Welcome to Blog No 35. Please commend to others, subscribe; comment and criticise (especially if you are American).
Not the USA?
Britain has often suffered from the ‘Elvis Syndrome’ – the view that the USA does things before, better and bigger than we do. This has often shaped our national understanding of ‘race’. Race first rose to prominence as a national issue in the 1950’s with increasing migration from the Caribbean; the same time that the Civil Rights Movement in the USA was gathering world-wide attention (and that Elvis appeared). Inevitably speculation grew as to whether patterns seen in the USA would be replicated or deviated from in Britain; and attempts to identify how like/how unlike race in Britain is compared to the USA.
This blog attempts to track the dissimilarities and similarities, which are rooted in history, geography and culture.
What are the dissimilarities?
1. In both size and proportion the black population of the United States is considerably greater than the UK black population. As regards numbers we are comparing 44.1 million over against 1.9 million; and percentages of national populations of 13.4% as against 3.3%; further, the UK black population includes a considerably higher proportion of people of directly African background. The US black population is 20x higher than the UK.
2. So it is impressive that Britain’s black population has produced an significant number of major international figures such as Steve McQueen, Lewis Hamilton, Naomi Campbell; whilst Samuel L Jackson has complained about the number of top black roles in Hollywood going to Britons (Elba, Boyega, Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o).
3. Because of the diversity of the black British population and the comparatively high level of inter-racial partnerships a black British cultural, as opposed to political, identity is likely to be increasingly both diluted and fragmented.
4. The USA ‘race’ narrative has traditionally focussed on African Americans, though this has diversified over the past few decades with the growth of the Hispanic population (now 18.5%), also seen as disadvantaged.
5. The USA also has a strikingly successful (mostly East) Asian population (5.9%), so that the imposition of ethnic quotas in education has for them been a negative rather than opportunity enhancing development.
6. By contrast the UK black population has been half the size of the largest broad ethnic category, South Asians, sections of whom have achieved significant academic, business and political success.
7. The UK narrative for the past few decades has been dominated by Islam, rather than ‘race’. Thus the debate over the strengths and weaknesses of multi-culturalism have focussed not on black people but on the isolation and alienation of Moslem communities. The rise here of Black Lives Matter since the death of George Floyd has led to a rather swift return to the focus of forty years earlier.
8. The USA has a long history of internal slavery, whilst the UKs post 1947 history has focussed on the entry of migrants to fill jobs at the lower end of the labour market.
9. Thus African Americans cover a wider social range with a substantial middle class community that has developed over time, whereas Britain’s black population has been substantially, though decreasingly, poor and working class.
10. Historically this has led to a range of specifically African American institutions, notably colleges and universities such as Howard, and also churches, which have often been a source of leadership.
11. Distinctive black political leadership has been slower in emerging in the UK because of several of the above factors.
12. ‘Black’ churches in the UK have had a significantly different history, ethos and theology from the USA. The major denominations (New Testament Church of God, Church of God of Prophecy) grew out of white, fundamentalist American missions to the Caribbean, with a strongly negative view of ‘the world’, and therefore with no aspirations for political leadership. In strong contrast ministers of black American churches, especially Baptist or African Methodist Episcopal, have played a decisive role from slavery until the present.
13. UK congregations are much more ethnically integrated than in the USA (given the standard benchmark for integration being 80% or less of the congregation being from one ethnic group). I guess this would be true of the majority of Anglican churches in London (especially if one extends it to those congregations which are over 80% black). Contrary to the common jibe concerning the USA, 11 am on Sunday is not the most segregated hour of the week in the UK.
14. The USA has ghettoes consisting almost entirely of one ethnic group. Whilst in the past the term may have been used for dramatic effect in the UK it has never been true. Localities, including housing estates have always been mixed. Doing youth work in Hackney many years ago I was struck how black young people who seemed to be living in an entirely ‘black’ world in fact knew and were quite positive about white boys, for example having played together in their primary school football team.
15. One mark of such interaction is that ethnically mixed marriages, and children of mixed parentage are far more common in the UK. (See Bi-Racial Britain: a different Way of Looking at Race by Remi Adekoya.
16. The USA has guns, which is significant not only for the number of killings, but also for creating a general atmosphere of fear and violence, not least for police officers going about their work.
