Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(4)
The image of the slave ship Brooks, first published in 1788 by abolitionist William Elford, depicted typical conditions.1 It shows a well-packed slave ship: bodies are lined up one by one, horizontally in four rows (with three short extra rows at the back of the ship), illustrating the callous efficiency used to transport a cargo of African people. The Brooks was owned by a Liverpudlian merchant named Joseph Brooks.
But slavery wasn’t just happening in Liverpool. Bristol, too, had a slave port, as well as Lancaster, Exeter, Plymouth, Bridport, Chester, Lancashire’s Poulton-le-Fylde and, of course, London.2 Although enslaved African people moved through British shores regularly, the plantations they toiled on were not in Britain, but rather in Britain’s colonies. The majority were in the Caribbean, so, unlike the situation in America, most British people saw the money without the blood. Some British people owned plantations that ran almost entirely on slave labour. Others bought just a handful of plantation slaves, with the intention of getting a return on their investment. Many Scottish men went to work as slave drivers in Jamaica, and some brought their slaves with them when they moved back to Britain. Slaves, like any other personal property, could be inherited, and many Brits lived comfortably off the toil of enslaved black people without being directly involved in the transaction.
The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was founded in London in 1787, was the idea of civil servant Granville Sharp and campaigner Thomas Clarkson. Sharp and Clarkson formed the society with ten other men, most of whom were Quakers. They campaigned for forty-seven years, generating broad-based support and attracting high-profile leadership from Members of Parliament – the most famous being abolitionist William Wilberforce. The public pressure of the campaign was successful, and an Act of Parliament declared slavery abolished in the British Empire in 1833. But the recipients of the compensation for the dissolution of a significant money-making industry were not those who had been enslaved. Instead it was the 46,000 British slave-owning citizens who received cheques for their financial losses.3 Such one-sided compensation seemed to be the logical conclusion for a country that had traded in human flesh.
Despite abolition, an Act of Parliament was not going to change the perception overnight of enslaved African people from quasi-animal to human. Less than two hundred years later, that damage is still to be undone.
After university, I was hungry for more information. I wanted to know about black people in Britain, post-slavery. However, this information was not easily accessible. This was history only available to people who truly cared, only knowable through a hefty amount of self-directed study. So I actively sought it out, and I began by looking into Black History Month.
The existence of Black History Month in the UK is relatively recent. It wasn’t until 1987 that local authorities in London began putting on events to celebrate black contributions to Britain. Linda Bellos was born in London to a Nigerian father and a white British mother, and it was under her leadership that a British Black History Month came to exist. At the time, she was leader of south London’s Lambeth Council and chair of the London Strategic Policy Unit (part of the now defunct Greater London Council). The idea for Black History Month was put to her by Ansel Wong, chief officer of the Strategic Policy Unit’s race equality division. ‘I said yes, let’s do it,’ she explained to me from her home in Norwich.
‘I thought Black History Month was a great idea. What I wasn’t going to do was make it like the American one, because we have a different history . . . There’s so many people who have no idea – and I’m talking about white people – no idea about the history of racism. They don’t know why we’re in this country.’
Ansel organised the first Black History Month, and Linda hosted the event. It was a London-wide affair. The decision to hold it in October was largely logistical, the United States have held their Black History Month in February since it began in 1970. ‘Our guest of honour was Sally Mugabe,’ Linda explained. ‘It was insufficient time to invite [her]. If we’d done it two weeks [later], then we wouldn’t have got the people we needed.
‘We were more inclusive,’ she added. ‘Black was defined in its political terms. African and Asian.4 We only ran it for two years, because Thatcher was cutting all our budgets. It would have been an indulgence.’
After two years of central funding and leadership from the London Strategic Policy Unit dried up, Black History Month continued in Britain, albeit sporadically. Today, Black History Month is firmly established in Britain, and has been running for thirty years. It tends to consist of exhibitions of work from artists from the African diaspora, panel events debating race, and softer cultural celebrations, like fashion shows and food festivals. Speaking to Linda, it felt like she was sceptical of the values of current-day Black History Month activities. When I asked her why she wanted Black History Month in Britain, she said it was to ‘celebrate the contribution that black people had made in the United Kingdom. It wasn’t about hair . . . it was history month, not culture month. There had been a history, a history that I had been aware of, from my own father’s experience.’
The history of blackness in Britain has been a piecemeal one. For an embarrassingly long time, I didn’t even realise that black people had been slaves in Britain. There was a received wisdom that all black and brown people in the UK were recent immigrants, with little discussion of the history of colonialism, or of why people from Africa and Asia came to settle in Britain. I knew vaguely of the Windrush Generation, the 492 Caribbeans who travelled to Britain by boat in 1948. This was because they were the older relatives of people I knew at school. There was no ‘black presence in Britain’ presentation that didn’t include the Windrush. But most of my knowledge of black history was American history. This was an inadequate education in a country where increasing generations of black and brown people continue to consider themselves British (including me). I had been denied a context, an ability to understand myself. I needed to know why, when people waved Union Jacks and shouted ‘we want our country back’, it felt like the chant was aimed at people like me. What history had I inherited that left me an alien in my place of birth?