New Ethnicities And Urban Culture

Social Identity And Racism In The Lives Of Young People

Les Back

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781857282528
• eBook ISBN: 9781351674652
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Engaging exploration of race and youth culture which examines the development of new identities, ethnicities and forms of racism. This text analyzes the relationship between racism, community and adolescent social identities in the African and South Asian diasporas.; This book is intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses in race and ethnicity, urban sociology, cultural studies and social anthropology. It will also have some appeal within social policy and social work.

CHAPTER 1
The metropolitan paradox

As we move towards the end of the twentieth century, ideas about nationhood, culture and identity are increasingly seen either as in a state of attrition and fragmentation or as being reified through a language of authenticity and cultural absolutism. The choice is presented pointedly as one between viewing cultures as rooted and fixed and a vision of cultural processes as in a constant state of flux producing creative and promiscuous routeways of identification. What is omitted in the deafening row over “essentialism” versus “anti-essentialism” is the complex interplay between these two impulses at the everyday level and how forms of social exclusion and inclusion work through notions of belonging and entitlement in particular times and places. Within Europe’s major conurbations, complex and exhilarating forms of transcultural production exist simultaneously with the most extreme forms of violence and racism. Urban vernacular cultures possess incommensurable political impulses that allow racism and transculturalism to be simultaneously proximate and symptomatic of what it means to grow up in post-imperial cities (Bhabha 1994). This metropolitan paradox cannot be comprehended within the binary “either/or” logic of the current debate over culture and essentialism. The central argument of this book is that multiply inflected forms of social identity are being expressed within cities such as London but these are equally being met by multiply accented forms of popular racism that sometimes operate inside urban multiculture and at other times prey on these fragile forms of dialogue from outside.

If we are to think again about the vexed question of multiculturalism it is vital to avoid any slippage into the false comfort of simple cultural archetypes that reify “minority” and “host” cultures respectively. Imperialism and the racist discourses that have flourished in its wake insist on what Roland Barthes (1973) called the “simplicity of essences”. However, cultural processes themselves confound the idea that cultures exist as hermetically sealed absolute unities. Urban cultures, in particular, are highly promiscuous in their endeavour constantly to re-make and invent traditions in the present. Edward Said attempts to name this process by insisting that one must view the politics of culture within “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” (Said 1993). The key question thus becomes how to render explicit the multiple influences that resonate within metropolitan contexts such as London, Amsterdam, Paris, Hamburg and Berlin.

The politics of multiculturalism is a matter not of somehow simultaneously understanding and tolerating “foreign cultures” but of facing an imperial history that has brought people from around the globe into intense and sometimes terrible contact. In this sense the history of Europe is profoundly multicultural (Gilroy 1993a). It is for this reason that throughout this text I have taken the hyphen out of this formulation in order to stress the polyglot and intensely pluralized quality of urban multiculture. Yet European racism has equally insisted that the distinction of the European be established and maintained in the face of the barbarism and inferiority of the native, the immigrant or the ethnic minority. The relationship between racism and the construction of identities is not simply a matter of making non-Europeans inferior within some pseudo-biological logic. One of the cultural contradictions of racism is that the Other can be seen as an object of desire, simultaneously a “noble savage” and a “violent avenger” (Hall 1988). This syndrome is signalled by Franz Fanon, who argued with great power that the European romance with the difference was equally as devastating as the venom of racial hatred to subaltern peoples. A multiculturalism that simply celebrates the Other – albeit with liberal intentions – runs perilously close to this syndrome. Crude models of “the traditional” or primordial ethnic definitions are of little use when applied to the ambiguous social ground inhabited by multi-ethnic communities of young people in metropolitan settings. The social semantics of race, nationhood and belonging have undergone important transformations at the local level. It is the nature of these transformations that the book attempts to explain.

