Part 2 of a Two-Part Post

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When I have had discussions with students and even academics about empire or the violence of the English state, it always interests me to hear the excuses as to why white people may have less of a reason to turn down a British Empire medal when it comes to the Queen’s Honours. There’s this idea that the violence of the British Empire only impacted those who were visibly not white. Whilst you cannot necessarily alot a skin colour to Ireland, it is a stereotypical white place, and hasn’t had Black populations for a long time (Dabiri, 2019). Ireland was also a testing ground for British colonialism. There is a very good reason why so many of my Irish colleagues are anti-imperialist. It’s almost as if, in discourses about not only the British Empire but the history of the English monarchy in relation to its neighbours (Scotland and Wales too), there is a historical amnesia, including the history in the title of the ‘ Prince of Wales’ dating back to the twelfth century.

In 2017 actor Michael Sheen quietly gave up his OBE so he could openly criticise the Royal Family without being labelled a hypocrite. Before the twelfth century, the title ‘Prince of Wales’ was held by native Welsh princes. Edward I, an English king, gave his son, Edward, the title, the first English prince of Wales in 1301. Sheen elected to give up his OBE after doing research for his 2017 Raymond Williams lecture. Learning about his native Welsh history, he saw he could not both do this lecture and hold on to his medal. In conversation with Owen Jones, Sheen talks about how in 2018 there was push to rename the second Severn Crossing the ‘Prince of Wales Bridge’, later recieving a petition against it garnering over 30,000 signatures. History holds power and the reason why Edward made his son Prince of Wales was to help quash the Welsh ‘rebellion.’

The reasons why some reject Honours are in many cases much ado with the British Empire but the violence committed by the Royal Family to its neighbours far predates our contemporary views of what defined the colonial project. Robert van Krieken (2011) states that looking at Irish history “makes it possible to see the extent to which the English conception of ‘the savage’ and indeed of the whole colonial project was anchored in the perception of the Irish and ‘Irishness’.” This dates back to the twelfth century and English encounters with the Irish, Welsh and Scots “constituted an important watershed in the development of what both civilization and barbarianism were…” So concepts that were donned on Black and Brown people during colonialism through racist science, actually originated with the othering of those also racialised as white.

In November 2020, activist Gina Martin declined an OBE concerned about its ties to oppression and the British Empire. She was being honoured for her activist work, namely the anti-upskirting campaign that lead to the construction of the Voyerusim (Offences) Act 2019. Over the years, many have declined honours, from Ken Loach and Nigella Lawson to Benjamin Zephaniah and Howard Gayle. Today, when ethnic minorities more generally accept or decline these awards, it is deeply politicised. In accepting one, you will be judged as ‘selling out’ to the establishment and in declining one, there is a possible interpretation of you being ‘too angry’ or ‘political’, and the worst of all ‘ungrateful’ to the country you live in. And the connotations of gratefulness in the context of Black people, Brown people and immigrants is a story also worth telling.

A good portion of the people I would call role models (to varying degrees) have them, from some of my favourite actors to empire historians, filmmakers and activists. In the New Year, Lewis Hamilton is set to add a knighthood to his MBE. Both my grandfather and Lewis Hamitlon’s grandfather grew up on the same hill in Grenada. As children, they would race carts down the hill together. Seeing Lewis Hamilton come out for the Black lives matter movement as he did during the summer was a positive. He already had an MBE at that point. However, now in seemingly accepting a knighthood as well for contributions to sport, I am asking more quesitons. Perhaps he’s virtue signalling off the back of this new pro-Black consciousness. In his knighthood, I am reminded of the stories of how Leapers’ Hill in Grenada gained its name… how the First People jumped from the hills to their deaths to avoid capture and/or enslavement. Or that’s the European version… seemingly if we knew the real details, this would be a gross understatement of what actually happened!

