The Case for African Caribbean Exceptionalism. # 204. 24/06/2025.

Out of Many, One People

Welcome. As ever, I am flying my opinions. Have they caught the wind, or should they be shot down?

The Case for African Caribbean Exceptionalism.

Any first-hand experience of multi-ethnic Britain will show the confusion and misunderstanding caused by bulking together all ethnic minorities under the label of BAME (the topic of my first blog) or more latterly UKME/GMH. The recent Policy Exchange report ‘A Portrait of Modern Britain: Ethnicity and Religion’ (Blog #198) argued against it forcefully, and implied that it was only sustained for strategic political reasons. Black writers at opposite poles of the political spectrum (Kehinde Andrews, blog #139 and Tony Sewell blog #152) have argued against it). But here I want to push the argument into further and more contested territory (and in passing apologise to African Caribbean friends who find my exploration unfairly negative or just out of touch). That is, I want to argue that for a variety of reasons Britain’s African Caribbean population has unique and specific characteristics which sets it apart from other ethnic groups. Some of those reasons are fairly straightforward, but others – as the discussion proceeds - more controversial.

1. African Caribbeans are the original and ‘normative’ ethnic minority.

The arrival of SS Windrush in 1948 is rightly heralded as an historical turning point. People from many parts of the world had settled and lived in Britain over the previous centuries. But Windrush inaugurated the process of large-scale immigration driven by the pull of Britain’s seemingly still unfulfilled labour needs; paralleled (though often unrecognised by contemporaries) by migration into Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, or rural/urban, south/north migration in the USA and Italy).

‘Race relations’ in the 50s and early 60s were essentially relationships between working class English people and working class people from the Caribbean who had moved into such areas. This phase still affects much thinking about race and racial justice. But the reality is that people of Caribbean background form a decreasing proportion of England and Wales black population. The Policy Exchange report ‘A Portrait of Moden Britain: Ethnicity and Religion’ (hereafter PE, reviewed in blog # 199) reports that in the 2001Census 50% of black people were Black Caribbean, by 2021 just 26%. PE comments: ‘Interestingly, this has occurred alongside the increasing cultural recognition of the arrival of the Empire Windrush as the ‘foundation story’ of modern mass migration to the UK. . . It is an important reminder that the true portrait of modern Britain contains a wide diversity of ethnicities, ancestries and experiences.’ (p 36). [When referring to the Report I use their terminology of ‘Black Caribbean.] Thus their proportion of the population dropped from 1.1% to 1% between 2011-21 (p 39), though in absolute numbers 595,000 to 623,000. Meanwhile, the Mixed White/Black Caribbean population has increased from 0.8% to 0.9%, that is, to 513,000. It is estimated that 60% of births to African Caribbean women are from non-African Caribbean men. PE raises: ‘The possibility that the absolute number of British Black Caribbeans is now very much on a downward trajectory’ (p 46). Yet, as the political commentator Mercy Muroki comments “There is a tendency for the “Caribbean experience” to be the reference point when understanding life in “Black Britain”’ (PE, p 122). (My Add On at blog # 199 on ‘Rashford, Saka and Bellingham’ notes the way that three leading English footballers chart the very differing trajectories of ‘black’ people in England).

But continuing distortion is seen in the Church of England. Apart from one brief exception all the heads of the Church of England’s Committee on Minority Ethnic Concerns (CMEAC) have had Caribbean backgrounds – initially it was the Committee for Black Concerns. So too ‘black theology’ in Britain is very much the work of theologians of Caribbean background (Anthony Reddie, Robert Beckford, Joe Aldred, Selina Stone). Further not only do Africans increasingly outnumber Black Caribbeans in England, but also it would seem that loyalty to Christianity, and indeed the Church of England, is holding up better with African migrants in contrast to the large scale lapsing and alienation amongst migrants from the Caribbean. Thus the Christian faith of Africans is likely to be far more significant for the Church.

2. African Caribbeans are the most like/unlike ethnic minority.

In the immediate post-Windrush period there were good reasons to expect Caribbean migrants to fit seamlessly into English society. English was their home language, in contrast to the growing arrival of people from South Asia. Unlike them also, their main religion was Christianity. Both groups shared a deep devotion to cricket, with the West Indies buccaneering three Ws batsmen (Worrell, Weekes and Walcott) and their subtle spin bowlers Ramadin and Valentine finding an affectionate place in English hearts, notably through song of the Calypsonian Lord Beginner. Meanwhile from the Caribbean direction migration was seen as a continuation of the war effort to help the ‘Mother Country’, whilst Barbadians prided themselves on the epithet of ‘Little England’.

