they arrived in Britain. They thought they were British, and they were right to think so: they were subjects of the British Crown. But they were made to feel like strangers. It’s no surprise they looked to America. It was a country with a larger and more established black population. The British Black Panther was based on the counterpart in America. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali were heroes to many black British people; they had so few heroes in their own country. America possessed a strong and sophisticated network of civil-rights organizations, from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), which campaigned against gross injustices with a forthright moral conviction. They offered clarity. But black Britons also looked to America for a more prosaic reason: British people from all backgrounds looked to America. (Richard Hoggart’s 1957 book The Uses of Literacy laments the poisonous effects of American-led mass culture on the working-class communities of England after the Second World War.)

It is understandable why we in Britain are fascinated by America: we share a common language; the founding fathers of America were British subjects; many of Britain’s greatest actors and musicians and directors made their name and fame in America; we voraciously consume American culture – from The Simpsons to The Sopranos. This is not necessarily a bad thing. This book is not anti-American. I love many aspects of American culture: I love the films of Martin Scorsese and Richard Linklater, the music of Bessie Smith and Don Headley, the fiction of John Updike and Philip Roth, the poetry of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the comedy of Larry David and the visual art of Roy Lichtenstein. I love American food, from turkey stuffings to American candy. I love New York City and Los Angeles. And I also love many people in America – including my brother, who has lived in the country for nearly twenty years and now has an American wife. This account is also not anti-American in another sense. Many of the thinkers on race that I have been most inspired by while writing it have been American, such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. The arguments in this book are a vindication of these thinkers, who affirmed the importance of American citizenship to struggles against racism and rejected the view that you could reduce a person to their race. These are the arguments of This is Not America, but in a British context.

I am also not uncritically pro-British. There are parts of British culture I don’t like or am indifferent to – in particular the weather, some of the food, the class divisions and some of the twee attitudes towards the royal family. In fact, being piously pro-British strikes me as fundamentally un-British; taking the piss out of ourselves is one of our greatest virtues. This book is not about being pro one nation and anti another. It is about accepting a nation on its own terms rather than through the perspective of another nation. Out of this, we can build a more effective form of anti-racist politics.

***

Britain is different from America. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary democracy. The United States of America is a federal republic with a presidential system. America, as mentioned above, has a written and codified constitution – Britain’s constitution is unwritten and malleable. Britain’s population is around seventy million people; America has more than 330 million residents. America is a richer country than Britain, and far more violent: the murder rate in Britain is 1.2 per 100,000 people, but in America it is over five times higher, at 6.3. In America, possessing guns in your home is legal under the constitution. In the UK, gun ownership is severely restricted, and we don’t have a culture that valorizes the use of firearms.18 As the Times columnist Hugo Rifkind points out, ‘Gunwise, particularly, only about ten Londoners get shot dead every year.’ By contrast, in ‘Washington DC, which is more than ten times smaller, the figure is 23 times more’.19 America is also more punitive on crime. The incarceration rate for people in England and Wales is 131.5 per 100,000 people, rising to 134 for Scotland. In America, it is 716.

Abortion has been legally available up to twenty-four weeks in Britain since the 1967 Abortion Act (apart from in Northern Ireland, which only decriminalized abortion in 2019). Abortion varies state by state in America: in some states, like New York and California, a woman can legally get an abortion up to foetal viability; in other states, like Louisiana and Oklahoma, abortion is completely illegal.20 At a federal level, abortion was decriminalized in 1973 with the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade, which was reinforced in 1992 with Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and which established that women have the right to abortion up to the point when a foetus can live outside the mother. Both decisions were overturned, as I mentioned earlier, by the Supreme Court decision of Dobbs v. Jackson in 2022. Women in America have no national statutory maternity leave, and there is no universal healthcare in the country. In the UK we have the National Health Service. Male homosexuality stopped being a crime in the UK under the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Many American states – especially in the South – didn’t make gay sex legal until 2003. Britain is different from America in terms of political and legal institutions, population size, economy, crime, various axes of culture and values, and geography. It is a very different country.

