Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain (Video)
- - [Melissa Chomintra] Next up from the Department of Communication,
- we have Mohan Ambikaipaker.
- - [Mohan Ambikaipaker] Sure.
- -Come on.
- -It is a hard act to follow
- beautiful pieces of music and Amy's is beautiful voice.
- I was already lost in the second one.
- I'm getting that second CD.
- Congratulations Amy.
- -[Amy Pfrimmer] Thank you. -It's gorgeous.
- My topic isn't so gorgeous and isn't so beautiful.
- It's the darker side of human nature, if you will.
- But I teach in the Department of Communication,
- but I'm trained as an anthropologist.
- And so the work that I did and wrote up, you know, is an ethnography
- which combines elements of storytelling as well as, you know,
- rigorous, theoretical analysis and things of that nature.
- I tried very hard in the massive rewrite of,
- you know, of the work to pitch it
- more towards a accessible tone, you know, so that the stories and narratives
- undergirded by the theory and analysis came, came forth.
- I was really helped a lot that the, the
- publishers were also very invested in this direction.
- And so the manuscript was actually sent to a New York Times bestseller,
- writer Pamela Hag, who is also an editor.
- And she, you know, went through--her job, was not to offer any,
- you know, academic input, but just to look at the book as, as a book.
- And, you know, this is where academics could really learn a lot from writers.
- And I'll give you this funny story
- like I'm going to read a piece from the prelude.
- In--about when it was in its original form,
- the prelude was about 50 pages, you know, and
- Pamela wrote back and said, Mohan, the book is a series of convention,
- conventions and 50 pages is not a prelude, you know.
- [audience laughter]
- And I thought, I have to hit all of, you know, cover myself so that,
- you know, my, my colleagues in the field, you know, won't be able to tear it down.
- And it is like, no, it has to be a prelude, you know?
- So I should ask Amy about the definition of preludes before undertaking it.
- The prelude is very succinct now and compact.
- But to give you a little bit of the background of the work,
- so I study race and race relations,
- and I went to the U.K. to look at the ways in which racial and ethnic minorities
- in the east London borough of London-- sorry, the east London borough of Newham,
- you know, worked to confront the kinds
- of racial violence and state violence that they were experiencing.
- And Newham, you know, is a very diverse borough.
- It's probably now I think it's like the third most diverse borough,
- but at the time that I was doing my work was probably like the most diverse
- municipality in all of the U.K., with people
- coming from different parts of Britain's former empire, you know, who
- had rights to come and settle, you know, in the U.K.
- So the, the discourse around immigration today often imagines
- that people who come from Jamaica, Trinidad, India, Pakistan are immigrants.
- But if you if you just think a little bit about history, you know,
- the British Empire covered a quarter of the Earth's landmass,
- and most of the people in these countries were British subjects.
- And what that meant, even as recently as the 1948
- British Nationality Act, is that they were citizens,
- they were imperial citizens of Britain with rights
- to come and work and settle in Britain.
- Britain just didn't expect people to exercise that right.
- [audience laughter]
- And hence there was a series of multiple, you know, waves of racial panics
- and the closing of the doors to what was called Commonwealth immigration,
- but not before substantial communities had already solidified
- and taken shape in many parts of the UK.
- If we go to London now, I think that's almost self-evident.
- But the process of settling and finding a place in the UK
- as a result of the kinds of transformations, you know,
- that Britain had from being an empire, and empires
- usually tried to incorporate difference 'cause they're trying to manage
- vast swaths of lands and cultural formations and different groups of people
- to then being kind of a defensive nation state in its post-colonial
- tran--transformation as it was losing its empire.
- You know, is the process that turns people who are once
- British subjects into interlopers in society, right.
- And this is met through a broad spectrum
- of discourses, including, you know, policy discourses on one hand,
- but also discourses of violence on the other hand.
- And there is a connectivity between these two ends of the spectrum, right.
- The very materials out of which this transformation occurs,
- you know, feeds the imagination that empowers and licenses
- and mobilizes people to also enact
- racial violence, racial harassment on the street, and also transforms
- people who are citizens into suspicious subjects
- that need surveillance, you know, with the state
- that then puts them in proximity to, to receiving state violence
- in the form of police abuse and things of that nature.
- So what I wanted to do was a work of anthropology
- that didn't simply try to extract the stories of suffering.
- You know, that I knew what was happening, but I wanted to insert myself
- in the politics of ethnography
- in a--in an empathetic and as well, partisan position.
- You know, I wanted to see not only what was going to happen
- when people were confronting racial and state
- violence, which is also something that we are familiar with in the--
- in the U.S., but also what happens after they experience this.
- Because, you know, if these were individuals' actions of lone
- racists or rogue policemen, you know, then one would expect
- that a liberal democratic system would have the mechanisms of justice
- to restore or find remedy for people who have suffered these injustices.
- But--and I thought initially in my kind of like,
- you know, youthful hubris, that all it required was, you know, somebody
- really dedicated and smart to go like, you know, work in these areas.
- And we would be able to wrest justice you know, just that people were apolitical
- and not dedicated enough.
- And that's why things didn't quite get where they need to be.
- So I became a caseworker for a grassroots organization
- after doing a stint at the Runnymede Trust of race relations, which was like
- a top down think tank body on race relations in the UK.
- We largely were listened to whenever the Labor Party was in government
- and never heard from if the Conservative Party was in government.
- But we used to have the, the years of the, the Labor Party.