“England, half English”: youth, racism and cultural syncretism

Racism is a notoriously difficult concept to define. Early writers concentrated on criticizing the legitimacy of the “idea of race” (Banton 1970) or they accepted the existence of “races” and focused on the way in which they were constructed in congenitally superior/inferior relationships (Benedict 1983). I will refer to racism as an ideology that defines social collectivities in terms of “natural” and immutable biological differences. These are invested with negative connotations of cultural difference and inferiority, whereby the presence of other “races” can be correlated with the economic and social health of either a specific region or the nation as a whole (Miles 1989). Racism is defined within particular historical and social contexts where past racial ideology can be used alongside new elements (Fanon 1967, Hall 1980); thus there is no one monolithic racism but numerous historically situated racisms.

During the 1980s Conservative ideologues woke up to the political necessity of reconstructing a unified British culture. This resulted in a British or English nativism extolled by such New Right commentators as Ray Honeyford (1989) and enshrined within the 1988 Educational Reform Act. Here culture, rather than pigment, became the key referent. The texture of British identity, stripped of its Celtic and regional components, is dominated by a cultural aesthetic of “Enghshness”. At the beginning of the new decade, the Conservative Member of Parliament Norman Tebbit appeared on the BBC’s programme Newsnight and warned that “Many youngsters leave school totally confused about their origins and their culture”. It is this shift that has prompted commentators to identify a new period in the history of English racism. The “new racism”, or what Fanon (1967) referred to as “cultural racism”, has its origins in the social and political crisis afflicting Britain (Hall 1978, Barker 1981, Gilroy 1990). Its focus is the defence of the mythical “British/English way of life” in the face of attack from enemies outside (“Argies”, “Frogs”, “Krauts”, “Iraqis”) and within (“black communities”, “Muslim fundamentalists”).

Paul Gilroy points to an alarming consequence of new racism where blackness and Englishness are reproduced as mutually exclusive categories (Gilroy 1987: 55–6; see also Wallman 1978a: 210–12). This is neatly captured in the cultural quotation used in the title of his influential book There ain’t no black in the Union Jack, which referred to a racist slogan used during the 1970s and 1980s. Gilroy alludes to a new kind of cultural politics that defies the new racism and develops a political and cultural aesthetic that is both black and English. Stuart Hall, returning to the flag metaphor, refers to a shift in his own thinking:

Fifteen years ago we didn’t care, or at least I didn’t care, whether there was any black in the Union Jack. Now not only do we care but we must. (Hall 1988: 30)

This is not simply a matter of building a series of cultural extensions on to the edifice of Britishness. Rather it involves an excavation of the diversity of traces found within British social formation so that the colours of the union flag develop a wholly different corona. The anti-road movements of the 1990s have further carnivalized the political semantics of the flag in the production of the vibrantly multicoloured “Union Jill”. The forms of cultural politics that are practised through the art of subversion and recovery point to the “opening up of a self-conscious post-colonial space in which the affirmation of difference points forward to a more pluralistic conception of nationality and perhaps beyond that to its transcendence” (Gilroy 1993b: 62). In the encounter between black young people and their white inner-city peers, “Black culture has become a class culture … as two generations of whites have appropriated it, discovered its seductive forms of meaning for their own” (Gilroy 1990: 273). Young whites in this situation may have more in common with R. Kelly¹ than John Bull, with the result that it is impossible to speak of black culture in Britain separately from the culture of Britain as a whole (Jeater 1992). Beyond this it is impossible to speak of British culture without understanding these “overlapping territories”.The perspective that I develop with this book recognizes the presence of new, and indeed old, racisms, but equally it is concerned with exploring the degree to which the emergent “new ethnicities” are reworking the terms of racial inclusion and exclusion.

