Tag Archives: racism in Britain

Why British history isn’t the story of a white country

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A new BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations has set off (heavy sigh) yet another conversation about whether British history is the story of a white country. 

Why? Because either the show’s casting was color blind, where actors are chosen without regard to their skin color, or because (and my bet’s on this) the directors deliberately placed Black actors in major roles. 

Cue the predictable emails/phone calls/howls of outrage. Cue mentions of wokeness and political correctness. Sadly, I doubt we can cue any repetitions of that glorious confection of manufactured outrage, “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati.” The workerati had too much fun with it and the sleeperati had to retire it. But if you want to do your bit to keep the phrase alive, for £12.99 plus shipping and handling, you can buy a tee shirt announcing your reading and eating preferences.

It comes in a variety of designs, which says (a) it’s popular, (b) someone had too much fun to stop at one, or (c) it wasn’t all that popular and they’ve still got stock left. 

But forget the shirts. The assumption behind the complaints is that having a Black lawyer in a Dickens story is historically inaccurate and can only be explained by someone’s desire to rewrite history into something tofu flavored. 

 

Brief interruption for the sake of complete accuracy

I don’t like tofu. I can eat it–it’s not liver, after all–but I haven’t found a way to enjoy it and I’ve stopped searching for one. I do like the shirts, although I won’t be eating any. I probably won’t be wearing one either. I’ve stopped thinking people want to hear from my clothing.

Irrelevant photo: Cuckoo flowers–also called lady’s smocks, milkmaids, and mayflower. It’s a member of the Brassicaceae family, and yes, it will be on the test.

 

Meanwhile, back at the Complaints Department…

…the question we’re considering is, How likely would it have been in the Victorian (and slightly pre-Victorian) era, which is when Great Expectations takes place, to find a Black lawyer and an Indian law clerk? And would Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella, be–um, it’s not immediately apparent from watching the series what her ethnicity is. I was going for someplace in Asia (it’s a big continent; surely it has a likely spot somewhere), but it turns out the actor playing her is of Mauritian and Thai heritage. She’s also described as an English-born Australian actor. That last bit isn’t relevant to the flap at hand but does remind us how complicated a person’s background can be. She has brown skin, though, and I’m assuming that does its bit to stir up the complainers.

To answer the question I’ve wandered away from, though: It’s quite accurate. English history is not all white, even if it’s often presented as if it were.

 

Georgian Britain

Let’s start with Georgian Britain, since that’s when Great Expectations begins (it then crosses into the Victorian era without needing to present a passport). The Georgian era ran from 1714 to 1830. Yes, I had to look it up, and I learned that it took four back-to-back Georges to cover that many years. 

At least 5,000 Black people lived in Georgian London, although that’s a minimum estimate, not a complete count. Data is (sorry: are) sparse–not just about Black people in London but about lots of people and things of the era. We have to work with what we’ve got. Many of them arrived as slaves and lived on in Britain as enslaved servants–it was quite the fashion among the upper class to have a Black servant in the household. Many of them escaped, though, disappearing into the general population. We know about them from newspaper ads calling for their capture and return. They’re often identified by the metal collars fastened onto their necks and by their scars.

Slavery within Britain itself was abolished in 1807, although the country continued to accumulate wealth from slavery in its colonies and trading relationships. Anyone who presents history as a simple picture is lying to you or themselves or both. So however ironically, British soil itself was free, and so were the people who stood on it.

Who, then, were these Black Britons? Most were poor and not lawyers in Dickens novels, but then so were most white Britons and you won’t find anyone offering that as an argument against casting a white actor as the lawyer. 

A few did become part of the middle and upper classes. 

How upper is upper?As far as I know, none of them inherited titles, but Queen Victoria  (you don’t get much higher in the class structure than that) had a ward and goddaughter, Sara Forbes Bonetta, who was Yoruba. 

So a Black lawyer? Entirely possible. 

As for the Indian law clerk and Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, when a country conquers an empire,it will be changed by the countries it conquers. The British Empire didn’t  just bring back money, textiles, tea, spices, opium, and new recipes to break up the same-old same-old of British cooking. People came as well, some by choice and some not. They came to work, to study, to live, to do all the assorted things humans do. Some stayed a while and went home. Others put down roots and became British. Communities formed.

That’s not to say there was no racism. 

 

Racism

British racism was (and, I think, still is) different from the American brand. For one thing, intermarriage wasn’t uncommon in Britain, whereas during large parts of US history it wasn’t just uncommon, it was illegal in many states. I mention that in part because a lot of readers here at Notes are American and also because culturally speaking I’m more American than British. I do know the US isn’t the world’s focal point, but I can’t help using it as mine a lot of the time. 

