![]() ![]() The still unresolved Windrush scandal is a mark against Britain’s record. The celebrations have not been without a darker note. ![]() Many of the Windrushers themselves – and their descendants – have been buoyant this week, reflecting on their community’s successes, joys and contribution to British life. The same cannot be said of all of the coverage of this week’s 75th anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush arriving in Tilbury docks, Essex, from Jamaica, bringing more than 700 people from the Caribbean to Blighty. It doesn’t simply bash Britain after years of antiracist discourse that does only that. It has been an incorrigibly British experience.” “The experience of black British people is not only defined by racism,” he writes, “and it would be profoundly damaging to suggest so: it has also been characterised by love and tenderness and humour and friendship. ![]() The Windrush generation arrived between the late 1940s and the 1970s, while African-Britons predominantly moved here in more recent decades.Ĭrucially, says Owolade, there is no single “black” experience separate from wider national life. As Owolade points out, although the UK invested heavily in the slave trade more than two hundred years ago, slavery had no legal basis in England, nor were there Jim Crow-style laws enforcing racial segregation, as in the US. The anguish caused by slavery on American soil, followed by the gruelling and protracted insult of Jim Crow laws in the South have led to a particular set of grievances. While his thesis may sound obvious, he furnishes it with just the kind of historical detail and calm consideration the subject deserves. Let us hope that Owolade’s book marks a turn to a new style of cultural politics: one that revolves around thoughtful analysis and even-handed and temperate argument. Statue-tearing, building renaming, diversity tick-boxing rubbish has not proved fulfilling. While race and racism are both important aspects of modern Britain, the exaggerations and endless Britain-bashing of recent years has wearied us. We’re seeing people’s patience run out with narcissistic activism in general, from extreme trans demands to the ludicrous antics of Just Stop Oil. What has changed? My money is on plain old fatigue and frustration with the puerile and manipulative moaning we’ve been bombarded with over the last few years. Everyone would have been cowering behind their copies of Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I am No Longer Talking To White People About Race and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Owolade’s book has been praised to the skies by many critics and commentators, and sports a dust jacket stuffed with hearty endorsements from the famous.Ī few years ago, in the tense atmosphere following George Floyd’s murder, such a raucous and enthusiastic reception for a book like this, by people of all skin colours, would have been unimaginable. ![]() It serves only to harm black British people, reducing them to the colour of their skin. Talk of white privilege, supremacy and systemic racism is wide of the mark in Blighty. While black British people have suffered discrimination, says Owolade, they do not share the grisly American history of racism and violence. The 26-year-old Nigerian-British writer’s new tome argues that the furious discord and racial theories spawned by the American Black Lives Matter movement are not appropriate for Britain. They were there to celebrate the launch of This Is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter by Tomiwa Owolade. On Thursday night, the great and the good of the publishing world – and dozens of assorted 20-somethings sporting the look of the young and literary – crowded into Daunt Books, in Holland Park. ![]()
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