This seems like an obvious point to make, but over recent years we in Britain have followed American politics and culture to such an extent that this important distinction has been lost. The Spanish-American philosopher and poet George Santayana once analysed the relationship between Britain and America, and the pitfalls that come with viewing one nation through the lens of another: ‘The groundwork of the two societies is so similar,’ he wrote, ‘that each nation, feeling almost at home with the other, and almost able to understand its speech, may instinctively resent what hinders it from being at home altogether.’ The fact that we have some affinities, in terms of language and culture, seduces us into thinking we can intuitively understand each other. ‘Each will judge the other by his own standards,’ Santayana added, ‘not feeling, as in the presence of complete foreigners, that he must make an effort of imagination and put himself in another man’s shoes.’21 But making such an effort is crucial. Without making this effort, the important differences between each country – in terms of politics, culture and the demographic makeup – are obscured.

Santayana was writing in the first half of the twentieth century. As of today, however, the relationship between the two nations is closer to a phenomenon called ‘cultural cringe’, notably used by the Australian art critic Robert Hughes to describe the relationship between Britain and Australia. I think the concept also works well for Britain’s attitude to America: ‘the Cultural Cringe is the assumption that whatever you do in the field of writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, dance, or theatre,’ Hughes wrote, ‘is of unknown value until it is judged by people outside your own society.’ He added that ‘it is the reflex of the kid with low self-esteem hoping that his work will please the implacable father, but secretly despairing that it can. The essence of cultural colonialism is that you demand of yourself that your work measure up to standards that cannot be shared or debated where you live.’22 Britain’s relationship with America is a case of cultural cringe. All too often, we judge ourselves by America’s standards rather than our own. Important differences between each country are lost amidst this.

One such important difference between Britain and America is race, and this will form the focus of this book. Over the past decade, racial topics have become much more visible in the British media landscape. As the researcher David Rozado puts it, in a blog post that was published in August 2022, ‘over the last decade, various studies have suggested that the UK is now rapidly following the United States into a more polarized politics in which intensifying “culture wars” over issues such as racism, identity, diversity, the legacy of history, and “social justice” or so-called “woke” politics are becoming far more prominent’. Rozado adds that ‘between 2010 and 2020, terms such as racism and white supremacy in popular UK media outlets increased on average by 769% and 2,827% respectively’.23 The problem is that, all too often, these discussions reflect an American perspective.

Britain is not America: black British people are distinct from black Americans in many relevant ways. Black British people, for example, are overwhelmingly immigrants or the children of immigrants. The average black American, by contrast, can trace his or her ancestry in America further back than the average white American. The black British population only reached 1 per cent of the general British population for the first time in around 1980. Black people now constitute 4 per cent of the British population.24 Since America’s founding, however, the black American population has been between 12 and 19 per cent of the general American population. For a long while, black British people largely meant black Caribbean people. This is no longer the case. Over the past thirty years there has been a significant shift in the nature of the black British population: there are now twice as many black Africans in the country as black Caribbean people. Most black Americans are still the descendants of the enslaved Africans imported to America between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Race is different between the two countries in another sense, too: the racial composition of Britain and America. White people constitute 60 per cent of the population in America: in Britain, by contrast, they make up 81.7 per cent of the population. There are more than three times as many Asian people in Britain as black people: Asians now make up 9.3 per cent of the British population. In America, by contrast, there are twice as many black Americans as Asian-Americans. America also has a distinct ethnic group that numbers almost 20 per cent of the population – the Hispanic or Latino – for which there is no equivalent in Britain. In all of the above respects, race in Britain is different from race in America. This should come as no surprise: Britain’s political institutions, history and many of its cultural values are different from those in America, so why should we assume that race would be the same between the two countries?

Many of us forgot these differences after the murder of George Floyd. On 25 May 2022 the British Labour Party announced that it would introduce a new Race Equality Act. As part of the announcement, the party released a video on social media explaining why Britain needed legislation to combat systemic racism. David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, was the first person to appear in the video. Near the start, he said this: ‘George Floyd looked like me. He could have been me.’25 But Floyd only looked like Lammy in the most superficial sense, and his life experience could only have been like Lammy’s in the most superficial sense, too: in that they were both black. David Lammy is a British politician and lawyer representing a London constituency: he is not similar to George Floyd. George Perry Floyd Jr – known simply as Perry to his family and friends – was born in October 1973 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to George Floyd Sr and Cissy Floyd. He was arrested more than twenty times in his life by the police, often for dealing drugs, and he spent almost one-third of his adult life in jail.26 He also attended a segregated school, an experience that doesn’t correspond to the experiences of black British people.

Ultimately the announcement was pointless. We already have the 2010 Equality Act, which supersedes the 1976 Race Relations Act and explicitly prohibits racist discrimination. It is not clear to me what a new Act would do. In the video Lammy adds that ‘We face the issues of structural racism in our lives every day. That’s why George Floyd’s death sparked a global movement, stretching from Minneapolis to Manchester to Mile End.’ Why should we assume that being a black person in Minneapolis is the same as being a black person in Mile End, apart from the magical powers of alliteration? Lammy doesn’t enlighten us.

Racism is not the same everywhere in the world. Racism reflects norms, and norms are not universal. They depend on the social, cultural, economic and demographic background of a country. The racism against African migrant workers in Italy is not the same as the racism against indigenous communities in Australia; the discrimination against Indian labourers in Qatar is not the same as the genocide against Uighur Muslims by the Chinese Communist Party. There are some similarities between the racism experienced by black people in Britain and America because both countries have some cultural affinities, but there are also many important differences. They are different countries.

Historically, racial segregation has been a more prominent feature of American society than of British. Frederick Douglass was one of the greatest black Americans of the nineteenth century; he campaigned against slavery in America with extraordinary eloquence and vigour; he was one of the most photographed American men of his century. Throughout his life he compared Britain favourably to America. In a letter to his friend Amy Post, for instance, Douglass wrote this about his experience of visiting Britain: ‘Everything is so different here from what I have been accustomed to in the United States. No insults to encounter, no prejudice to encounter, but all is smooth. I am treated as a man and equal brother.’ He added that ‘My color instead of being a barrier to social equality is not thought of as such. I am everywhere treated with the greatest kindness by all with whom I come in contact. The change is wonderful.’ In another letter, to the influential American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass noted: ‘I find no difficulty here in obtaining admission into any place of worship, instruction, or amusement, on equal terms with people as white as any I ever saw in the United States.’27

More recently, despite the discrimination in housing, employment, criminal justice and education that many black people faced in Britain after the Second World War, there was no equivalent in British law of the Jim Crow segregation (between the late nineteenth century and the mid-1960s) that was enshrined in America. Lynching has never been practised in the United Kingdom. Interracial marriage has never been banned in Britain. Our schools are not segregated by race, but by class. When the 1948 British Nationality Act was introduced, David Maxwell Fyfe, a barrister and politician for the Conservative Party, announced, ‘We are proud that we impose no colour bar restrictions’ and ‘we must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone from every part of our empire’.28 Famously, during the Second World War, many black American soldiers stationed in Britain were treated more kindly by white British people than they were by fellow white American soldiers. One West Country farmer was quoted in the New Statesman as saying, ‘I love the Americans, but I don’t like those white ones they’ve brought with them.’