The Honours list raises more concerns for me about the face of Black activism in Britain, very much one that is establishment. Despite the success of Small Axe, Steve McQueen like Lewis, has two honours, a knighthood and a CBE. During the summer, we saw David Olusoga OBE deliver a brilliant MacTaggart lecture on race and representation in the media, and a video on white privilege by John Amaechi OBE went viral. I have also seen people awarded honours for contributions to equality, diversity and inclusion… oxymoron much? In Marcus Rashford, I see someone that was a victim of his MBE, with possible pressure from his family to accept at such a young age. Would he have had to campaign for free school meal vouchers for children, had it not been for the Government’s 19th century policies and ideologies? The answers I get to my dislike of the Honours system is that it allows change from within. But I wonder, how can you put a fire out from inside the house?

In the face of Black activism and those speaking out on television, there is a large whiff of Black exceptionalism and unsaid thoughts of them being “some of the good ones”… the voices of the Black working-class are lost, and a few Guardian articles isn’t enough.

The fact ‘British Empire’ is also in the title is another problem, linked to the idea that the Royal Family hand out these medals based on recommendations from Government. The most ironic one of late being Marcus Rashford, it almost feels like the powers that be had the last laugh. In discussions about the Honours system and change from within, I would ask you to think about Audre Lorde’s ideas about power as “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” The tools of colonisers were not designed to liberate the colonised; Whiteness cannot be used to dismantle White supremacy; “this fact is only threatening to [those] who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” (Lorde, continued). There is an African proverb that states “the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

Those three letters after your name are one problem, historical amnesia is another; however, the biggest one of all is how activists and community campaigners still take emblems to empire undermining the integrity of all activist movements. Not every activist/campaigner with Honours feels disowned by their community, but we need to be careful in what local leaders accept from the local/national ivory towers, so those working to tackle inequalities in our communities do not end up looking like hypocrites.

Watching last night’s finale to Steve McQueen’s Small Axe took me back to when I was at school. Unknown to many, I was a student that was considered Special Educational Needs [SEN]. Today, as a Black Caribbean SEN boy I would be 168 times more likely than my white counterpart to be excluded (Crenna-Jennings, 2017). I had extra classes and was in the minds of the white education system “educationally subnormal” [ESN]. How my experience of school differs to a good many Black students in this country though, in that I was at private school. Being the only Black student in the school to then need extra classes to keep up has a specific set of connotations. Looking back on this part of my personal history now, shows me that did I really need extra classes, or does education still not know how to treat students as individals? Moreover, is the system not designed for such an endeavour? The added invisible disability of dyspraxia also brought its own challenges. So, last night, I know if I was a boy in the 1970s, I would have been put in an ESN. No doubt about it.

McQueen’s picture has also cast my mind back to earlier on in the summer, when the cancelling of A-Level and GCSE examinations saw a resurgence of discussion about the embedded racism in the education system… when Race Equality specialist Sofia Akel wrote “predicted grades are a lottery of privilege where Black students almost always lose.” Unlike me, many Black students in this country, just like Kingsley go / went through the state system, just like my parents did during the 1980s. And I know my grandparents, also from Grenada, would remember the publication of Grenadian politician Bernard Coard’s seminal pamphlet How the West Indian Child is made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System (1971).

Those schools no longer exist as those schools, they’re simply called “Pupil Referral Units”, or the same students that would be put into an ESN are today now excluded, Black Caribbeans disproportionately (Department of Education), along with Irish Traveller and Roma students, respectively… however, stats do not give you context.

Roma and Irish Traveller communities in Wales, for example, do not typically engage in the mainstream school system to the same levels as other ethnic groups (Fensham-Smith, 2014) and in the UK at large, we are some way from removing those barriers to this community (Hamilton, 2017). So, to see the data to also include this community despite so few of them in mainstream education, is a damning indictment as a whole. However, exclusion/isolation data for Black Caribbeans is also shocking and it has precedent going back 50 years.

Growing up, my mother and godmother started the Garvey Saturday School (2010) to combat the barriers facing Black Caribbean students in Northamptonshire. Amongst Caribbean communities, especially women in my experience, education is thought of as vital part of life, much alike breathing. Especially being around my mother’s friends, my aunties, grandmothers, women cousins… the passion about education was at the centre of Caribbean matriarchs and I hold fond memories of them telling me to study. But above that, learn, and to find something I was passionate about. Akel goes on to discuss the long-held idea that Black people must “work twice as hard to get half as far, an adage that has very real implications in 21st century UK schooling.”

