Shame, Scandal and Respectability Amongst the Children of the Windrush Generation: A Scholarly Omission

Abstract

African Caribbean men in Britain are often defined as being a problematic social category. Father deficit and unmarried female-headed families often dominate discourses on black British culture. However, a common observation within ethnographic studies concerning black men is that often there is a police or crime story to tell. This is perhaps the case as officially presented statistics inform us that black men in Britain are chronically criminalised and subjected to a disproportionate level of criminalisation by enforcement agencies, facts that can be validated and verified within much British sociological literature spanning several decades (Pryce, 1979; Gilroy, 1987; Cavidino & Dignan, 1992; Bowling & Phillips, 2002; Glynn, 2014). Whilst these findings can perhaps leave an impression for some that a preponderance of black men engage in crime, what is often omitted from this deliberation is the fact that an overwhelming glut of men of African Caribbean descent wilfully choose to shun or cease criminal participation, and are instead commonly influenced by strategies that are aimed at blocking any potential criminal drift, by virtues of structures cemented within Caribbean cultural identity (Monrose, 2013). Central to these strategies are concepts of respectability, propriety and notions of shame, instilled by parents in order to avert dishonour of one’s family and community-factors which the newly arrived West Indians took extremely seriously. The following remarks are not only singularly applicable to the paradigms which exist with sociological enquiries on race and ethnicity, but are equally relevant in the investigation of issues related to social stratification and class structure.