Black Men in Britain

An Ethnographic Portrait of the Post-Windrush Generation

Kenny Monrose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815354307
• eBook ISBN: 9781351133418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

While extensive attention has been paid to black youth, adult black British men are a notable omission in academic literature. This book is the first attempt to understand one of Britain's hidden populations: the post- Windrush generation, who matured within a post-industrial British society that rendered them both invisible and irrelevant. Using ethnography, participant observation, interviews and his own personal experience, and without an ounce of liberal angst, Kenny Monrose pulls no punches and presents the reader with a fierce but sensitive study of a population that has been vilified and ignored.

The widely disseminated portrait of black maleness, which habitually constructs black men as being either violently dangerous, or social failures, is challenged by granting black men in Britain the autonomy to speak on sociologically significant issues candidly and openly for themselves. This reveals how this group has been forced to negotiate a glut of political shifts and socially imposed imperatives, ranging from Windrush to Brexit, and how these have had an impact on their life course. This provides a cultural uplift and offers an authenticated examination and privileged insight of black British culture.

This book will be of interest to sociologists, cultural historians and criminologists engaged with citizenship, migration, race, racialisation and criminal justice.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Personal curiosity and research trajectory

One of the experiences that propelled the challenge of writing this book occurred shortly after I had completed the ‘Knowledge of London’,¹ and became a licensed (black) London taxi driver. I was twenty-three, raised in a neglected part of East London, and granted a license from the Metropolitan Police to roam the grey streets of London in order to earn an honest wage. This was both an adventurous and an overwhelming experience, as I discovered parts of London that my parents, who had arrived in London from the Eastern Caribbean almost thirty years previously, never had the privilege of seeing.

A cold, wet evening during ‘kipper season’² found me plying for hire at Euston station. Being ‘kipper season’, there was not much work on offer, so to pass time I struck up a conversation with another cabbie whom I shared the rank with. Chester, an arresting thickset Barbadian in his late seventies, bragged of being one of London’s first black ‘black taxi’ drivers. As a Windrush arrival, he considered himself somewhat of a pioneer, and was full of advice for an inexperienced ‘butter boy’³ like myself. After a long wait and whilst ushering a fare into his cab, in his heavy Barbadian burr he said to me:

Listen, young man, if you’re smart in this country, you can be anybody you want to be, at any time. You can be an African, West Indian or an Englishman. Being a black man in this country is easy, you just have to know what part to play.

Chester drove off and left me to digest not only the acrid diesel smoke from his exhaust, but the potency and clout of his statement. Although I never saw him again, his words planted a seed of inquisitiveness in my mind that lasted many years. How on earth could it be easy to be a black and British? Even as a child, my experience taught me that being black in Britain was problematic. Being black and born in the ‘City of Thieves’, as Canning Town in Newham was locally known, one learnt early on what you were, who you were and where you belonged. Football grounds, Cub Scout huts and pubs were not for the likes of me. Despite the introduction of racial discrimination law in the 1960s, the colour bar mentioned by Banton (1967) and Sutcliffe and Smith (1974) was still very present when I was growing up during the Thatcherite period.⁴ In Newham, this meant many no-go areas for blacks, particularly the south of the borough near to the docks, where I was born.

Blacks throughout London grew accustomed to staying close to where small West Indian communities had emerged and developed into neighbourhoods where they felt safe, and could maintain their own relevant and workable cultural practices. When they did venture from these spaces, it was often for an annual day visit to a provincial seaside town such as Southend-on-Sea, Margate or Clacton. West Indians were fully aware of the significance of the seaside to the English, and despite the host of daily difficulties they encountered, the trip to the seaside was one occasion when they tried their best to shoehorn themselves into British culture.

I recall these trips vividly. Off we went to be English for the day, three, four or five extended black families travelling east towards where the brass bands played the ‘tiddly-om-pom-pom’ – the fabled British seaside. Fathers and uncles dressed as sharp and dandy as they did upon their arrival on the Orbita and Empire Windrush.⁵ Mothers, sisters and aunties struggled as they carried heavy packed lunches and additional layers of clothing in fear of the sea (Thames Estuary) breeze. We boys were decked out in our best attire, normally reserved for Sunday Mass, and our faces shone with Vaseline. We clung tightly to the two ‘bob’⁶ we had to spend, and were excited to be doing the same thing that our white classmates did during the six-week summer holidays. We must have been quite a sight, sitting on the shingle, salt marshes and mudflats, eating fish cakes and fried dumplings, arguing about where the sand had gone, and why the sea was brown.

My first experiences of the seaside awakened me to the difficulties associated with my cultural identity, and left me feeling horridly uncomfortable, with a yearning to return to the inner-city enclave. Quickly I realised the subtle implications that the colour bar presented and why our parents rarely ventured away from Newham. I became aware of just how out of context we were. White people pointed, and stared intensely at us. The legion of noisy amusement arcades around us seemed to fall silent and redundant as we passed by – we now were the new object of amusement. Toothless old ladies looked at us open-mouthed, frozen. Old men with handkerchiefs tied on their heads stood in socks and sandals, fixated, whispering loudly about us to each other, while white children our age gesticulated, mocked and looked confused all at the same time. To be honest, it was not malevolent, nor menacing, but eerily strange and disconcerting. Why are they looking at me like that? I eat fish and chips, and drink Tizer. Look, don’t you know that I love football? I have posters of Bobby Moore, Kenny Dalglish and Clyde Best on my bedroom wall. Am I not a part of you? Does not I mean we?