It didn’t work out so happily. Racial hostility broke out into anti-migrant riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958. Specifically racist exclusion from housing and jobs, especially as regards promotion, a wider cultural climate of disdain, patronage and disrespect poisoned the prospects of just and harmonious integration. Paradoxically, the strong expectation of ‘coming home’ – far greater than with South Asian migrants – made the actual experience of exclusion and rejection far more embittering and alienating. In response the foci of Caribbean identity, whether with the flourishing of expressive, Pentecostal churches, or with the growth of ‘blues’ parties strengthened by the surging creativity of reggae music, led to increasing separation. At the far end of identity, Rastafarianism’s creation of new and powerful visual, behavioural, verbal and religious expressions served the children of migrants with a wholescale black refusal of Englishness. By having their expected ‘likeness’ to England rejected, a dynamic was created that augmented all the marks of ‘unlikeness’ available from African heritage and life in the plantation villages.

The like/unlike dynamic plays out in Black Caribbean attitudes. On the hand, according to the PE Report, Black Caribbean people amongst ethnic minorities still show quite a ‘High Sense of Britishness’ – 33%, much higher than Chinese or African people, though lower than the national level of 40% (p 113). On the other hand, they show notably lower levels of trust in British democracy and politicians than the high level of other minorities, though White British respondents are almost as negative. Perhaps this reflects both that Black Caribbean people have a higher degree of ‘social mixing’ than other ethnic minorities, and also less immediate experience of undemocratic and corrupt governance in their countries of origin (PE, p 95)

3. African Caribbeans bear the consequences of deep-seated and brutal enslavement and racism.

Virtually all non-white ethnic minorities in England come from areas that have been dominated by Britain, or other Europeans. The disruption of traditional ways of life, and loss of political and economic control have been usual; white racism and arrogance have been a common experience. Nonetheless there has been legitimate debate from Margery Perham’s Reith Lectures ‘The Colonial Reckoning ; (1961) to Nigel Biggar’s ‘Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning’ (reviewed at blog # 109) as to the damage and the benefit of colonial rule. Clearly the Black Caribbean history of enslavement allows no such debate. Absolute power often led to absolute brutality, at best only ever ameliorated by humane concern or the economic necessity of maintaining a functioning slave population. Whilst the evils elicited by enslavement could be seen as merging with brutal episodes in the history of British colonialism, nonetheless the easy over-simplification of conflating ‘slavery and colonialism’ as twin evils is distorting. African Caribbean people are heir to a passage of history unequalled in its brutality and enduring in its consequences. Alongside the everyday physical drudgery and frequent sadism went the loss of a shared language and the undermining of cultural identity.

Compared to other forms of colonial rule, slavery in the Caribbean was unique in the psychic and cultural damage it inflicted. Tony Sewell quotes poet James Berry poet: ‘We had no sense of history. I played on the ruins of the old slave mill and didn't know what it was. There was such a strong shame of slavery. There was no process of handing anything down. The world of my father was his machete, his donkey and his land. I had no idea about my ancestors and what happened to them. At school we had no black heroes’. Yet also from the ‘ruins’ there emerged a resilience, defiance and humanity that has touched the inner lives pf people around the world, notably through Jamaican music. Sewell quotes Derek Walcott’s Nobel Laureate acceptance speech: ‘Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for peace is broken off from the original continent’(in ‘Black Success, pp 188 & 225).

The moral crime of slavery was the attempt to destroy people’s inherited culture and in doing so to deny their intrinsic worth. As I have argued, the case for reparations can not be based on artificially denying the complexities of the passage of time and attempting to create some sort of ‘objective’ valuation of the unpaid labour, but rather simply as a token of shame – which is impossible of quantification - for the evils we committed as a nation and were for so long complicit in as a church. A sign of apology and sorrow offered to descendants whose collective historical memory still bears the scars of their forbears’ degradation. As with any apology, the recipients have the freedom of choosing how they respond to it.

Of more immediate consequence is the harm done to those who have migrated to Britain over the past seventy-seven years. That explicit racism occurred is beyond doubt, as also the accumulating damage to well-being and health through the personal humiliation of disparagement, rejection and the denial of fair opportunities. It is notable that the long years of complaint at racist treatment by the police were publicly vindicated in 1999 by the Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence. So too complaints against official racism were also vindicated when the so-called ‘Windrush scandal’ denied citizenship to people who had lived, studied and worked here since childhood and which indicated an appalling and racist implacability in failing to respond to clear injustices.

