Race Today Research Articles

Late Cuts: C.L.R. James, Cricket and Postcolonial England

This article centres upon C.L.R. James's last cricket writings which were published in the Brixton-based periodical Race Today between 1983 and 1986. The ‘Cricket Notes’ have received little critical attention but in their surprising focus upon English cricket and their scepticism about the dominant West Indies Test team of the time they provide evidence both of James's intellectual method and his particular use of cricket in exploring the postcolonial Caribbean and England in the mid-1980s. Relating the ‘Cricket Notes’ to his post-Second World War writings on anti-colonial struggles in West Africa and the Caribbean, the essay explores James's development of an idiosyncratic Marxist cultural politics in which sport was a central mode of performing and instigating revolutionary change. James's late preoccupation with English cricket, and particularly a tradition of stylish batsmen that he traces back to the innovative practices of W.G. Grace and C.B. Fry, is seen as an application of his political method to an English context. In discussing the cultural meanings of David Gower and his team in the most radical black journal of the time, James addressed the question of the means by which a radical postcolonial Englishness might be made and expressed through sport.

What colour is the South African rainbow?: The ANC’s racial transformation

What colour is the South African rainbow? The ANC’s racial transformation Irina Filatova (bio) Over two decades ago, after De Klerk’s famous speech of 2 February 1990, announcing the formal end of apartheid, journalists started to speak of the ‘South African miracle’ – the almost unthinkable possibility of a peaceful transition to a democratic future in a united society. Not every black South African was happy about the fact that, after long and difficult negotiations, the new national anthem featured ‘Die Stem’ together with ‘Nkosi Sikelela Afrika’, that several representatives of the National Party became ministers in the government of national unity and that, having become president, Nelson Mandela did not show any willingness to revenge himself upon old enemies. Not every white South African was happy about the new constitutional arrangements in the wake of the negotiated settlement. But the expectations of the black majority were so high, and the feeling of relief among their white compatriots so overwhelming, that petty grudges did not matter. For a few years the country lived in a state of euphoria, and Bishop Desmond Tutu proclaimed that South Africa had already become a ‘rainbow nation’. Alas the term did not last: it is only with irony that ‘the rainbow nation’ is mentioned today. The miracle has not yet happened: a high proportion of both blacks and whites are disillusioned and disappointed. The national reconciliation that seemed almost a reality at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when former torturers asked their victims for forgiveness and cried together with them in front of the TV cameras, still evades South Africans, and South African society is still divided by law, emotions, economy, ethnicity and policy. So, what has gone wrong? Why is it that the ‘rainbow nation’ obstinately does not want to form? There are [End Page 23] many reasons for this, but one has to begin with the ideology and policy of the ruling party. Ideology The ANC has been conceptualising South Africa’s ethno-racial1 relations from its inception in 1912, and they remain the focus of the party’s ideology to the present day. This is not surprising in the context of the nature of the ANC as an African nationalist organisation and of the history of a country whose state structures were based on race discrimination for centuries and on apartheid’s racial engineering for more than four decades. The ANC’s approach to ethno–racial issues in South Africa significantly changed over time – the process that has been sufficiently covered in the academic literature.2 There is, however, one aspect of the ANC’s ideological baggage which continues to define its policy on race today that deserves to be mentioned here: a contradiction between two approaches to the race issue as defined in the ANC’s two policy documents and thus between its two images of South Africa’s society and its future. One document is the Freedom Charter which has been the party’s programme since its adoption in 1955 and which asserted that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white’ (Karis and Carter 1977: 205). The other is Strategy and Tactics of the ANC, adopted by the party’s conference in Morogoro in 1969. This second document which repeated the main points of the 1962 Programme of the South African Communist Party (South African Communist Party 1963), stated that the main contents of the struggle in South Africa was the ‘national liberation’ of the biggest and worst exploited group of South Africa’s population – the African people (African National Congress 1970). The authors of the Freedom Charter saw South Africa as one society, though deeply unequal and divided by race and class. For them the struggle was for political and social equality. The authors of the Strategy and Tactics assumed that South Africa was a colony, albeit of a special type, because it was situated on the same territory as its colonial power. For them, the ANC’s struggle was a national revolution – the ‘national democratic revolution’ (NDR), as it was called, following the Soviet lead. 3 Equality and ‘internationalism’ were to come later, at the second stage of...