In the Victorian era, science was dragged in, kicking and screaming, to explain why racism and empire were natural and whites–and especially whites of the British persuasion–were superior to whoever else you had in mind. They measured heads and found that–surprise, surprise–the heads that happened to be shaped like their own had more brain power than anyone else’s, proving that their little twig of the human tree was by far superior to the other little twigs. They catalogued humanity into races, and no matter how many times later scientists have demonstrated that science provides no basis for the divisions, we’re still fighting our way out of that paper bag.

So again, we’re looking at a complicated picture. Racism, yes, but also Black people distributed–however unequally–throughout society.

And for the benefit of American readers, who see the word Black and understand it to mean someone of African heritage, in Britain it often includes Asians, although I think that’s shifting.

The Victorians didn’t invent racism, though. As soon as the country dove into slave-holding and the slave trade, it began to tell itself that the people it was enslaving were a lower grade of human. All the Victorians did was sprinkle a bit of pseudo-scientific glitter over it.

 

Moving backwards

Historians have relatively recently begun tracing Black British history in the Tudor era, picking individuals out of the sparse records that are available, and again the picture isn’t simple. Miranda Kaufman writes about a weaver, a sailor, a porter, travelers, a salvage diver, and an assortment of others. Onyeka Nubia combed through marriage and baptism records and found Black people who often married whites and over several generations disappeared into the gene pool. As he put it when I heard him speak to an almost all-white crowd, “This is not my history [he’s of African extraction]. This is  your history.”

Peter Fryer covers some of the same territory, but he starts with Roman legionnaires. 

Most of the stories they give us are, of necessity, limited. The written records mark  brief moments in people’s lives, then they disappear. But they were here. They lived, they worked, they died. They’ve been written out of British history. If someone writes them back in, it’s an act of restitution, not tofu addiction.

Does racism go back as far as the Tudor era? I’m not sure, but if it does it was probably different from the racism we know today. 

As early as the Elizabethan era (1558-1603, and yes, I had to look it up) we can find Liz issuing two separate orders to expell Black people from Britain because they were eating food that should have gone to her people, and besides, most of them were heathens. Or some of them were heathens. Or, well, never mind, they ate, and getting rid of them was easier than wrestling with inequality and famine.

Except that she didn’t get rid of them. She issued a couple of proclamations and there (give or take a bit of historical running back and forth, which we’ll skip) it ended. You can find the full tale here. 

Does it matter whether Black people were targets because they were Black, because some of them weren’t Christian, or because they were an immigrant community (with some  descendants of immigrants added in)? I’m not sure. None of those positions are comfortable. 

Onyeka Nubia argues that the Tudor era was more open and it wasn’t until later that the contributions of Black Britons were written out of the official history. I’d give you details but I haven’t gotten my hands on his books yet. Expect me to come back to the subject.

All the news you don’t need to know

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Patriotism has run away with us in ever-so-great Britain: Paul Scully, a minister at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, went on TV to promote offshore windfarms and bragged that a government program would create British jobs, using British manufacturing “and of course British wind.”

The plan at the moment is to surround windfarms with barbed wire and make sure foreign winds are kept out, but the plans could change if the political winds shift. The possibility of putting electric fans on the leeward side hasn’t been ruled out. 

Irrelevant photo: A Cornish stone wall. The plant is wall pennywort.

 

More political stuff

After Meghan Markle and Harry Whatsisname accused Britain’s tabloid press of being racist, Ian Murray, the executive director of Britain’s Society of Editors, responded by asking himself, “Are you a racist?” answering, “Don’t be silly,” and then issuing a statement saying that racism was never a factor in how the press treated Markle. M & H’s “attack,” he said, was “not acceptable.”

All hell broke loose, a great deal of huffing a puffing followed, and Murray has now resigned.

A particularly British way of thinking about racism is for a person (the person in question, in my experience, being white) to consult their intent and declare themselves free of it. Their impact on other people or the world in general doesn’t come into it and neither does anything that other people might contribute to the discussion. If they declare their intent to be pure, they are pure. 

 

The sciencey stuff they don’t want us to know

And now we come to the shocking revelation that on the equinox, which most of us were trusting enough to think is the moment when day and night are equal in length, day and not are not equal in length.

Yes, folks, deep forces are at work here and they do not have our best interests at heart. 

I’ll quote an explanation of what the equinox really is: “On a winter day, the Sun is low in the sky, whereas on a summer’s day the Sun lies considerably higher. But on a specific day in the spring or autumn, the Sun will be visible directly above the equator, somewhere in the middle of the two arcs traced by the Sun in the summer and winter.”