- We used to come up with reports and do briefings in,
- in Parliament around these topics,
- but I decided to go from there and work at an a grassroots organization
- where I became a caseworker for people
- who were suffering from police abuse and racial attacks.
- I became their advocate and in part through agreement and consensus, you know,
- I was both going to be the caseworker and also document
- what happened in the process as people who suffered these events,
- you know, tried to get justice in the UK.
- And the story that I have is not a very happy story.
- It's not a very successful story.
- Most of the times, you know, justice was hard to find.
- And the sites that are set up
- for providing justice around these cases ended up
- being secondary sites for revictimizing, you know, the, the victims.
- And this was a surprise because in one--in--on, on paper, Britain actually
- is so much better than the US around this these questions, you know.
- For example, you know, the term institutional racism
- which we often hear in the US,
- which was coined by, you know, like a radical group like the Black Panthers,
- you know, is actually a--an item of law in the UK.
- Institutional racism enters the criminological code,
- you know, after the Royal MacPherson inquiry delivers
- its report on the failure of state agencies to provide equal and adequate
- service to the family of Stephen Lawrence, the Afro-Caribbean boy
- who was knifed to death at a bus stop, and the verdict
- of this parliamentary inquiry was to deem
- the Metropolitan Police of London to be institutionally racist.
- You know, and that is such a powerful concept
- that that we lacked in American jurisprudence.
- If you try to prove discrimination in America, in American jurisprudence,
- and certainly under the Roberts court, believe me, your task is really high.
- If you want to convict a police officer for, for racism,
- you know, and or for a racial use of fatal violence, in the United States,
- you have to do two things concurrently.
- You have to show, one, that they had an intent to discriminate
- on the day that they committed the offense.
- And you have to have evidence providing that they had the intent to discriminate.
- So a recording saying that they wanted to go kill black people in the morning
- would be an evidence of the intent to discriminate.
- And secondly, you have to prove that their perception of the threat
- that they saw was unreasonable.
- Right. And this is important.
- It's the perception of the threat, not the threat itself.
- So like in the Michael Brown case in St. Louis,
- you know, like if there if there's if a police officer says
- there's a big black guy waving arms in front of me and I perceived the threat,
- it did not require that threat to be real.
- It just required it to be reasonable.
- And you have to prove these two things at the same time.
- But anyway, I thought Britain would be a better
- scenario and it didn't turn out to be a better scenario.
- It turned out to be as challenging
- as the scenario in the UK--in the US, and I guess
- the book is the opportunity to sort of dig in to how that, you know, narrates.
- I'm going to do a very quick reading. Can I or am I out of time?
- - [Courtney Kearney] You know--yeah. -Very quick reading. Okay.
- Let me see. Okay.
- "'Black people were called 'gollywogs'; It was awful,' Amina continued.
- "'But-people used to come around, though! To have my mom's cooking.
- "She was such a fantastic cook,' Amina said breaking into a smile again.
- "'And Dad used to do odd jobs for people around here.
- "He was such a good gardener,' she added.
- "Amina grew up in East London in the 1970s and 80s
- "when hers was one of only three South Asian families in her school.
- "There was also one African Caribbean family.
- "'I remember song that comes to mind.
- "It was 'Ding dong the bells are ringing, we are going a-Paki-bashing!'
- "The people upstairs, they were singing it
- "And you know we were probably the cleanest family there.
- "I mean, they talk about Asians being smelly and all,
- "but we were the cleanest family there. Simply ridiculous.
- "My dad did not see himself as a black man other people-they just see a wog...
- "I mean, when push comes to shove,
- "they make everyone a Paki or a black bastard.
- "To them you're not white, so you're all these other things
- "because you're not white and because they are superior.'
- "Despite the racism he experienced,
- "Amina's father did not want to isolate himself or his family.
- "He took a 'liberal' approach, Amina explained.
- "He allowed his daughters to dress as they please and to mix widely.
- "Amina describe her social circle growing up
- "as comprising people from many different racial backgrounds,
- "which included many white British friends from school.
- "Amina married her son's father, a white man, who had also converted
- "to her family's Islamic faith.
- "The marriage had not worked out and she had recently divorced the husband.
- "In contrast to the stereotypes of British Asians and Muslims as self-segregate,
- "segregating communities, Amina pointed to her own cosmopolitan family:
- "one of the sisters was married to a black Grenadian man;
- "another was married to a Pakistani man;
- "and another had married a man from South Africa and emigrated there.
- "She describe the openness of her upbringing
- "and how her parents had taught her not to look down on anybody.
- "She remember her father telling her, 'You've got to take people as they come.'
- "According to Amina her father initially didn't care about the racism he faced.
- "'He would go down to a local pub and have drinks with people,
- "play darts, and even bowled'
- "Victoria Park, near where Amina lived as a child, had a lawn bowling club.
- "But it did not allow Afro-Caribbean or South Asian people to play.
- "And yet she remembered
- "how her father would simply enter uninvited and join in the games.
- "One day, however, Mr. Azlan's nonchalance reached its breaking point.
- "'Well, the people who lived above us, in the flat above,
- "they used to call my dad names.
- "Racial comments and stuff like that,' Amina said.
- "'My dad would always stick up for himself and his family,
- "you know, protect his family and whatnot,' she added.
- "'We came home from school one day, well, I came home from nursery
- "and my elder sisters came home from school.
- "Our mum was walking with us, and we could see smoke coming out.
- "They had put all our things, well, all my dad's things
- "in the middle of the room, poured something on there and set them on fire
- and wrote 'Paki' on the wall and things like that."
- I'll just stop there, thank you.
- [audience applause]