It is important to counter the idea that socio-cultural groups – including nations – are essentially unchanging and atavistic entities. This phenomenon, which Paul Gilroy (1987: 59) appropriately calls “ethnic absolutism”, ossifies the complex and changing nature of social and cultural life in Britain. He writes:

The absolutist view of black and white cultures, as fixed, mutually impermeable expressions of racial and national identity, is a ubiquitous theme in racial “common sense”, but it is far from secure. (Gilroy 1987: 61)

In addition to Gilroy’s work there is emerging a small but significant literature that documents the cultural creativity of young people who reside in multiracial areas (Hewitt 1986, Jones 1988, Rampton 1989). The detail of this process promises to transform the way we understand the politics of “race” and the paradigms that have been utilized to analyze multiracial contexts within British cities. Consequently, it is important, on the one hand, to view cultural meanings as in a constant state of negotiation and evolution, and, on the other, to be sensitive to the political, historical and ideological context in which this process takes place. The fundamental starting point of this analysis is that it is impossible to divide the British social formation into neat cultural compartments.

The earliest attempts to discuss negotiations taking place between black and white young people in British cities are found in the work of Dick Hebdige and Ian Chambers (Chambers 1976; Hebdige 1974a, b, 1979, 1981, 1983). Chambers saw that black cultural forms provided a resource on which white youth could draw, thus undercutting and contesting the dominant cultural hegemony (Chambers 1976: 160). A more developed statement on black/white dialogues is provided by Hebdige’s account of “style”. He suggests that within the development of youth styles it is possible to see a “phantom history of race relations”:

The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep-structural forms which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community. It is on the plane of aesthetics: in dress, dance, music, in the whole rhetoric of style that we find the dialogue between black and white most subtly and comprehensively recorded, albeit in code. (Hebdige 1979: 44–5)

Here Hebdige claims that we can view a dialogue of emulation and accommodation. We see a history of “England, half English” encoded within these spectacular youth styles. As Hebdige points out, the impact of black culture on white young people was not uniformly progressive. For example, skinhead style incorporated Jamaican forms of music (such as ska and bluebeat), yet at the same time it also proclaimed white power and white pride. In this case, like a photographic negative, black culture was an emblem of white chauvinism (Mercer 1987, 1994). However, there are problems with Hebdige’s provocative and programmatic analysis.

Hebdige, true to his post-structuralist method, tends to read off meanings from style formations without paying any attention to the interactional components of racial dialogue at the level of everyday experience. Writers working within the cultural studies paradigm have for the most part not attempted to develop detailed ethnographic recordings of youth styles but have relied predominantly on textual reconstruction. A notable exception here is the work of Paul Willis (1977, 1978), who is perhaps the most rigorous ethnographer to emerge from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. However, his work does not deal in any systematic way with working-class racism (Marcus 1986). Hebdige views the interaction between black and white youth in urban contexts as “ghostly” or “encoded”, without addressing lived manifestations of the process of conflict and accommodation. Although Hebdige’s work serves as a useful platform, there is a need to look at these dialogues within specific ethnographic contexts (Jones 1986: 89).²

Jones (1988) develops this approach in his analysis of white experiences of black youth culture. In his study of a section of Birmingham’s youth he shows how reggae music provides a site where dialogues between black and white people can occur. He reports:

They are visible everywhere in a whole range of cross racial affiliations and shared leisure spaces; on the streets, around the games machines, in the local chip shop, in the playgrounds and parks, the dances and blues, right through the mixed rock and reggae groups for which the area has become renowned. (Jones 1988: xiv)

Here, the national chauvinism so prevalent in Britain during the 1980s, he argued, is simply redundant. Although one should be careful about viewing these dialogues through the lens of a Utopian romanticism, the fact that such phenomena existed at all pointed to the emergence of a youthful social sphere in which racism – however fleetingly – could be organized out of social life.

Another social location where exchanges take place between black and white young people is in language use (Hewitt 1982, 1986, 1988b). There exists a growing literature on the development of a specific British Creole that is distinct from the Creole spoken by first-generation Afro-Caribbean migrants (Sutcliffe 1982, Sebba 1983a, b, 1986, Sebba & Wooton 1984, Wong 1986). But by far the most comprehensive account is Hewitt’s (1986) book White talk, black talk – an analysis of two contrasting London neighbourhoods, one ethnically mixed and the other predominantly white. He points out the different factors acting to censure Creole usage amongst the youthful black population. Hewitt interprets London Creole as a prestige form of speech and locates it within anti-racist struggle and a reaction to the “mundane face of racial discrimination” (Hewitt 1988b). He shows that in the multi-ethnic neighbourhood Creole usage is also adopted by white young people. This takes two forms: first, ethnically unmarked use of the Creole lexicon, and, secondly, fully marked Creole usage. In situations where friendship and trust are developed, whites may use this form of speech in the company of black peers. However, there is a constant monitoring of this usage and limitations are placed on what will be tolerated by black friends.

Hewitt’s analysis is refined and methodologically grounded in recording observed behaviour. The result is a compelling analysis that is located in a particular historical and ethnographic context. However, there are some limitations in his discussion. He focuses exclusively on interactions between black and white youth, to the exclusion of other minority groups in the area. The difficulty with such an approach lies in the focus on a set of interactions, which is then used as an indicator of levels of adolescent racism. Kelly (1987) has shown that the concentration on black-white relations can give “interactional politics” a false significance. As I will show, dialogue between Afro-Caribbean and white working-class youth may have little or no impact on the use of racist discourses that are applied by whites to other minorities.³

I want to emphasize the importance of locating this analysis in specific social contexts. There is a need to investigate the practices that emerge within adolescent communities that give meaning to “race”. I am suggesting something more than the term “culture contact” can adequately capture (Hewitt 1988b, 1991). Rather, what is needed is an approach that looks at urban multiculture in ethnically and racially plural contexts and takes on board the dialogue, transmission and hybridization of ethnicities (Bhachu 1991, Rampton 1987, Wulff 1988). This approach seeks to report sensitively the processes whereby British youth of various lineages work out and give meaning to their heritage in the context of daily experience. Also, it is vital to see how ethnicities are made through associations, friendships and cross affiliations.⁴ The picture that is already beginning to emerge (Hewitt 1986, Rampton 1987, Jones 1988, Røgilds 1991) is infinitely more complex than the polemical black-white race relations model, and its complexity constitutes a new challenge for those interested in understanding the truly multicultural and multi-racist character of Britain’s youth.

Imperial London in a post-colonial era

The history of the capital is integrally connected to imperial expansion and trade. At its height during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries London emerged as “a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth” (Joseph Addision quoted in Porter 1994). Peter Linebaugh comments in his seminal study of eighteenth-century London society:

The Thames was the jugular vein of the British Empire. London, the largest city in the western hemisphere, containing by 1800 nearly a million souls, was both the capital of England and the centre of the empire that embraced the workshops of Bengal, the plantations of the Caribbean, the “factories” of West Africa and the forests of North America … Through these waters passed the wealth of the Empire. (Linebaugh 1991: 409–10)

Along with the flow of commodities came migrations of people from various hinterlands: Jews came to London from Poland and Germany and French Huguenots came fleeing religious persecution. It is also little known that from the middle of the eighteenth century there were 5, 000–10, 000 Africans living in London; some of them were seamen but in large part they were transported to Britain as servants and chattel (Fryer 1984). London provided the financial centre from which Britain’s slave trade was financed and it was developed economically from the fruits of slavery. From the late eighteenth century, London’s population, and in particular its working classes, may be likened to a popular drink of the time called “All Nations”: this intoxicating mixture sold in “dram shops” was made up of the dregs of different spirits (Linebaugh 1991: 358).

The great trading companies of the imperial era established them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The metropolitan paradox
• Part I Racism, community and youth culture
• Part II Transculturalism and the politics of dialogue
• Part III Black music, youth culture and syncretism
• Appendix 1: The ethnographic sample
• Appendix 2: 1981 and 1991 census data and ethno-demographic structure
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index