‘Black Success – The Surprising Truth’ by Tony Sewell – A Review. #152. 19/03/2024.
Out of Many, One People
Welcome. A hot off the press review of a book published this week.
‘Black Success – The Surprising Truth’ by Tony Sewell – A Review.
At the time in early 1970s that Tony Sewell was attending an Anglican Sunday School in south-east London I was leading a Pathfinder group of 60 or so of his mainlyblack contemporaries in north-west London. So reading his book at times generated nostalgia, often strong appreciation of his perceptions, and resonance with his positivity and love of reggae.
It is a book of two halves. Part 1 is ‘Education’, referring both to his own and his work as an educationalist. He describes his childhood and early education; his involvement in responding to life in Britain, especially writing regularly for the ‘Voice’ black newspaper; his work on The Hackney Learning Trust, and overturning the shibboleths surrounding the education of black children; and setting up the Generating Genius project to develop STEM capabilities amongst, initially, black teenage boys.
Part 1 has already included capsules on what underlies black success’, such as Jamaican sprinting gold medallists. Similar exemplary stories are the theme of Part 2 on ‘Black Success’ – he looks at Nigeria, not just the curious fact of it being world Scrabble champions, but also the role of faith. A chapter on the famous Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole imaginatively links her with her with the white Jamaican record producer, Chris Blackwell. Sewell flips the narrative of seeing her as being a racialistically overlooked equivalent of Florence Nightingale to instead having the qualities that Sewell is foregrounding – readiness for adventure and the risk-taking utilisation of whatever resources life has presented us with. Instead ‘she is made fit for the needs of modern white guilt and black historic racial trauma (page 170). The chapter on ‘The Housing Lark’ shows how the racism of landlords led the early immigrants to buy their own houses, creating long-term financial benefit. The final chapter utilises once more his love of stories, of ‘Odysseus and the Five Talents’, and exemplified in the success of the 1976 West Indian cricket team, his central role in the highly controversial Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities, and his late life move into developing a ‘wellness’ farm back to his Jamaican roots.
Some characteristics of the book.
Imagination.
Sewell was an enthusiastic English Literature scholar at the University of Essex. His book, as noticed above, abounds in love for stories and imaginative connections. Thus he connects the Jamaican folk-lore stories about the spider god Anansi with D H Lawrence’s observation in ‘The Rainbow’ about the gargoyles on Lincoln Cathedral – they are ‘both in and outside the system . . . Black success is part of the orthodoxy, but it is also slightly separate. It is mischievous, practical, satirical and defensive.’ (p 45). It is ‘a blend of the sacred and the profane, the grand and the irreverent’ (p 54). Sewell is not just making a clever connection between Anansi and the gargoyle here, it is a ‘figure’ that underlies the whole book (and also, in different register, his Report). Utilising a phrase of the poet Derek Walcott, he writes ‘we did get ‘shat on’, but that we were smart enough to use it as fertiliser for the imagination’ (p 234). Sewell’s attempt to speak positively of the ‘Caribbean experience’ in his Report aroused derision. In his book he can more subtly explicate how brutal historical experience can be transformed into material for a rich and resilient inner life.
Myth Breaking.
It is this ambiguous and elusive stance that gives Sewell the clarity to see all the myths that have accrued around multi-racialism, so the ‘conventional myths about black success need to be unpicked’ (p 26). He spells out three increasingly common ones in his educational policy: ‘it’s twice as hard’, when being told the world is stacked against you simply encourages despair; ‘the curriculum is too white’, when ‘I was able to get on in life precisely because . . I delved into the classics’; ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’, when it is the competency not the colour of teachers that matters (pp 37-39). The extraordinary and policy-changing success of The Hackney Learning Trust was based on their readiness to abandon these sorts of untested cliches.
Instead he came to realise that ‘When we focused on the main issues of good leadership, high expectations and subject knowledge, black children really succeeded. The idea that teachers needed lessons in unconscious bias training, or that black students needed sessions on how Egypt was a black kingdom, were nothing but big diversions’ (p 128). His iconoclastic approach runs through the book, as in his overturning of the BHM myths about Mary Seacole. At a time when discussion of race too often consists of black grievance rhetoric responded to by white soft-ball, Sewell cuts through the pieties of our time and rather puts confidence in his own experience and in objective evidence and outcomes.
