The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  As you’d expect, a lot of the recent cultural ferment associated with black London happens much closer to street level. You feel that energy when you page through some of the black newspapers, like the weekly Voice (which claims to have two hundred thousand readers) and the more bourgie New Nation (which has been publishing only since November and hopes to reach thirty thousand). And you feel it even in the crudely satiric Skank, which is produced by and addressed to younger blacks. Skank has a less than reverential attitude toward black celebrities (devoting an entire page to the splayed nostrils of the Birmingham-based black boxer Chris Eubank, which it likens to King Kong’s); and it spoofs such historic episodes of black resistance as the 1981 Brixton riots, by offering “the Brixton Riots ’95 role playing game.” (“Feel the tension as you try to light that petrol bomb! Feel your pulse race as you try to find a hiding place for that brand new 48 inch Dolby stereo, laser color TV and video you happily found lying in Dixons!”) Then, there was a scabrous cartoon sequence entitled “Lunch Box Christie,” which focused on the runner Linford Christie’s supposedly outsized endowment. (Christie sued the magazine, but only because the cartoon also implied that he took drugs to increase his athletic performance.)

  Skank is published by the X Press, which is otherwise exclusively a book-publishing house. The press’s founder, Dotun Adebayo, was born in Nigeria and came to the U.K. when he was six; his father taught physics at the University of London, though he has since retired and returned to Nigeria. The Adebayos are a textbook story of upward mobility: during one period, Dr. Adebayo had five children at university in England at the same time. Dotun Adebayo himself studied philosophy at the University of Essex; his brother Diran, a successful novelist, attended Oxford. Dotun Adebayo, like others of his generation, has a strong sense of mission—the familiar first-generation drive to fulfill the longings of the immigrant parents. “I drive a very old car, but it happens to be a Jaguar,” he told me. “The reason I have it is my father, and his dream. He always wanted a Jaguar XJ-6. My father came back over to this country recently, and I didn’t even tell him I had this car, I just told him I’d pick him up. He was so proud. He said, ‘Ah Dotun. When I lived in England, I always wanted this car.’ It didn’t matter that he’d spent thirty years here without achieving what he wanted to achieve—he had actually achieved it for the next generation. So that the onus is now on us to do something.”

  Adebayo’s first big score as a book publisher was Victor Headley’s “Yardie”—pulp fiction about Jamaican gangster life. “Basically, we postered the whole of Brixton,” he recalls. “You woke up one morning and everywhere you looked in Brixton it said ‘Yardie.’ Within a few weeks, we’d sold thousands and thousands of copies.” The X Press has now published fifty-one titles, most by black British authors, and most delightfully lurid and action-packed. (The titles include “Rude Gal,” “Curvy Love-box,” and “The Ragga and the Royal.”) The success of these books shows that there is a black reading public—though Adebayo would argue that black London is something that is in the process of being created. “You need to go outside London and see the other inner cities, and then you will realize there is a black London,” he told me. “The black people in Manchester are Mancunians first. Black people second. There’s no link point over there. In the circles I move in—and I move in circles from ragamuffin kids to intellectuals, or what have you—there is definitely an urge to create a black London.”

  In the main, the black London that existed in the sixties and seventies was bound by what Stuart Hall calls a “transistor culture”—by certain kinds of music and the radio stations that played them. Though blacks in Britain have always been known for the music they brought with them from the islands (like ska and reggae and its rougher offspring, ragga), it is only relatively recently that these musical styles have evolved beyond their precursors. Today, the mores of the black British club scene have drifted far from those island moorings.

