Stokely Carmichael — or Kwame Touré as he’s known to Pan-Africanists — is notorious for popularising the phrase “Black Power”. Dissatisfied by the way liberal integrationism had failed to deliver on the promise of black freedom during the sixties, he called on black Americans to shamelessly embrace their black African heritage: they were no longer to be regarded as “negroes”, but as “black”.
In Britain, however, where “black power” also began to take hold, there was a twist: it wasn’t just being embraced by black people, but Asians too. Indeed, Stokely Carmichael once recalled his surprise when, during a trip to London in 1967, he witnessed Black Power “resonating” among “the raised fists in the Asian communities, especially among Pakistani youth.” This would extend into the 1970s and 80s, when South Asians and black people were united under the banner of “political blackness”.
In the US, “blackness” was — and remains — both a political and ethnic identity; in Britain, things have always been more complicated. Here, political blackness was fashioned to encourage solidarity and mobilisation between Black Caribbeans and South Asians: an identity for people who shared a history of colonial subjugation, migration and diaspora — and who were now being treated as second-class citizens.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan, for instance, left behind the ethnic pogroms of his native Sri Lanka to migrate to London in 1958, only to witness attacks by white mobs on West Indians during the Notting Hill riots. “I knew then I was black,” he wrote; he would be treated as black whether he accepted it or not. Decades later, not much had changed. After a long career as the editor of the journal Race & Class, Sivanandan wrote in 2008: “Black is the colour of our politics, not the colour of our skins”.
But political blackness was born in a different era, one where “coloureds” — anyone who was not white — were treated as part of a de facto underclass in the UK. Institutional racism meant they occupied menial jobs, were denied decent housing and education and were excluded from many social spaces due to the “colour bar”.
At the time, the mainstream Left did little to change this state of affairs. Trade unions, for instance, were generally hostile to the cause of anti-racism. Political blackness, therefore, wasn’t simply a critique of Tory governments; it also attacked the Labour Party for being co-conspirators in institutional racism. “What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after,” was Sivanandan’s sardonic assessment. After Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, as fears abounded of Kenyan Asians “swarming” into Britain, it was Harold Wilson’s Labour government that rushed through the racist 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act. Where previously Commonwealth citizens had had unlimited entry to Britain, as British subjects, they were now barred.
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