You mean all those people on the equator only get to see the sun twice a year? 

Um, probably not. It means–

Well, it means something else, okay? 

The unevenness of day and night has to do in part with sunrise being measured from the moment when the rim of the sun appears on the horizon and sundown being measured from the time that same rim disappears. That leaves a bit of time sloshing around when the rest of the sun is following the rim.

Did you follow that? Maybe it would be better if we skip over the sciencey stuff. All we need to know is that deep forces are at work and that we’ve been lied to. Don’t trust the forces of nature. Stay alert. Keep a clock by you at all times. Trust no one. And if you want an actual explanation, follow the link. 

 

The animal stuff

This is the year of cats and lawyers. 

Barrister Naz Hussain’s cat Colombo broke into a Zoom hearing in January. He had his eye on the headphone cable but then strolled across the keyboard until he was in range of the camera.

“The judge jokingly asked if he was my instructing solicitor,” Hussein said, “to which I said: ‘No, it’s my replacement junior.’ “

That is British legalspeak. Don’t worry about what it means. Just bask in how arcane and British it sounds and pretend you’re watching one of those law shows where half the actors have lambs curled up on their heads.

“Everyone laughed,” Hussain said, “and, sensing stardom, Columbo just kept coming back.”

I don’t know if the defendant was included in everyone, but he may have been because he was found innocent.  

Colombo now has his own Twitter account. And Hussain–having been repeatedly mistaken for a defendant and asked by other lawyers if he’s really a QC–has taken advantage of the moment when people are listening to him to say some serious things about diversity in the legal profession.

A QC? That’s a particularly high-powered breed of lawyer. They’re so important they’d wear two lambs on their heads if there was room.

*

Somewhat less impressively, a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia got out of her patrol car to serve papers on someone, leaving the door open, and a goat jumped in. She–that’s the deputy, not the goat–recorded the whole thing on her head cam, which also recorded her saying, as she knocked on the door, “I hope that goat don’t get in my car.”

Be careful what you say around a goat. They’re very bright and highly suggestible. 

Leaving the car door open is standard practice, at least for her. If she has to get away from a bad-tempered dog, she wants the escape to be seamless. 

While it was in the car, the goat munched on her papers and spilled her drink. And when the deputy got to be enough of an annoyance, it head-butted her to the ground. 

She’ll never hear the end of it.

To the best of my knowledge, the goat hasn’t set up a Twitter account.

Yet.

 

The high-tech stuff

Gucci’s selling sneakers for $17.99, but since the brand’s shoes can sell for as much as $500, there’s a catch: They’re virtual sneakers. You can buy them for your imaginary self to wear in online games, which if I was even remotely with it I’d call virtual reality but I can’t be bothered to pretend. You can’t put them on real feet because they don’t actually exist. So if you buy a pair you just spent $17.99 on something imaginary.

The Guardian describes one of them as “a chunky slime green, bubble-gum pink and sky blue shoe that wouldn’t look out of place in a robot’s orthotics clinic.” I’m going to assume that the other one matches.  

Who could resist?

The Bristol bus boycott

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Back in the bad old days, when the U.S. was unashamedly racist (gee, just think of the changes time has wrought), when the southern states weren’t just segregated but vibrating with the possibility of lynching, Britain had a reputation for being free of the color bar. 

I don’t think it was just me who believed that. I’m pretty sure I had both company and a push or two in that direction, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the belief came at least in part out of the experience of black American soldiers during World War II, when the U.S. Army was still segregated and Britain felt like a place you could take a deep breath.

That should teach me not to judge a country on the basis of one or two stories, although it probably won’t. In postwar Britain, it wasn’t unusual to see signs saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs,” when a place was for rent. 

In the interest of getting to the point, we’ll let that example stand in for a range of racist practices and talk about the bus boycott. 

Irrelevant photo: I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think this is a viola. At any rate, it’s a volunteer.

But before we do that, I need to stop and warn you that I haven’t managed to be funny about any of this. Sorry. It happens. Ask me to write about the black death and yes, I could probably be funny. The Bristol bus boycott, though? I haven’t managed it, but it’s an interesting piece of history. For whatever good my opinion does, I think it’s worth your time. 

The story starts in 1963. In the U.S., the Civil Rights Movement was still fighting to integrate the most basic elements of public life, in South Africa the anti-apartheid movement was becoming more and more visible, and in Bristol the bus company had a whites-only policy for its higher paying jobs. That was as legal in Britain as it was in the US or South Africa. The difference was that in Britain no law enforced segregation, it just didn’t ban it.

The union local at the bus company and the management were in agreement on keeping blacks out of the better jobs. For the union, it was about the garden-variety racism of some members, but it was also protecting overtime. Before the war, basic wages had matched what skilled workers at the city’s aerospace plant earned, but since then they’d fallen behind. That left drivers and conductors dependent on overtime to make up the difference. 

But overtime depended on the company being short of workers, so tapping into a new source of drivers and conductors was the last thing the union wanted, and back in the fifties the local had passed a resolution against hiring anyone black as a driver or conductor. 

What management got out of the whites-only policy is anyone’s guess. Maybe just a chance to sit comfortably in their existing prejudices. It’s a surprisingly powerful motivator. You can judge their thinking by a quote from a manager:

“The advent of coloured crews would mean a gradual falling off of white staff. It is true that London Transport employ a large coloured staff. They even have recruiting offices in Jamaica and they subsidise the fares to Britain of their new coloured employees. As a result of this, the amount of white labour dwindles steadily on the London Underground. You won’t get a white man in London to admit it, but which of them will join a service where they may find themselves working under a coloured foreman? . . . I understand that in London, coloured men have become arrogant and rude, after they have been employed for some months.” 

A group of four men formed the West Indian Development Council (West Indians made up the majority of the black community) and set out to demonstrate that the bus company really was refusing to hire black drivers and conductors. An eighteen-year-old, Guy Bailey, applied for a job and showed up at the receptionist’s desk, explaining that he had an interview. 

You have to give a kind of back-handed credit to the bus company, because if they’d wanted to prove the association’s point they couldn’t have been more helpful. 

“I don’t think so,” the receptionist said.

He gave her his name. Yup, he had an appointment. 

She went to the manager’s office door and called,  “Your two o’clock appointment is here, and he’s black.”

The manager called back, “Tell him the vacancies are full.”

The company had been advertising for applicants, and an hour before someone from the association had called to ask about a job and been told they were hiring. He had an Essex accent, so they’d assumed he was white.

“There’s no point having an interview,” the manager said, still calling from his office. “We don’t employ black people.”

The next day, the association called a boycott of Bristol’s buses. 

At this point, I’d expected to read about the boycott itself, but the boycott isn’t the focus of anybody’s article about, um, the boycott. Bristol’s black community wasn’t large, so it didn’t have the economic impact of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Instead, the West Indian Development Council picketed bus depots, organized blockades and sit-ins, and generally brought the issue in front of  the public. Britain was the scene of an active movement against apartheid in South Africa, and the two causes became linked. 

Support came from the local Labour MP, Tony Benn, and the Trinidadian cricket player and high commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago Learie Constantine became a central figure. Student groups and antiracist organized demonstrations handed out leaflets. Bristol’s local press was inundated with letters, pro and con. The national press began to pay attention. 

The strategy had an impact. The local became isolated within the union movement and was accused of bringing shame on it. And the drivers began getting grief from passengers. 

Bristol’s Council of Churches decided to help out by issuing one of history’s more useless public statements: “We seriously regret that what may prove an extended racial conflict arising from this issue has apparently been deliberately created by a small group of West Indians professing to be representative. We also deplore the apparent fact that social and economic fears on the part of some white people should have placed the Bristol Bus Company in a position where it is most difficult to fulfil the Christian ideal of race relations.”

If you figure out what they’re calling for there, do let me know. Possibly a return to the time when they could snoozily ignore the problem.

Negotiations went on for months with the bus company, the union, the Bishop of Bristol, and the city government doing their best to sideline the West Indian Development Council, but Learie Constantine–remember him? the cricket player?–met with everyone he could and convinced the Transport Holding Company , the parent company of the Bristol Omnibus Company, to talk with the union, which they did for several months before the union voted, at a meeting of 500 members, to end the color bar. 

The first non-white conductor wasn’t Guy Bailey but a Sikh, Raghbir Singh. Bailey–remember, he was only eighteen–had found it hard being at the center of the storm and decided he didn’t want to work on the buses. 

“I felt unwanted, I felt helpless, I felt the whole world had caved in around me. I didn’t think I would live through it,” he said. “But it was worth it.”

A few days after that first hire, four other non-whites joined him. 

In 1965 and 1968, Britain passed two Race Relations acts banning discrimination in housing, employment, and public places. Harold Wilson’s government had decided it had to keep a situation like Bristol’s from happening again.

Three of the central people, Bailey, Roy Hackett, and Paul Stephenson, were awarded OBEs for the roles they played. 

An OBE? Well, irony’s alive and well, thanks. That stands for Order of the British Empire, which (you may remember) wasn’t what you’d call free of racism. Still, recognition is recognition, however deeply tinged with irony.