Whilst Tomiwa Owolade’s ‘This is not America’ importantly underlines the difference between Britain and the USA (reviewed at blog #125, see also my blog # 35), his West African background causes him to overlook a very significant connection – unlike West Africans, black Americans and British African Caribbeans shared the decisive and formative experience of several centuries of brutal enslavement. Tony Sewell has remarked that black Africans don’t carry same ‘historical baggage’ as Caribbean people (“Black Success’, p 144).

All ethnic minorities, even white ones, will experience some degree of racism in this country, even if the overall incidence is declining. Nonetheless African Caribbean negative experience is unique in both the traumatising brutality of their history, and of being the first wave of migrants to break upon the rocks of insular racial arrogance, made more unsettling by the assumption that they had been coming home.

4. African Caribbeans are the most un-fathered ethnic minority.

Take the following syllogism:

a) Growing up without a father leads to a wide range of negative outcomes, particularly for boys

b) Growing up without a father in the home is particularly common for African Caribbean young people.

a + b) The African Caribbean population is marked by a wide range of negative outcomes

To expand:

a) A range of studies have indicated that fatherlessness is linked to alcohol abuse, drug abuse, truancy in school, incarceration, and mental health difficulties – all among young boys, in particular. As one example: 76% of young people in custody had an absent father (Centre for Social Justice).

b) 63% of Black Caribbean children under 15 live with one parent. This is considerably higher than the next groups: Black Africans 43%, White and Black Caribbean 41%. With White British the figure is 19%, but ethnicity statistics do not disaggregate for social class. In fact, there is a marked class divergence in family structure. Of children aged 3 in the poorest 20% in the country, 21% are living with two parents as opposed to a massive 81% living with just one parent.

Disentangling the reciprocal relationship between poverty and single parenthood may be complex, but whatever the pressure that poverty may add to other cultural factors that leads to children being brought up without a father, the consequences are obvious: the child’s future is likely to be marked by a host of negative features. Historically upward mobility into a more secure and prosperous future has been enhanced by growing up in the security of a two parent family. The casual dismissal of this not only by our culture but even by many in the church (as in the woeful Archbishops’ Families and Households Commission ‘Love Matters’ Report) simply entrenches disadvantage rather than providing a solution

a + b) Therefore because of its exceptionally high level of absent fathers, the very largely working-class African Caribbean community will be marked by disadvantage across a wide range of indices. As the preceding section has recognised racism is a factor in leading to poor outcomes for Black Caribbean people, but full weight must be given to the curse of fatherlessness, which damages the life outcomes of both white low income families and also Black Caribbean ones. Community leaders, politicians, academics and church bodies which refuse to be explicit on this issue are therefore very much part of the problem rather than the solution. Jarel Robinson-Brown criticism of the concern for ‘respectability’ amongst African Caribbean people is in fact devaluing the proven route to social progress.

As a curate in Harlesden I saw rapid growth of children’s and youth work as we contacted stable ‘Windrush generation’ families with five, six or seven children. It has been sad to see those children themselves so often fail to form stable or lasting relationships, with the next generation growing up in a world of instability and social disfunction. (The contrast with the economic and spiritual progress of second generation Sri Lankan Tamils is particularly marked). Whatever measures may be taken, and ought to be taken, to counter and reduce racism in Britain, the hard fact is that the overall Black Caribbean population will be marked by a range of negative outcomes until there is a dramatic change in the pattern of parenting. As PE recognises, it would require ‘fundamental cultural change’ for this to happen, and that ‘A more family-centred government policy agenda would need to be complemented by cultural sea-change encouraged by traditional-minded elements of civil society’ (p 129). Quite simply churches and Christian leaders that are not seeking to bring about that change – however strong their anti-racist and racial justice agendas – are simply betraying the future well being of the Black Caribbean population.

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Poem: The Funeral of Barbara Cox

Black cassock, white surplice.

White minister, black congregation.

Almost only the two, all caught between life and death.

The men hover in the background, quietly smoking, ill at ease.

No hymn sheets received to sing from.

The women gather round the grave. Secure in their role

Wells of sorrow raising up their voices.

Wells full of much else alongside death.

Freed to express pain, they speak for all.

Yet in channels prescribed as much as chosen.

And myself?

Never, thus far, truly bereaved.

Hearing a pain but not forever lived with.

The strong, secure words now finished.

Left to improvise as best I can.

To seek connections across great gulfs.

Glad for small links of shared humanity,

Yet conscious too of much unspoken –

Still more of pain, injustice, anger, fear.

And of death’s hard finality.

John Root 1972