  You can get a sense of just how far at Rampage, a movable feast held one recent Friday at the S.W.1 Club, near Victoria Station. By a quarter past ten, there’s already a line of young working-class blacks all the way down the block and around the corner. They queue relatively quietly, chatting in small groups. Inside the small foyer, everyone is halted for a serious security check, scanned by metal detectors and thoroughly patted down by bouncers with headsets. Then they pay their eight pounds cover charge and proceed up a flight of steps and into a large rectangular room. It is furnished sparely, with just a few tables and chairs—nowhere near enough to accommodate a crowd that will grow to a thousand or more by midnight, but by then everybody will be bumping and grinding to Garage and House, hip-hop, Jungle, and even some R & B. At first, men face each other, dancing, but in postures that are menacing rather than erotic. It’s as if they were shadowboxing to the heavy bass beat. Few couples dance together; instead, the genders divide and watch each other, with the men engaged in active display. A man moves in and out of another man’s space, mimicking and exaggerating the other’s moves. Again, it’s pretend sparring; occasionally a shoulder knocks a shoulder.

  The hair stylist Daniel (“Er, I still use ‘Daniel X,’” he says sheepishly, “but my friends tell me it’s such a cliché”) fluently explains the vitality of the popular music scene to me. “I was really disturbed when I first heard Jungle, because they took some of my favorite reggae tunes and just speeded them up,” he says. “The vocals sounded like Mickey Mouse. I was like ‘That tune’s sacred! How dare you play it at that speed?’ They’d double the speed, sample stuff, then put a chant over it, like ‘I’ll kill your mother.’ It took me a little while to come around.” Now Daniel speaks of Jungle music with the zeal of a convert. He distinguishes with scholastic precision between Jungle (the drum-and-bass kind of thing that has crossed over, to the point where fifty-year-old David Bowie has a couple of Jungle tracks on his new album) and Jungle Jungle, which remains hard-core and all black. But that’s not the point. The point is that Daniel himself is about to put out a Jungle track in a couple of months, on his label, Ticking Time Records. Daniel sees a musical world rife with possibility; and should he fail there are multitudes behind him.

  In no small measure, black culture simply is youth culture in London today. Bizarre as it first seems, speaking with a Jamaican inflection has become hip among working-class white kids. If blacks are only 1.6 per cent of the population, the percentage of wiggers—white wannabes—seems considerably higher. It would be a mistake, though, to come to any hasty conclusions. Imitation and enmity have an uncanny ability to coexist. Paul Gilroy, a leading theorist of black British culture, and a professor at Goldsmiths’ College, at the University of London, tells me about white skinheads who beat up blacks and then go home and listen to the rap group Public Enemy. It’s as if they can’t decide whether they want to bash blacks or be blacks.

  And there you have the central contradictions of post-Thatcherite England: the growing cultural prominence of black culture there doesn’t mean that racism itself has much abated. The police recently bugged the apartment of the young white thugs suspected of killing a seventeen-year-old black student, Steven Lawrence, and found them hashing over various ways of killing blacks—even demonstrating the right moves with their kitchen knives. Just last week, a report by the Office for Public Management found that the Royal Navy has “a level of awareness of cultural diversity which is 10 or 20 years behind that of society at large and which can reasonably be said to constitute institutional racism.” The same investigation concluded that in the R.A.F. blacks are routinely excluded from honor-guard or V.I.P. details: “An unwritten rule summarized as ‘no blacks, Pakis, spots or specs’ governed basic assumptions about how things should ‘really’ or ‘normally’ be.”

  Nor are the better-off necessarily better disposed. At a dinner party at a Suffolk manor house, a group of fairly well-to-do Englishmen discuss their hopes and fears for postelection Britain while a fly-on-the-wall documentary-maker named Paul Wa
tson films the group he has convened. The guests—a sales director at a real-estate company, a Lloyds insurance broker, a restaurant owner, and so forth—talk spiritedly about, inter alia, the disagreeableness of blacks. (“I would encourage the black minorities to move back to their country of origin,” one says.) Controversy ensues when the documentary is shown on Channel 4, but the participants have few regrets: one of them, a baronet’s son named Henry Erskine-Hill, says, “I would think our opinions are representative of the views of a great many people.” Erskine-Hill was asked by a newspaper if he was a racist. “It depends what you mean by racism,” he sagely replied.