Family and fathering.
Sewell quotes his ‘Voice’ colleague, Marcia Dixon’s assessment of what were ‘the upstream reasons why the Caribbean Community couldn't build on the success of the early Caribbean pioneers. This had everything to do with the collapse of the family’ (p 57). As regards his own extensive work with black boys as both a teacher and an administrator, he writes: ‘My sense is that African Caribbean boys did suffer a particular trauma. Because the male authority figures in their lives were problematic.... I think we would have gone further had there been political leaders willing to admit that we had a family crisis that needed professional support’ (p 88-89). My impression is that such an emphasis on the family and especially fathering as a determinative outcome appears more strongly in the book than in his Report.
Whilst he celebrates the positivity that he received from the Windrush generation, notably his mother, his narrative also laments real decline: ‘What seems to have changed for my generation was the introduction of priority council housing, which incentivized single motherhood and spelled the end for reliable fatherhood. This combined with mass unemployment, knocked the enterprise stuffing out of a generation. We never really recovered’ (p 204). Sadly, this fits with my own perceptions over the generations.
Wariness of ‘race hustlers’.
Into this unsettled situation Sowell also notes policies and people that can make it worse. ‘It was clear to me that emerging alongside a genuine struggle for racial justice were race hustlers. They needed - and still need - a narrative of victimhood in order to keep their jobs, receive grants, and stay relevant. Sadly, this hasn't changed – there are new books and films released seemingly weekly that revel in black misery’ (p 71). He refers to Steve Pope, his editor at the ‘Voice’ being dismissive of the intellectual pontificating of today's black identity politics, which he claims is a middle-class obsession’ (p 69). The outcome is the bureaucratisation of racial interaction. ‘I feel some concern that the burgeoning ‘diversity and inclusion’ sector, valued at around five billion pounds, is sucking up black talent’ (p 241) instead of into productive technical skills.
Further white attitudes now collude with these negative developments. ‘This white guilt literature hangs like a weight on me every time I go back to Britain: these people never see the region as having its own agency. Once again, it's about them and how in the end they can have power of others. In this way, the guilty white liberal becomes guilty of a new kind of colonialism’ (p 225).
Christian Faith.
Possibly one ingredient in the acid corrodes the delusions and deceit around policies on race is the prominence Sewell gives to Christian faith. He speaks very warmly of both the hospitable welcome and the seriousness of theology that he received at the Anglican church that his parents sent him to in Penge; thereby dispelling the myth that the church’s response to Caribbean immigrants was uniformly negative and racist. ‘The church opened my eyes, my mind, and my world’ (p 29). Concerning his time at the ‘Voice’ his warmest accolades are for Marcia Dixon’s outspoken and challenging Christian section, ‘Soul Stirrings’. We find positive encounters with Christian brothers such as Bishop Joe Aldred and Israel Olofinjana, all of Matthew 25:14-30 printed in full, and his book concludes by referring to my blog #113 on ‘Good Story, Bad Story + Lynne’s Story’.
It would be interesting if his essentially ethical understanding of the Christian faith was enriched by seeing the transformative power of God’s grace so that the one who has been ‘shat upon’ has become through faith the source of new life and hope.
Agency.
‘This story, this good story, begins and ends with the powerful idea of agency’ (p 242). Thus he began in his Introduction by describing his friendship with American, Jamaican background educationalist, Ian Rowe, the framework of whose book on agency uses FREE as an acronym for Family, Religion, Education and Enterprise. So he tells the stories of those who found ‘For all its persistent racism, Britain was nevertheless a place of creativity, possibility and success’ (p 190). So he is unimpressed that Michael Holding used a space in a cricket commentary to lament a black history omission, when ‘I wanted to hear the story of how [the 1976 West Indian croicket] team came up in the world; of how organised, professional and scientific black people really are.. It is a world away from stereotypes around instinctive athleticism’ (p 220).