In a 1943 column for Tribune, George Orwell wrote about walking through London during the Second World War: ‘Even if you steer clear of Piccadilly with its seething swarms of drunks and whores,’ he wrote, ‘it is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.’29 That year also witnessed the Battle of Bamber Bridge, where an attempt by the American military leadership to racially segregate the pubs in a Lancashire village was resisted by both the black American soldiers stationed there and the white British natives. The British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens recounts in his memoir Hitch-22 his experience of talking to black American cab drivers who served in the Second World War. They had fond memories of England. As Hitchens put it, ‘for many of these brave gentlemen, segregated in their US Army units, England was the first picture they ever saw of how a non-segregated society might look’. He added that, ‘in my hometown of Portsmouth there was a riot in 1943, with the locals scorning attempts by American military policemen to enforce a color bar in the pubs. The young Medgar Evers [a black American civil-rights activist] apparently told his English friends that after what he’d seen and learned, when he got back to Mississippi he wasn’t going to put up with any more of this garbage.’30

This is not to say that racism has never played a part in the experiences of black people in Britain. Such a suggestion would be silly. It is merely to note the difference from America. The racism that black people subsequently encountered in the UK after the Second World War was much closer in nature to the racial hostility encountered by other immigrant groups. Like South Asians and other immigrant communities, they were treated as a drain on resources and a threat to national cohesion.

Even today, the differences between black Americans and black Britons on race are significant. It is much more normal for black Americans to have an exclusively black social circle than it is for black Britons. In December 2022 I attended my older brother’s wedding in Nigeria. He was marrying an African-American woman (by which I mean a descendant of enslaved Africans, not an African immigrant or from an African immigrant family). She and my brother invited seventy guests to Nigeria, made up of family and friends, and every single one of them was black. It is easier to have exclusively black friends in America than it is in the UK because there are so many American cities where the majority of the population is black: from Memphis, Tennessee, to New Orleans, Louisiana; from Newark, New Jersey, to Baltimore, Maryland; from Birmingham, Alabama, to Detroit, Michigan. And there are many more examples. (According to the latest census data, Atlanta, Georgia, is only 49 per cent black.) By contrast, London is the city in Britain with the highest concentration of black people and they only make up 13 per cent of the city’s population.31 Any comparison between black people in America and black people in Britain, without considering these demographic differences, is short-sighted. When we think about race and racism, we need to think about the groups that are affected by these things. They are not simply interchangeable pegs to be slotted into a machine. They are human beings richly embedded in their own particular communities. Emphasizing that humanity needs to form a key part in any anti-racist vision.

Another problem with invoking the experience of black Americans to describe black British people in the way Lammy did in that video is that it defines black people simply in terms of victimization. Despite the racism that many black British people have faced in Britain, the Windrush generation and subsequent generations of black British people have developed a strong cultural affinity with the nation. To define them wholly through their terrible experiences is a form of denigration: it denies their attachment and contribution to Britain. Some of this affinity is explicit: for instance, through sport and music and religion. The former footballer Ian Wright is as inextricably British, for example, as any white person from south London. Some of this affinity, meanwhile, is implicit, through cultural assumptions and behaviour: the unwritten norms, such as our ability to form a queue seamlessly, that make us British. All of it is negated by seeing black British people through the lens of America, and only as victims of racial oppression.

Black British people are not one single group. We are the largely Christian Windrush generation and its direct descendants. But we are also the Muslim Somali refugees who arrived in the 1990s and 2000s. We are affluent and well-educated immigrants from Nigeria and Ghana who arrived at around the same time as the Somali refugees and now live in Kent and Hertfordshire, and send their kids to private and grammar schools. And we are the Congolese immigrants in inner-city London who send their kids to the local comp. We are Kemi Badenoch and Bernardine Evaristo, two highly successful women with Nigerian ancestry, but with different experiences, occupations and political beliefs. Badenoch is a Tory politician who is touted as a future leader of her party. Evaristo is a Booker Prize-winning novelist and president of the Royal Society of Literature. We are barely a we. To quote the famous line from the American poet Walt Whitman: we ‘contain multitudes’.32

English is the unifying language. But we often speak or listen to a language other than English at home. Anyone who takes a bus ride across south-east London – through Peckham, Lewisham, Woolwich and Thamesmead, what I like to call the black African Riviera – will hear Yoruba, Twi, Somali and African-accented French: the language of immigrants from francophone Africa. The parents of a close friend of mine come from Cameroon. His dad is from the minority English-speaking part of the nation; his mum comes from the 80 per cent of the country that speaks French. My friend speaks English, like any other young Londoner. Black Britons have also intermarried with native white British people, especially the working-class and Celtic white population, at a remarkable rate. As Trevor Phillips, a Times columnist and former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has said, Britain is one of the few countries in the world with a large mixed-race population that came about as a result of love rather than rape.

Still, our current conception of black British identity is limited. When that friend of mine asked a white university-educated woman, ‘Where do you think my family is from?’, the only two places she could name were Nigeria or Ghana. I’m fairly sure that she could name most of the southern states of America. This reflects a wider problem. Think of the most famous black people in the world, and the chances are most of the names that crop up in your mind will be black Americans. In fact think of the most famous black people in history and you get a similar result. I’m not using this to judge. I am as guilty of this as anyone else: Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Nina Simone, Will Smith, Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan – their names ring around my mind like a child reciting the players of his favourite football team. American cultural frames can be all-consuming.

This book argues two main points. We should understand race in Britain through a British perspective, and we shouldn’t reduce black people to their race. Being black and British is as much shaped by being British as it is by being black. The only way to approach racism in Britain helpfully, and to acknowledge the distinctive qualities of black people in the UK, is by accepting this particular duality: black and British. Race is not an abstract or metaphysical thing. It relies on context – national context, in the case of distinguishing the experiences of black British people from black Americans, but other forms of context, too. For instance, when we talk about black British people, we have to recognize that we are not talking about a singular group of people: we are talking about different communities and cultures, divided by language and religion and national origin and class. When we focus on race in Britain, therefore, we need to take into account the unique complexities of black British identity. Despite such differences, however, there are also striking similarities between the communities that fall under the category of black British – an emerging dialect called Multicultural London English (MLE), for example, which is now used by younger black British people of all backgrounds and even, increasingly, by younger British people of all backgrounds, irrespective of their race or where they live in the country. The experience of black British people is not only defined by racism, and it would be profoundly damaging to suggest so: it has also been characterized by love and tenderness and humour and friendship. It has been an incorrigibly British experience.

This is Not America is not a history book about black British people. Nor is it a definitive account of contemporary black Britain, or of race relations in Britain today: events are moving so rapidly that an exposition of that ambition will only be impressionistic in any case. As I mentioned earlier, up until the past twenty years the majority of black British people came from a Caribbean background, and this is no longer the case: today most black British people are black Africans. In terms of history books about black British lives, I would recommend Hakim Adi’s African and Caribbean People in Britain; David Olusoga’s Black and British; Windrush by Trevor Phillips and Mike Phillips; and Peter Fryer’s Staying Power. In terms of titles on immigration to Britain, I would recommend Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder and Lovers and Strangers by Clair Wills.

One might argue that one problem with this book is that it replicates the problem of seeing race in Britain through an American perspective, by focusing on the experiences of black people in Britain despite the fact there are more Asians in the country. This is a fair criticism. But I can only write about what interests me, and I am interested principally in black people in Britain. I welcome any account that rejects the American frame by focusing on the particular experiences of British-Asians. Another related objection to the book is this: by writing an entire title on the topic of race, am I not already acquiescing to an American way of looking at the world? I would respond by saying that ignoring the issue will not make it go away. But what if it is the case that Britain has internalized so much of American culture that it is useful to simply accept this trend as a matter of fact and look at black British people through an American perspective? I would say the underlying differences between the countries still matter, and should still be taken into account when looking at race. Another objection one might make is that I put too much store in evidence and facts, and this fog of data diminishes the experiences of black British people. To which I would respond that the truth matters, and empirical evidence is important. But I accept that this can only go so far. This account will not be solely data-driven, but will try to capture what data can’t encapsulate by itself: the substance of human experiences. The point is that to accept the humanity of black people, or anyone else, you can’t define them as a homogenous bloc; the differences within and between them matter just as much. This is why I will strive for experiences