PublicA comment in an otherwise unrelated post a little while back made me think about how the American domination of English-language social media is distorting the way people see or even talk about the history of British race relations. I'm not really up to a complex, detailed, dense post on this – and I'm no expert anyway – but I'll try to get something down. I happened to read this point of contrast today and it really hit me:
* Black Americans are overwhelmingly likely (80-90%) to be there because their ancestors were trafficked there as slaves.
* Black Britons are overwhelmingly likely to be here because
their ancestors came here as free people.
It's certainly true that many British people, of all races, find the American way of looking at race to be very monolithic. It largely works for the US, because of that statistic. It really doesn't work for the UK, because we simply don't have one background that fits the large majority of our Black citizens. (And because of the importance of class in British discrimination, but that's a post in itself...)
The reason this matters is that the aforementioned US dominance of online discourse provides pressure that people "should" talk about the issue in a way that fits with American sensibilities. But doing that in fact risks
erasure of the distinct history of Black people in Britain.
Not
just Black people, either. Whiteness in itself wasn't necessarily a shield against enslavement in Europe, something I tend to find many Americans find very hard to process. In fact, possibly as many a million Europeans –
including from Cornwall – were taken by Ottoman "Barbary" slavers operating out of North Africa between the 16th and 18th century. Yes, the
very same era when Europeans were taking people as slaves
from Africa – on a more industrialised scale, absolutely. It doesn't fit into a nice, tidy, American social media-shaped box, does it? But it happened.
If someone's family tree has gaps in it because their ancestors disappeared in those Barbary raids, then they must be able to talk about that without needing to add a "disclaimer" about a completely different atrocity. It is also a form of erasure to make out that anyone who brings up the Barbary trade is basically a white nationalist under the skin. Some indeed are, but many are simply talking about their own family heritage. Context matters. Once again, the standard US framework just doesn't work here, and it's harmful when people (often, it has to be said, white American liberals) try to force it to.
One final point, and this returns to Black British history. For Black History Month – which is in
October here – in 2024, a poll was taken which among other things revealed that about twice as many British people (of all races) knew about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott as knew about the
Bristol bus boycott which happened in their own country and helped bring about modern equalities legislation. I only knew about it myself because I have family roots in Bristol. But again, it bothers me that we've made a US event our "standard" example when the background to that boycott – beyond the shared central factor of institutionalised racism – was really quite different.
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loganberrybunny
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