“A Good Work for Our Race To-Day”: Interests, Virtues, and the Achievement of Justice in Frederick Douglass's Freedmen's Monument Speech

Frederick Douglass's Freedmen's Monument speech of 1876 is notable for its complexity, and commentators have offered widely varying readings. Critics have judged it an abdication of racial responsibility, indicative of an unwarranted optimism characteristic of Douglass's larger argument on racial reform. In this article, I explicate this speech, highlighting the complex rhetorical design in which Douglass forges a memory of Lincoln as a medium for issuing carefully targeted appeals to the interests and virtues of black and white Americans. In its hitherto underappreciated theoretical dimension, the speech epitomizes a theory of racial progress that challenges recent, pessimistic readings of America's racial history and prospects.

Conflicting Narratives of Black Youth Rebellion in Modern Britain

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several clashes between black youth2 and the police broke out in Britain. As the economic crisis of the 1970s endured and policing tactics in Britain shifted towards more confrontational means, these episodes of rebellion were seen by many in Britain as a prelude to wider revolutionary action. This article will focus on two perceptions of these rebellious acts, which provided often confl icting, but not entirely mutually exclusive, interpretations. One interpretation comes from the (primarily white) British left, who saw these rebellious youth as part of the vanguard against capitalism, a potentially revolutionary section of the working class that could provoke a broader movement against the police, the Government and the capitalist system. The other interpretation is that of radical black activists, who saw these acts of rebellion as part of a struggle by the black communities to assert a collective identity as black Britons in post-colonial Britain, while combating the racism still prevalent in Britain at the time. This article will examine publications within these two streams to demonstrate how the episodes of youth rebellion were interpreted as acts of class or ethnicity; examining the journals of the British left, primarily those from the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Workers Party, for the former position and the journals of black activists, primarily those of Race Today, Race & Class and the publications of the Asian Youth Movements, for the latter. The article will conclude that neither of these interpretations is wholly suffi cient and that a hybrid interpretation, based on the work of postcolonial scholars, such as Homi Bhabha, is a more appropriate approach. As the thirtieth anniversary of the 1981 riots draws nearer, this approach can benefi t historians as they negotiate these competing interpretations, where the events have become categorised and essentialised by leftist and black radical writers, while those who were involved in the events discussed are, in actuality, unlikely to be contained within a singular narrative.

Against The Declining Significance of Race

The Rising Significance of Class Re-examining William Julius Wilson’s landmark study, The Declining Significance of Race today, in a moment quite distant from the book’s release context some thirty years ago, it is difficult to understand how this rather brief treatise on “race and class in the American experience” could have played a key role in transforming the research agenda of a generation of scholars working on the history of African Americans in the United States. The book relies almos...

The Political Education of Young Blacks in Britain

Abstract The political concerns of young Afro‐ Caribbeans are strongly related to the existence of racial divisions in British society. In order to make sense of their experiences in a white power structure, young blacks draw eclectically on a range of political philosophies — in particular, Gaveyism, Pan‐Africanism, Rastafarianism, American Black Power, and the interpretations of the Race Today collective — which are made available to them in the social institutions of the black community. The authors discuss the difference between black disaffection and revolutionary black consciousness before going on to examine the attempts that have been made to accommodate black political aspirations within the education system and the appropriateness of the kinds of political education the schools offer to black pupils.

The Black Scholar Interviews: Darcus Howe:Part Two

The frequent target of police harassment, Darcus Howe has just been arrested on trumped up charges of assault. Contact: Darcus Howe Defense Committee, c/o Race Today, 74 Shakespeare Road, London S.E. 24. Howe's trial is scheduled for August 10, 1978.