At the higher end of the educational chain at universities; as a sabbatical officer it was evident to see the number of Black students being pulled through disciplinary panels in both housing misdemeanors but also assessment offenses (academic misconduct). What were then called ESNs in the school system are now Pupil Referral Units that set up Black students for jail, whilst simultaneously those university disciplinary panels feeling a lot like what I believe a police custody interrogation to feel like. Schools set students up for prison, especially Black students, and higher education is simply another violent institution should that student avoid the jail cell schools set them up for. And the hegemonic processes at schools (and universities) “are based in assumption about what embodied discipline looks like” (Graham, 2019: 132).

By showing the trajectory that Black students go, from the moment they enter the education system, private included (it just has differences), we are able to see the nature of the beast of racism in the education sector to the point that my colleague Liz Pemberton AKA The Black Nursery Manager runs an establishment in Birmingham that prides itself around issues of race and culture, very much catering for Afro-Caribbean children. You would think there isn’t racism in Early Years, right? Wrong. Liz has been doing some sterling work and I recommend you all follow her on Instagram and LinkedIn, and it truly shows to critique racism in education we also need to look at Early Years.

Presented by David Harewood, in 2017, the BBC aired the documentary Will Britain Ever Have a Black Prime Minister? (above). It explored the chances of a Black British child progressing through life via the education system, from the biased marking of in-school test scores to university chances and independently-marked GCSEs (where markers don’t know the student’s ethnicity). This was backed by research from Professor Simon Burgess that shows teachers that know their students, have a clear bias (not that unconscious). The finale to Steve McQueen’s Small Axe makes me think to education and COVID and looking at the impact that predicted grades have on Black students in a system that is already rigged against them, even outside of the grades part.

Even after Black students slog through school fighting off all numbers of barriers, they then come to the ivory towers of academia and UCAS, very much following the tradition of structural racism entrenched in the education system, as Black students are also twenty-two times more likely to face investigation by UCAS’ verification services compared to their white counterparts (Busby, 2018). Despite slogging through Britain’s education system as I have, my struggle was less so without the added layer of class. Even in my experience, at that time, I drew the golden ticket of privilege of private education where my only challenge was racism. Classism was there, not in the barriers to access but more the prejudice because I came from that background.

Bernard Coard’s seminal pamphlet is as relevant now as it was in 1971; the ESNs have changed their face but Black students continue to be failed by the education system at every level, from Early Years and Primary, to Secondary, Further Education [FE] and universities, don’t even get me started on the experiences of Black educators in schools and higher education… that’s for another blog for another Monday. Indeed!

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Referencing

Frensham-Smith, Amber (2014) Gypsy and Traveller Education: Engaging Families – A Research Report. Cardiff: Welsh Government. Available: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/21443/1/141125-gypsy-traveller-education-engaging-families-en.pdf

Graham, Karen (2019) The British School-to-Prison Pipeline. In: Andrews, K and Palmer, Lisa Amanda. Blackness in Britain. London: Routledge. pp.130-142.

Hamilton, Paula (2017) Engaging Gypsy and Traveller pupils in secondary education in Wales: tensions and dilemmas of addressing difference. International Studies in Sociology of Education. 27(1). pp. 4-22. Available: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09620214.2017.1377100?needAccess=true

As vaccines are now being rolled out across the UK, Black people are questioning not only whether they should take it, but also the intergity of the vaccine. Does it have their welfare at heart? Whilst vaccines historically have done a lot of good for communities in battling against disease, it cannot be forgotten that science and medical trials under the umbrella of “colonial medicine” do not have a flattering past in the context of African diasporic peoples. However, we also know that for the vaccine to have maximum impact Black and Brown communities need to take part as well. We are the global majority and the vaccine will essentially fail without us. Coronavirus disproportionately impacts Black Africans and Caribbeans but also South Asians. Without everyone’s participation, there could come a day when people are laying blame for the continuation of Coronavirus in the UK on ethnic minority groups that don’t trust it.