17. The USA has seen lynching within living memory, where the intensity of the hatred and gratuitous, deliberate violence bears little comparison with anything on UK soil.
18. The UK had an Empire where gratuitous violence was exercised, as with the response to the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857, or the Mau Mau movement in Kenya in the 1950s.
19. Whilst racist views were explicitly expressed in sections of the United States until recently, generally the United Kingdom has disavowed such expressions. At a popular level, I remember my mother talking to a friend in the late 50s whose son had just started doing National Service and whose closest friend was a black recruit. They both agreed that ‘the colour bar’ was a terrible thing. Such acceptance may have been superficial, but to an extent it was real.
20. Similarly at a political level, Enoch Powell’s political career crashed with his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1966, when similar views were still acceptable and popular in some parts of the United States. But at a less explicit level Margaret Thatcher could boost her support by speaking of the country being ‘swamped’ by immigrants in 1979, and Boris Johnson has upped his profile by writing derisively about burqas.
What are the similarities?
Most of the above factors suggest that racism is not such a serious factor in the UK, but for many black people that creates a negative response. In the CEEC video ‘One’ Esther Prior spoke in a slightly irritated tone about people saying she was fortunate not to be living in the USA (See my blog 13, for 28/01/2021). Considerably more powerfully in the recent Tear Fund webinar marking the anniversary of the death of George Floyd, Professor Tom Wright was strongly rebuked by Professor Robert Beckford for holding a far too benign concept of Britain’s racial identity contrasted with the USA.
Beckford’s charge was of ‘intellectual dishonesty’ and ‘amnesia’ as regards England’s past use of ‘racial terror’, most obviously but by no means exclusively with Caribbean slavery; and of western Christianity being complicit in this entanglement with white supremacy. Dispassionate treatment of our history as an abstract prologue to our present situation instead of engaging in the ‘emotional work’ of fully internalising the horror of what white Britons and Americans have both done in the centuries of slavery disables properly contextualised teaching and ministry by white church leaders today. (See James Cone’s Theology’s Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy, in The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology, ed. By Dwight Hopkins and Edward Antonio). One might further add that slavery in the Caribbean was almost entirely plantation based, whereas in the USA it was partly on more personalised small-holdings, so cumulatively British slaveholding was more brutal than American.
Thus Prior and Beckford share a similar sense, though at different levels, of hostility to English complacency in comparison with the USA; a sense shared in the widespread emphasis on the negative ‘lived experiences’ of black people, deployed, for example, in the hostile response to the meliorative tone of the Sewell Report.
Yet it is still important to seek for an awareness of nuance, a desire to find a balance of shades, rather than stark absolutes in perceiving and contrasting race in Britain and the USA. In this respect BLM: A Voice for Black Briton? (a February 2021 report of a survey conducted by the Henry Jackson Society) provides an illuminating up-to date picture. (Summarised in my blog 17 of 25/02/2021). As regards the central theme of this blog (and providing a fairly precise answer) 58% of Black Britons thought the UK was fundamentally racist, as opposed to the 78% who considered the USA to be so. Even more clearly 57.6% of respondents regarded the UK favourably, set against 10.2% unfavourably; in contrast to 27% seeing the USA favourably and 34.7% unfavourably. As regards ‘Satisfaction with Life’ in Britain Black Britons came out remarkably similar to the General Population, with 38% of Black Britons Very or Fairly Satisfied, and 32.5% Fairly or Very Dissatisfied.
Nonetheless 40% of Black Britons perceived UK Race Relations as being bad. To say that things are even worse elsewhere is a serious evasion of the need to bring about change.
Thanks John.. helpful stuff....I think we need to note that the cultural and media dominance of the USA does play an important role in shaping UK perceptions of race, and maybe Black communities and churches in the UK have strong cultural and family connections across the pond, and indeed on the historic triangle of trade routes which reinforces this for them.
Another nuance is that in the North of England we stil do have some communities with high levels of residential segregation almost as great as in the USA with towns polarised between Pakistani and Indian heritage Muslims and white (mainly working class) groups. Some parishes are up to 80% of one ethnicity. But this often gets lost in the debates over Islamaphobi and interfaith and does not come up in most discusssions of racism. A recent book which I reviewed is helpful here https://williamtemplefoundation.org.uk/blog-review-race-space-multiculturalism/