The Black Scholar Interviews: Darcus Howe

The Black Scholar Interviews: Darcus Howe

Promises to keep

PAGE 106 PAGE 106 THE BLA CK LA W JOURNAL THE BLACK LA WIOURNAL PROMISES TO KEEP By J. SKELLY WRIGHT* T HE SECOND RECONSTRUCTION is now 20 years old. The first, one hundred years ago, lasted only half that long. Is this cause for celebration or only a good reason to hold our breath? I am not at all sure. That first voyage toward racial justice was simply deserted by the winds of history. It would be imprudent to ignore that our sails today have gone rather ominously still. The parallels are somewhat disturbing. As in the 1870's, the political landscape has been devastated. Martin Luther King is dead, and Whitney Young, Medgar Evers, Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy, and Lyndon John- son. Gone too is that coalition of Blacks, the young, labor and the churches which broke a filibuster older than the Senate chamber. The liveliest political movement in the land belongs to the man who stood in the schoolhouse door. Congress toys with bills aimed at restricting the equitable powers, and purposes, of the courts. At the highest tribunal in the judicial branch, eight of the nine justices who joined in Brown are gone. Orders of desegregation are no longer unan- imously affirmed; some, indeed, may be destined for reversal. And the remaining branch of government has its own problems, strangely similar in some respects to those of the First Reconstruction presidency. As in the 1870's, the issue of race today has nearly everywhere lost its sense of moral urgency. It is not so much a replacement of virtue by vice as a fading of awareness into in- difference. Having been ingrained for over three centuries, apparently our habits of racial injustice are imperceptible unless we are ex- periencing a veritable fever of the moral senses. Before we could emancipate the slaves, we had to war against each other in a spirit of religious martyrdom: As He died to make men holy, Let us die to make men free. In proposing the original Civil Rights Act, Charles Sumner spoke of the true grandeur in an example of justice, mak- ing the rights of all the same as our own, and beating down prejudice, like Satan, under our feet. So too with us. Martin Luther King gave us all a dream, and James Baldwin, pointing to an old Negro spiritual, convinced us that the dream's fruition was nigh, for continued delay would surely destroy us: God gave Noah the Rainbow sign; No more water, the fire next time. NDEED THE FIRES CAME. In most of our cities, one can still see a great deal of cold charcoal, and the poet of the moment would appear to be Robert Frost: Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate, To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Public discussion today echoes the weariness of 100 years ago. President Grant com- plained: The whole public are tired out with these annual Autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the *Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Co- lumbia Circuit.

The Concept of Race

I remember a seminar held at the University of Heidelberg, soon after Hitler came to power. Karl Jaspers, who was shortly to lose his professorship because he had committed the crime of Rassenschande—in other words, because he had married a Jewess—was discussing a student's essay on Hegel's philosophy. He said: “In these days when we hear all too much about race, I advise you to read X's book on ‘race among the herrings’. You will then see what we know about race today, when human passions are not involved.”

Kill and Overkill

Though many voices have been heard warning us of the danger of annihilation confronting the human race today, who would say that the chorus is loud enough ? A man who played as prominent a part in our preservation from the forces of Nazism as did Sir Robert Watson-Watt certainly is entitled to be heard on this theme. In this book Sir Robert sets our present plight against a full background which ranges from a study of primitive man, the rise of civilization, and the growth of intellect to a description of the modern scene with its technological heights and its political and moral morasses.

Three general types of racial characteristics.

Earlier papers given at this Symposium make it quite clear that most anthropologists would prefer to be able to base their classifications of mankind into races on hereditary characters inherited in a known manner. Characters which are clearly not inherited and are due solely to accident, or to environment, such as cultural traits, will not appeal to the physical anthropologist. For unless the traits we use are physically inherited, any racial classification based upon them may only too likely prove to be impermanent, shifting structures built upon foundations of sand. What is characteristic of a race today should also be characteristic of its descendants some generations hence, allowing only for mixture with other races in the meantime.

Environment and Race

IN “An Atlas of Environment and Race” (University of Chicago Bookshop, 40 cents), which is issued to accompany a course of lectures broadcast from Chicago by Prof. Griffith Taylor, is a series of 110 maps, of which 65 have not previously been published. The series, in addition to the maps of racial distribution usually accompanying the discussion of this topic, covers matters such as land elevation, climatic variation, vegetation, strati-graphical evidence and cultural distributions. As a whole, the series is both original and stimulating. The course is designed to prove the ‘zones and strata’ theory, in which, adopting the criteria of skull form and hair character, it is argued that the races of the world are arranged in five zones about central Asia a theory already advanced by Prof. Taylor in his “Environment and Race” (1927). Prof. Taylor stresses the paramount importance of the study of race to-day on the ground that two thirds of the world is occupied by coloured peoples “often chafing under European domination”.