Years later, going ‘home’ to the Caribbean for the first time as an adult, similar issues were raised, only this time in reverse. Almost immediately on exiting the British Airways aircraft, and being thumped by the tropical heat, I was hit by fascinated stares and rapt glances, not only from over-zealous customs employees but from those all around. The difference this time was that these eyes were not grey, blue or green, but big, brown and wide like mine. Again those feelings of being out of context returned. I heard a baggage porter call out, ‘Hey, Englishman, let me help you,’ and wondered who he was talking to; it couldn’t have been me, could it? I had never been called English before (other than by siblings in jest), but it was me. I was finally being called English. I always wanted to be English, but hadn’t felt allowed to be, and here I was several thousand miles away from East London, finally being acknowledged as an ‘Englishman’ (how the St Lucians knew I was English by simply looking at me is something I still marvel at).

Until that moment, I had given up my pursuit of being British, and considered myself a St Lucian. This was of great significance because as the only family member born in England, I was an anomaly at home. This, however, was not a problem, because I became St Lucian by association, and had always referred to it as home (despite not having been there). In time, I learnt how deluded this type of consciousness was. The Eastern Caribbean, like the East End of London, did not acknowledge or accept me culturally, and the same questions from my childhood were again raised. Am I not a part of you?

Waiting for my transportation to arrive in the Windwards’ searing heat, I remembered Chester the cabbie, and the exchange we had on that cold wet evening in central London. I recalled the writing of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Ken Pryce and Michael Banton regarding the difficulties of blackness in Britain, and, submerging myself within their theories, was reminded of the double- and sometimes triple-encrusted consciousness of which they speak. I recalled the fabulous novels I had read by Sam Selvon and George Lamming and the poetry of Sir Derek Walcott, who all reminded me of the heavy burden that manifold identities sometimes carry. Why is it I only feel English in the Caribbean, and a West Indian whilst in Britain? Why do those born in the West Indies arrive in Britain and only then discover themselves as West Indians? Why do blacks born in Britain cleave so much to the Caribbean, whilst those born in the Caribbean cleave to the ideals of ‘Britishness’? Why is it so difficult to be a black male in Britain? How does this cultural mishmash of identity have an impact on broader sociological issues? And, most importantly, what does it mean to be a black man in Britain?

The structure of the book

In order to answer these questions, this book examines the life stories and narratives of the post-Windrush generation in Britain. The book is a shift away from the habitual analysis of black youth culture towards an investigation of middle-aged black men, which until now has escaped academic scrutiny. The narratives contained in this text are foregrounded in the years respondents spent in Newham in East London, during a time when the area was ranked bottom of the available statistical indices for socioeconomics, health and education in Britain.

History is the key to understanding, and is best qualified to reward all research; therefore, Chapter 2 is concerned with constructing a historical framework by which the focal issues of this monograph can be positioned. This chapter also draws attention to the often-overlooked legacy of black presence in Britain, and highlights the pursuit of social justice that acted as a crucible for race relations during the Thatcher years. Chapter 3 introduces the focal characters within this text, and then focuses on the methodological processes undertaken to create it. Additionally it introduces the importance of issues such as black by black research and challenges assumptions such as ‘It has all been done already; we know everything there is to know about the black minority in this country’ (Phillips & Pugh, 2002:9). Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the topics of identity and masculinity respectively. They provide a conceptual insight into the lives of post-Windrush-generation men, and act as a prism through which additional factors can be examined. The attention-grabbing premise of the sexualisation of the black male is presented here, as well as a brief content analysis of film and music, and a discourse on media representations of black men.

The chapters that follow investigate experiences of black men in relation to societal institutions such as education, family configuration, criminal justice and religion. Chapter 6 explores the nature of the black family unit in modern Britain, highlighting the emergent themes gleaned from my investigation, such as domestic discipline and intergenerational conflict. Chapter 7 is concerned with education, beginning with a comparative account of education in the Caribbean and education in Britain. This chapter is predominantly sited in the 1970s and 1980s, as this was the period of compulsory education for those interviewed. Sport in school is touched upon, and the chapter concludes with the barbed issue of racism within education. Chapter 8 concentrates upon religion, opening with a condensed account of the sociology of religion and concluding by observing the manner in which postmodern religious beliefs such as Rastafari have had an impact on the collective identity of blacks in Britain. The focal point of Chapter 9 is crime. This chapter analyses issues such as criminal drift, regenerative shaming and desistance, as well as drug and alcohol use. The Conclusion (Chapter 10) sums up my key findings, significant emergent themes and recommendations for future research.

Notes

1 Training to become a London taxi driver. This lasts three to five years.

2 An annual austere work period, typically January to March, when cabbies are said to adopt frugal means of survival, such as a diet of kippers.

3 An apprenticed cabbie.

4 4 May 1979–28 November 1990.

5 Ex-Second World War troopships, which brought predominately Caribbean men, and a small number of Polish women, to Britain.

6 Five pence. Two ‘bob’ equals ten pence.

References

Banton, M. (1967) Race Relations, London: Tavistock.

Hall, S. (1973) Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Lamming, G. (1993) In the Castle of My Skin, Harlow: Longman.

Lamming, G. (1994) The Emigrants, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Phillips, E. & Pugh, D. S. (2002) How to Get a PhD, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Pryce, K. (1979) Endless Pressure, Bristol: Bristol Classical Press.

Selvon, S. (1967) Lonely Londoners, London: Penguin.

Selvon, S. (1975) Moses Ascending, London: Penguin....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: personal curiosity and research trajectory
• 2. Historical context
• 3. Research approach and methods
• 4. Black British self-concept
• 5. Being a black man
• 6. The crisis of the black family in Britain
• 7. Uneducated, educated or mis-educated?
• 8. Black British religious instruction
• 9. Criminal participation, desistance and preclusion
• 10. Conclusion
• Index