Pity Black History Month UK, assailed on all sides. Those on the right seek to end the celebration on the basis that it amounts to special treatment for a group that doesn’t deserve it. History should be colour-blind: society should not differentiate, they say. We are not racist, we just want fairness. But often, they are – and they really don’t.
On the other side of the argument are the progressives, notably minority progressives, who say the idea of a month to consider Black history is demeaning because it should already have a year-round place in our teaching and consciousness. There is a further view that any beneficial effect the month once had has been diluted by unimaginative repetition and commercially motivated virtue signalling. Players taking the knee in the Premier League? Been there, done that: yawn!
I have long taken the glass-half-full approach. The ideal would be for Black history to be incorporated into the social and educational culture – and perhaps one day it will be. But in the meantime, I’ll take a mandated, month-long focus on the Black contribution to the way our society has evolved. And it seems very necessary this year, when the very notion of belonging in Britain and other major western countries has been so under attack.
A year in which we have clearly seen that a political party, with pretensions to lead the country, attracts activists with ugly racist and nativist views – at national and local level – with the same efficiency that magnets attract iron filings. Our expectations are different now. When transcripts of the things Reform folk say in private reach the public domain, the old-fashioned Tory dog-whistle seems comparatively quaint.
This is a year in which we have again seen the confidence and daring of those who cuddle close to pseudo-scientific theories asserting white superiority and black inferiority. The racial eugenicists are back from the fringes, championed down their venal path by Donald Trump, whose leadership of the free world gladhands nativists, targets Black officials and routinely belittles Black enemies as “low IQ”.
It’s been a year in which toxic politics and the mainstreaming of intolerance – against minorities of many categories – has led to racist unpleasantness on our streets and in the workplace. There is a snapshot from the Royal College of Nursing: racist abuse of NHS nurses – including use of the N-word – up 86% in the recent past. All part of what one NHS official called “a rising tide of racism”.
Another snapshot of the increasingly hostile environment is from parliament. What happened, via social media, when Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy posted a video in support of Black History Month? Vile abuse, of course: “Some of a kind that I had not necessarily seen in that volume before. I had people calling me the N-word, people telling me to eff-off and go back to where I came from, and people sending monkey photographs.”
Another snapshot from Chichester, Sussex, where a diverse group of actors recently went to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream and were shamefully menaced. “I don’t know if I have witnessed and/or experienced as much racism, xenophobia and homophobia as I saw in those six weeks,” said the actor and comedian Munya Chawawa. Britain is a good place. The vast majority of our fellow citizens are decent and kind. But it’s now easy, far too easy, to unwittingly enter hostile territory.
So in years like this, when there are obvious, concerted, targeted, and well-funded attempts to undermine Black people and the Black experience – not least the targeting of books by Black authors by “anti woke” crusaders – it becomes more difficult to be sanguine about concepts such as Black History Month. It then becomes a good thing, perhaps an essential one, to remember and to highlight – if only over a calendar month – who we are, who has shaped us and how we have indisputably helped to shape Britain as a vibrant, diverse, first world power.
Today, at the end of this Black History Month, Guardian Opinion has asked Black Britons representing four generations to tell us how their own Black British identities have evolved, for we have been here long enough now to compare notes on the different stages of our lives on this island. A twentysomething sees the joy and pain of being here very differently to their elderly siblings, to their parents, to their grandparents.
after newsletter promotion
Call it reflection with a purpose. In a time like this, it seems more vital than ever to know who we were, who we are – and the foundations on which we all stand.
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