His own story recounts positives. Based on his mother’s frequent assertion that he was a ‘genius’ (though he failed his 11+), he experienced good outcomes - getting a plum job in his local library as a schoolboy, whilst his enthusiasm to discuss with his lecturers at university led on to social and life-long friendships with them. His apparent enjoyment of a fulfilling life might suggest that what a person expects from their society powerfully determines how they experience it
Tony Sewell’s Report made him enemies. (The Acknowledgements thank Adele and Zindzi ‘who knew that after the storm would come the calm’; but with no attribution to Desmond Dekker!). I guess this book – personal and narratival as well as analytical - will cause less of a storm, not least because of the pressure of evidence, but it still upsets apple-carts of myth and posture that will invite pushback. But hopefully it will be well read by politicians, educationalists, policy makers and church leaders, and so shift us towards policies that respond more appropriately to the present realities of multi-ethnic Britain.
Related blogs:
Report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. # 25. . 13/04/2021.
What can the Church of England learn from the Sewell Report? # 26. 20/04/2021;
Runnymede vs Sewell? #40. 27/07/2021
*****
Some quotes to consider, especially for the church.
‘We need to be alive to injustice, but celebrate our successes. All this requires skilful mental juggling. We must acknowledge the suffering of our parents and grandparents, but not be burdened with their trauma’ (p 3).
‘We’ll also look at class. Low-income white people have a lot in common with their black peers. Identity politics has got in the way of finding this potentially progressive common ground’ (p 15).
‘Yes, my fellow Christians were guilty of ignoring the wider racism in society, but I didn't need their empathy. I only needed my fellow churchgoers to be themselves - to be fair, decent and loving’ (p 20).
‘It was clear even during the 1980s that there was no uniform ‘black community with a single view on matters’ (p 50).
‘How did we raise the educational outcomes of African Caribbean children and other ethnic minorities when no one else could. How did we stop making ‘diversity’ and ‘deprivation’ a millstone or an excuse in the journey towards academic excellence?... The Learning Trust focused remorselessly on school leadership’ (p 78).
‘Quite simply, too much money was being spent on identity issues or self-esteem programmes, rather than the nuts and bolts of academic achievement’ (pp 82/83).
‘We put the cart before the horse when we focus on buzzy anti-racism initiatives and don't plough money into improving teacher competency’ (p 84).
‘I never tried to convert the boys to my perspective on race and politics. Despite the nature of our programme, I don't remember us ever discussing the subject’ (p 124).
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Add Ons.
Reparations Revisited.
I was glad that Ian Paul republished on Psephizo my blog on The Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice last Friday, which led to an extensive and quite intricate discussion about reparations (which was taken further by Tony Sewell’s comments on the issue in Saturday’s Times). Whilst the Psephizo debate focussed mostly on the relevance or not of Germany’s reparations for the Holocaust, a number of important qualifications were made about the basis for the Church of England making any sort of reparative response to Queen Anne’s Bounty’s deposit in the South Sea Company.
* It may well be that the Church of England made no profit whatsoever from its investment.
* The actual slaves traded went to the Hispanic Americas, not the British Caribbean.
* The stance of the Church of England to the slave trade in the eighteenth century was more critical than my brief references suggested.
As regards the discussion of the wider question of reparations and responsibility, the picture that comes to my mind is of a football match played without touch-lines – there are no formal constraints to stop the ball going anywhere, so anyone can decide where the limitations are.
* How far back in history is it reasonable to go? My case is that the cultural and psychological problems generated by chattel slavery are still with us and therefore relevant. Or does this sustain a grievance culture amongst descendants of slaves which is debilitating for future progress?
* How do we quantify the harm inflicted? There is no way of calibrating this, and therefore it can always be incomplete. As I wrote, the present proposals seem to be asking for the Church Commissioners to have an open cheque book.
* Similarly, when are the reparations sufficiently paid and therefore finished? Past initiatives are now deemed incomplete, how will future ones be justly regarded as final?