Black history is British history
By Claudia Webbe MP
The intersectional crises we face require radical solutions to combat the injustices of racial and class inequality, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP
BLACK history has never been more important. Across the world, racism and the far right are on the rise. Yet we have also seen the largest mobilisation of anti-racist protest for decades in the form of the inspiring Black Lives Matter movement.
At this crucial juncture, it has never been more important for us to learn from the history of racial oppression and to end the injustices that exist to this day.
The scourge of institutional racism continues to affect us in all walks of life, from police use of force to the disproportionate number of black children who go to bed hungry.
Black History Month is about celebrating our history. I am a daughter of the Windrush generation. When my family arrived from the Caribbean Island of Nevis, and settled in Leicester, they made tremendous sacrifices so that they could contribute to our local and national community.
My parents never lived to see their daughter make history as a Leicester-born member of Parliament representing a Leicestershire constituency or becoming the first black female member of Parliament for Leicester East.
Yet what will be remembered is the mistreatment of the Windrush generation as one of the most wicked chapters in modern British history.
The current government does not want to learn the lessons from the Windrush scandal.
The Conservative government is cynically using culture war tropes that are designed to divide communities against each other and distract from the real causes of inequality and injustice.
Black History Month is an opportunity to highlight and combat intersecting racial and class inequalities.
We have a government that is only too willing to divide our communities based on the colour of our skin, our religion and where we come from.
There is a dangerous connecting current that runs between the Sewell report, the Nationalities and Borders Bill, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill and many other initiatives taken by this government.
They all reveal a deeply troubling broader political project, which is designed to divide people against each other and distract from the real causes of inequality and injustice.
The government is cynically pretending that racism is an individual failing, not a systemic experience which is driven by powerful institutions, as was the case of colonialism, which resulted in millions of murders (direct and indirect), sexual abuses and extraction of natural resources inherent to imperial projects — yet is typical of this government’s point-blank refusal to acknowledge structural disadvantages and the pervasive legacy of empire.
The government’s aim to individualise racism and to claim that discrimination is no longer a societal issue is the betrayal of black history and an expression of the Thatcherite dogma that “there is no such thing as society.”
Our collective revolutionary response is, to reject this government’s attempts to divide us up and to fight — together — for a world free of racial and class inequalities.
As Kwame Nkrumah highlighted when challenging the use of the derogatory term “Third World”, he said: “The oppressed and exploited peoples are the struggling revolutionary masses committed to the socialist world … They do not constitute a ‘Third World’ — they are part of the revolutionary upsurge which is everywhere challenging the capitalist, imperialist and neocolonialist power of reaction and counter-revolution … committed to the hilt in the struggle against capitalism, to end the exploitation.”
The government could instead drop its counterproductive crusade against the concept of institutional racism, and outline a target-driven plan to end the shocking racial disparities that continue to plague British society.
Ultimately, it could abandon its divisive agenda and commit to governing in the interests of all citizens — regardless of the colour of their skin or their country of birth.
The pandemic has reaffirmed the ways in which race and class perniciously intersect. The crises we face today, from climate change to the rise of authoritarian governments, are animated by class struggles.
When we look at our world today — a world in which half of global wealth belongs to the richest 1 per cent; a world in which global and regional inequalities are defined by racialised violence and extraction — we see another historical epoch which remains defined by “the oppressor and oppressed.”
This Black History Month, it is vital that we recognise the integral role that black socialists — and especially black women — have played within the labour movement.
There have been many influential African revolutionaries who understood the interconnection between violent imperialism and extractive capitalism.
The words of Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian and political activist, in his influential How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, still ring true today: “The workers of Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole world) paid a huge price so that the capitalists could make their profits from the human labour that always lies behind the machines … that is why at the moment capitalism stands in the path of further human social development … the social (class) relations of capitalism are now outmoded, just as slave and feudal relations became outmoded in their time.”
There are also countless inspiring socialists within the African diaspora. As the US socialist Angela Davis said: “If we are going to rise out of our oppression, our poverty, if we are going to cease being the targets of the racist-minded mentality of racist policemen, we will have to obliterate a system in which a few wealthy capitalists are guaranteed the privilege of becoming richer and richer, whereas the people who are forced to work for the rich, and especially black people, never take any significant step forward.”
This is equally applicable to Britain. As Jamaican-British sociologist Stuart Hall wrote: “There is no understanding of Englishness without understanding its imperial and colonial dimensions.”
A study of Hall, who wrote during the rise of Thatcherism in the 1970s and ’80s, is especially relevant given recent debates within the left, particularly his assertion that “the right of the labour movement … has no ideas of any compelling quality, except the instinct for short-term political survival.
“It would not know an ideological struggle if it stumbled across one in the dark. The only ‘struggle’ it engages in with any trace of conviction is the one against the left.”
Indeed, the ongoing fight for a £15-per-hour minimum wage would overwhelmingly benefit African, African-Caribbean, Asian and racialised workers, who are disproportionately employed in underpaid and undervalued jobs.
There is also an endless list of inspiring black British socialist women, from Stella Dadzie (who helped to set up the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent that challenged the white domination of the women’s liberation movement), to young academics such as Lola Olufemi — to name but a few.
The intersectional crises we face, require radical solutions. We stand on a precipice, in which the crises of climate breakdown, rampant racial inequality and the shockingly uneven distribution of wealth seem irreversible.
Yet as socialists, we know that there is an alternative, that it is possible to build a society around the needs of all its citizens and the principles of solidarity.
It is up to all of us as revolutionaries to fight for that better world in which all of us, regardless of the colour of our skin, can live in dignity.
Black history is British history — let us all pledge to continue the struggle for full racial and class equality.
Let us resolve for our proud history to be taught all year round. And let us fight for a fairer future so that future generations will celebrate our achievements today and every day.
Claudia Webbe MP is the member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe
