Thinking Black: Britain 1964–1985. By Rob Waters

Abstract

The story of the end of British imperial power is a familiar one; the flag coming down, the final sundowners sipped, the wanton violence and brutality which underlay neat narratives of ‘orderly’ transitions to power. Yet at the same time, Britain itself was shaped in critical ways by its imperial past. The nation and its people underwent a series of highly complex and intense psychological and physical experiences as they struggled to come to terms with its place in the world. The state of contemporary politics suggests that these debates remain unresolved. One critical aspect of the post-war era was an understanding of the very definition of who ‘Britons’ were and could be. Accentuated by post-war immigration from the ‘new’ Commonwealth, particularly the Caribbean and South Asia, the prospect of a predominantly white society confronting what some have called the Empire coming home spilled into ugly and vicious racial violence, disavowal of the imperial past and any sense of obligation to former imperial subjects, and the insidious insularity of Powellism—which reached its apotheosis in 1968 with the now infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (for this backlash see C. Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain). The 1970s were a time of unease, a time when both black and white felt that the British state had failed them and that the post-war consensus, with its levelling rhetoric of equality and fairness for all, was collapsing. In this context, Britain’s ethnic minorities, subject to both petty discrimination and terrifying mob violence, were prompted to engage in a series of renegotiations of their identity and sense of place. In Thinking Black, Rob Waters skilfully charts the evolution of black radicalism in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.