Despite being tagged to a YouTube video (urgh), an ill-thoughtout tweet that went viral by Small Axe star Letitia Wright asked questions about the integrity of a vaccine, only for her to later delete the tweet/her account when the torrents of abuse came.

The disproportionate outcomes with the Coronavirus show Black people in the UK and the United States as part of the groups most likely to die from issues relating to the disease. In Britain, a Channel 4 documentary entitled Is COVID Racist? shows that it’s not the disease as a singular entity that is killing us off at a disproportionate rate, but entrenched inequality, including poverty and structural racism. The first ten NHS staff to die from COVID-related afflictions were from a Black, Brown or ethnic minority background. A 100% death rate is unheard of and now two thirds of NHS deaths from the virus are from a Black, Brown or ethnic minority background.

By itself, Coronavirus is not racist but the environmental factors that plague Black and Brown people are, which then adds to the biological weathering: from nearly 3 in 5 ethnic minority UK households in poverty, to being stopped and searched on the way to work, these are the sorts of things that consistently add to the biological weathering.

When we look at the history of science in the West, in the context of the Africann diaspora it is not pleasant reading. Surveys done in both the United States and England show a mistrust in this vaccine with Black and Brown groups, whilst white people seem more likely to get the vaccine at large. With specifically Black communities, why they are less likely to get the vaccine could be a whole number of factors: from the history of experimentation on Black people throughout the colonial era to how Black people have been treated during the pandemic and lockdowns by society as a whole. Really, to think (all) institutions have your best interest at heart comes with degrees of privilege. In this case, one could conclude, a white privilege.

Growing up as I have, around Caribbeans who have a very real experience of white supremacy on those islands, but also when they came to this country as immigrants, it’s not really surprising to see vaccine scepticism. Caribbean interraction with white public bodies has rarely been positive. But vaccines have been one of the most effective things to help communities in the last century. However, there have been mistakes; and for Black communities, there have been outright acts of violence committed against us in the name of “science.” Despite a good safety record, there is a history of untold untaught horrors committed against Black people in the name of science and “public good.” It would do us well to not lump their scepticism of vaccinations with the anti-vaxxers that get their info from YouTube hacks. Black people asking questions about vaccines can be viewed as a Black lives matter issue, since there is a legacy of poor medical treatment and dubious practices.

To understand the roots of why there are activist movements to make Black lives matter, we need to understand the racial pseudoscience that underpinned racist colonial ideology. Even prior to colonialism as we know it, contempt for Black dignity is beyond reasonable doubt. Bristol University professor Olivette Otele writes about how European fourteenth century medical scholars drew on Aristotle’s ideas about blood and heat, arriving at the conclusion “that the milk of black women had more nutrients … the body heat of dark and dusky women rendered their milk more digestible and therefore better quality for the child” (2020: 28).

However, the thinker that has done untold damage to how Africans are seen was historian Edward Long, a slaveowner and the son of a slaveowner, with his ideas about Black people and Africa widely accepted as scientific fact in his day, even though he was not even a scientist. His book The History of Jamaica donned the African continent as “the parent of everything that is monstrous in nature” (p383) with many sections denouncing Blackness and Africanness as inferior and less than human. The fact he spent twelve years in the Caribbean gave the audiences of the 18th century some “certainty” he was credible. Echoes of his work can be seen in novels that came after him by writers, including Joseph Conrad, H.G Wells and Bram Stoker. Poisonous ‘race science’ was also perpetuated by medical professionals. In the late 1700s, an English physician by the name of Charles White (1799) provided empirical science for the hierachies of race, claiming Black people had a seperate origin to white people, namely Black people came from primates and white people did not.

In Black and British, Professor David Olusoga says that the first user of Victorian “new racism” (2017: 349) was an essayist and critic called Thomas Carlyle. In 1849, he pens an essay called ‘The Negro Problem’.