  What’s clear is that British identity itself remains, as Stuart Hall would say, a contested space. A few years ago, Norman Beresford Tebbit, who was one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers and a onetime chairman of the Tory Party, complained that when Britain’s cricket team played one of the West Indian teams “our blacks” tended to root for the wrong side. How could they be truly British if they weren’t rooting for the British team? And it’s perfectly true that most black Brits fail the so-called Tebbit test; collective allegiances don’t always align themselves altogether neatly. In Britain, the challenge is to figure out a vocabulary for addressing the intersections of racial and national identities.

  “The trouble is, all of our language on race and race relations has always been borrowed from the United States, and there are reasons why that’s wrong,” Trevor Phillips, a longtime television broadcaster and producer, complains to me, in crisp Oxford English with just the faintest lilt to it. (He spent his childhood between Guyana and North London.) “Effectively, Caribbean Americans behave in the United States as classical immigrants do and succeed as classical immigrants do—Koreans, say. Here we behave like black Americans in northern cities. Our experience is just the same as that of the blacks who migrated from the South to Chicago—all the way down to welfare dependency, and so forth.”

  The statistics are pretty dire. The unemployment rate among Afro-Caribbeans in Britain is around twenty-five per cent, and in some parts of London it’s closer to fifty per cent. The fraction that belongs to the professional class is only two per cent. Despite the fact that Afro-Caribbeans make up only 1.2 per cent of the population, moreover, a recent survey indicated that there may be as many as sixty-one thousand racially motivated assaults against Afro-Caribbeans over the course of a year.

  Phillips, a man whose velvety burnt-sienna skin is accented by copper-framed glasses, is the chairman of the Runnymede Trust, and is regarded by many black Brits as a leading cultural broker. As influential as he is at present, he is likely to become more so in the near future. For one thing, he’s a friend of Tony Blair’s and is said to be in line for a position of some importance. Rumor has him as the chairman of the London Arts Board—or even, once the city’s council system of governance is overhauled, as mayor. The possibility of his being raised to a peerage has also been mentioned. Perhaps not surprisingly for such an insider, he doesn’t see how separatist ideologies will ever prosper among English blacks. “I think most black people in this country are embarrassed by the idea of being separate,” he says. “Our neighbors don’t come to lynch us, by and large. And, you know, we go out with their daughters, for Christ’s sake.” The saving grace of a class-bound society, after all, is that the right class credentials can often override other obstacles.

  “The one thing that saves me on the street with the police,” Dotun Adebayo tells me, “is they hear my accent and then they think, Hang on, this isn’t your typical black bus driver or minicab driver, and take you a bit more seriously. And class is distinguished more by the way you speak than by anything else. In fact, the most tangible racism you’ll find here is from the working classes. They’re the ones who are going to fight you on the street. Whereas with the middle classes it can be ‘Oh, gosh, you went to Oxford as well? Oh, jolly good.’” The novelist Caryl Phillips, who grew up between St. Kitts and England, where he studied at Cambridge, tidily describes the relationship between sociolect and skin color: “In the States, until I open my mouth I look as if I fit in. In Britain, it’s only when I open my mouth that I fit in.”

  That situation can lead to some cultural contortions. Yvonne Brewster, the artistic director of the black theatre company Talawa and a recent O.B.E. (“for services in the arts”), tells me about what she dubs “the raffia ceiling.” She says, “Linford Christie will say to you, ‘I cannot drive my Porsche.’ The man is a millionaire, but he could get arrested for stealing the car. That’s why someone like the boxer Chris Eubank dresses up like a kind of antediluvian English toff, with plus fours and a monocle, so he is easily identifiable. You know, there’s method to his madness. Even if they stop him with his Mercedes-Benz, they say, ‘Ah, it’s Chris Eubank—drive on.’ In this country, there’s absolutely no chance of burning that raffia ceiling. If you put your head above the parapet, you’re likely to get it cut off.”

