Rac(e)ing the Nation: Black Politics and the Thatcherite Backlash

Abstract

The words above are drawn from my conversation with Mark Wilson, a late thirty-something, black British man, founding and board member of the Britain’s black think tank, the 1990 Trust. Although we’d met prior to this occasion, on the day of this interview, I went to his workplace. His sleek corporate office and attire belied his past and present socially engaged political commitments. Mark spoke candidly, vividly, while he recalled his involvement in the Southwark borough’s Southwark Black Communities Consortium (SBCC); the overall sociopolitical climate in Britain during the height of Margaret Thatcher’s years in office as prime minister; and the deployment of blackness during the 1980s, years of racial tension, protest, and neoliberal ideology and policy.

There was a shaping of a politics that we could call Black Nationalism. We were very young and felt really radical… and we were really fed up with working with organizations that had nothing to tell us. There were uprisings taking place around that time in different parts of the country. In 1981 we had uprisings in all of the major conurbations…Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham, and various areas of London…There were deaths in custody, police brutality, unemployment, every single manifestation of racism in its most explicit form was taking place. It was almost as if it was an affront to our communities that this was happening so visibly on our tele[vision]…and the government would refuse to have an inquiry (although we’d find the police guilty)…And the only way [we] could address this was by being very open about our disgust about the way we were being treated…I think black people were becoming increasingly disappointed by mainstream Socialist, white, Left movements who would use our issues for their purposes. So, therefore, we had a lot of support for black self-organization people seeing the political [use of] black in a political context. Therefore, embracing the notion of African, Caribbean, and Asian unity. So in the 1980s that’s what was happening.

—Interview by author, January 28, 1998¹