See this extract:

“…till the European white man first saw them, some three short centuries ago, those islands had produced mere jungle, savagery, poison reptiles and swamp malaria till the white European first saw them, they were, as if not yet created; their noble elements of cinnamon — sugar, coffee, pepper, black and gray, lying all asleep, waiting the white Enchanter, who should say to them, awake!” (Carlyle, 1849)

Another thinker in this field was French novelist Arthur de Gobineau (1853), writing “… the Polynesian negroes, the Samoyedes and others in the far north, and the majority of the African races, have never been able to shake themselves free from their impotence.”

According to Emma Dabiri (2019), he was famous for his views on Aryanism and the concept that Black people were privileged for being allowed to exist on the lowest rungs of the racial order. Additionally, he was an aristocrat most famous for helping to legitamise racism through the use of scientific theory and “racial demography”, moreover, developing the theory of the Aryan master race.

The ideas perpetuated by these academics, medical experts and so forth underpinned colonialism and enslavement. It put Black life at the bottom of the pile. We are still living with this legacy today… from overpolicing Black communities, to low expectations of Black students (Busby, 2018). This is what allowed J. Marion Simms to experiment on enslaved Black women in pursuit of what today is called gynaecology, with his unethical torturous practices. Yet, since there were intellectual justifications made by academics prior, these acts could be carried out without a thought. In the eyes of the law and in public consciousness, Black people were subhuman in colony and metropole.

The case of Henrietta Lacks and her family in the United States is another example of contempt for Black life; where her cells were taken from her before she died. They were used to study diseases without her permission and shared around the world. Moreover, in the years of French colonialism in Africa, what about the horrific experimentations carried out on Black African people? There is a precedent behind current mistrust.

African diasporic vaccine scepticism may be inspired by the trend set by history but it also may have something to do with the present, where Black people continue to be treated with contempt by healthcare and medical services. Disproportionate deaths from Coronavirus is just one example. In the UK, Black people are four times more likely to be detained under The Mental Health Act (DoH, 2019/20) and Black women are five times more likely to die from childbirth or related complications (MBRRACE UK, 2019). Additionally, on the African continent itself, there has been discussion around concerns about a number of clinical trials such as the malaria trial by World Health Organization [WHO]. Furthermore, a legal battle between Pfizer, and Kano in Nigeria over the tests being done on Trovan, a drug to combat meningitis.

There is a Black history to clinical trials and science that isn’t being taught or widely known. This is the irony that the people disproportionately impacted by Coronavirus (significantly helped along by systemic inequality) are also the same people hesitant to take a vaccine. However, these same communities don’t trust the system because of history and a contemporary where the system has not worked for them. If the UK government wants Black people to take a vaccine (not necessarily this current one), they need to change the messaging around COVID, like government aides and advisors saying institutional racism doesn’t exist. Whilst the history articulated so far is damaging on racial grounds, there are also histories written in violence in the context of gender, class, sexuality and disability as well – from electrock therapy to eugenics.

The story of Black communities’ historic interactions with western science/scientists is damning; the present contemporary narrative of healthcare’s interactions with Black UK and Black American communities is also damning and both are well evidenced, there’s lots of improvements to made on both sides of the pond and we can do better.

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Referencing

Carlyle, T (1849) “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (London, Vol. XL., February 1849). Available from:
https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/texts/carlyle/carlyle1849negroquestion.htm

Dabiri, Emma (2019) Don’t Touch My Hair. London: Allen Lane.

De Gobineau, J, A (1853) The Inequality of Human Races. London: William Heinemann. Available: https://ia800501.us.archive.org/27/items/inequalityofhuma00gobi/inequalityofhuma00gobi.pdf

Long, E (1774/2002). The History of Jamaica, Volume 2: Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government. London: Ian Randle.

Olusoga, D (2017) Black and British: A Forgotten History. London: Pan Macmillan.

Otelle, Olivette (2020) African European. London: Hurst and Company, London.

White, C (1799) An account of the regular gradation in man, and in different animals and vegetables. Edinburgh: C, Dilly. Available: https://archive.org/details/b24924507/page/n3/mode/2up