  For Yvonne Brewster, a member of Jamaica’s “mulatto élite,” there was never anything abstract about the vagaries of race and class in her new country. “My father had two farms, one in Portland and one in St. Thomas, and there was a man who used to do the horses in St. Thomas,” she recalls. “He used to call me Miss Yvonne. Anyway, he came over here as a migrant, because there was no future for him in Jamaica and he didn’t have any education. I was over here studying, and I was at Tottenham Court Road underground station and he saw me and came up and hugged and kissed me.” That the laborer should have presumed on the solidarity of color and acquaintance horrified her, and, in her vulnerable state, she recoiled. “I suppose what flashed through my mind was that in Jamaica this man wouldn’t even come within six feet of me,” she says. “Anyway, I never saw the man again.” She breaks off, and I notice that there are tears in her eyes.

  Yet if the barriers of class seem higher in England, those of race seem far more permeable. I’m always struck by the social ease between most blacks and whites on London streets. I was recently near the Brixton market, across the street from the entrance to its open air section, and two men—tall, coal-black, muscle-bound—came loping toward a small young white woman who was walking by herself in the opposite direction. What happened then was—well, nothing. The needle on the anxiety meter didn’t so much as quiver. Throughout the area, blacks and whites seemed comfortable with one another in a way that most American urbanites simply aren’t and never have been. “The advantage we have here in England is that you are more likely to be accepted for who you are,” one black Londoner tells me. “People don’t judge you by who your partner is or who your friends are. I have this white girlfriend who lives in Brixton. We were going shopping in a market, and I met some Lisson Grovers”—the “ruffneck” denizens of a large housing project—“who had never seen me with a white woman. They took it really well. They were like ‘Yeah, O.K.’” Annie Stewart, the editor of the Voice, says, “I think something like forty per cent of our men have a relationship with a white woman. You find a second generation of blacks here who are more integrated than the first generation.”

  Some of this sense of belonging is simply a result of racial dispersion. The Labour M.P. Bernie Grant points out, “Even in my area, Tottenham, housing is mixed among the various races—blacks are mixed with whites and Asians and people from Cyprus, and it’s all one big cosmopolitan bundle.” Americans who imagine Brixton to be analogous to Harlem are always surprised to see how large its white population is. London is where seventy per cent of Britain’s blacks reside, but its blackest neighborhoods are almost never more than two-thirds black, and usually they’re substantially less.

  All this sounds like a good thing, and yet blacks in London often speak enviously of the salience of race in America. “I love going to New York, because I can walk down the street and the place is full of black people,” says Ekow Eshun, who is the twenty-eight-year-old editor of Arena—a sort of English Details. “A lot of the identity of the city is forged on the basis of that. The whole y
oung black generation—the whole hip-hop thing—is very, very alive in New York, and it has a marked effect on the character of the city.” So part of the romance with America that you find in black Britain has to do with a sense that America has, racially speaking, a critical mass.

  The allure of America isn’t just that of indelible blackness, though. It’s also the allure of class mobility. Of all the black Londoners I’ve spoken to, Trevor Phillips delivers the most impassioned homage to America, and it’s in precisely these terms: “I think the thing about the West Indians in the United States—and I know it’s probably not fashionable to say this—is the openness of American society. There is, I think, genuine social mobility if you’re ready for it.” He’s convinced of this because of his father’s fortunes. His father left school at thirteen and had never learned to write other than in block capitals; in England, he worked in the post office. Trevor remembered visiting his father at work one day, in a large sorting office manned largely by blacks. “They were all wearing Post Office uniforms, blue jackets with red piping, and then across the floor comes a white man wearing a suit, a gray suit, and my father said to me simply, ‘That’s one of the guv’nors,’ meaning that it signified two things: that this man is completely separate from us, and that no matter what I, George Phillips, do—no matter how much people respect me, no matter how well I know my job—I will never be one of them.” Then his father came to New York, got a job as a security guard at Columbia University, and decided, for some reason, to go to night school and learn bookkeeping. “In a year, I think, he had become the treasurer of a little think tank at Columbia called the American Assembly. This guy goes to the United States, he gets some education at the age of fifty-seven, gets his qualifications, and he ends up signing for Henry Kissinger’s expenses.” Phillips is practically swelling in the recitation—there’s a nearly evangelical fervor to his voice now—and he looks at me as if to say, How can you not love a country like that?