Black is a politically motivated symbol of inferiority that is sometimes used to embrace all non-White groups in Britain. Note the phrase non-White, a word that gives precedence to Whites by making them the centre and the standard to which others bear a negative relation. People are described as if they are a cast along a yard-stick, with opposing ends, Black and White, the higher you are towards White the better off you are”.
In Britain, non-White people have been referred to by various names including ‘Moors’, ‘Blue men’ (fir gorma), ‘Negros’, ‘Blak’ and today they are classified as either ‘Black’ or Black and ethnic minorities (BAME). In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, racism was legitimised by White-centred theories of evolution which designated Blacks as members of a biologically inferior, barbaric and an uncivilised species and Whites as superior. This racist ideology was used to justify enslaving Black Africans and colonialism which fuelled British capitalism, the industrial revolution and the transformation of Bristol, Liverpool and London from slave ports to world class cities and elevated the country from Britain to Great Britain.
The words black and white have possessed meaning long before the British stepped foot on the African continent. Traditionally in Britain black stood for death, mourning, sorrow, forsaken love, poison, baseness, evil, sin and danger. Black was the colour of bad magic, melancholy and hell. People spoke of black art, blackmail, a black sheep of the family and the black death. When people were ostracised, they were entered into a black book, when executed a black flag was hoisted. However, White was related to virginity, purity, innocence, good magic, flags of truce, harmless lies, and perfect human beauty. When “one of the fairest-skinned nations came across one of the darkest people on earth”, it was easier for the British to slot a new phenomenon into a pre-existing conceptual pigeon-hole. “If their skin was dark, what else could they be but BLACK and the devil?”
Dr Martin Luther King speaks to this in his Black and Proud speech on the 3rd April 1968’
Don’t let anybody take your manhood. Be proud of our heritage. As somebody said earlier tonight, we don’t have anything to be ashamed of. Somebody told a lie one day. They couched it in language. They made everything black ugly and evil. Look in your dictionary and see the synonyms of the word black. It’s always something degrading, low and sinister. Look at the word white. It’s always something pure, high, clean. Well, I want to get the language right tonight. I want to get the language so right that everybody here will cry out, “YES! I’M BLACK. I’M PROUD OF IT. I’M BLACK AND BEAUTIFUL!”
Some have attempted to reclaim Blackness. Caron Wheeler of ‘Soul to Soul’ fame’s album entitled ‘UK BLAK’ elevated the word ‘Blak’ in mainstream British society. By omitting the letter ‘c’, Wheeler was making a profound Africentric political statement that reflected a conscious move by certain members of the Black community to distance themselves from the negative connotations associated to the word. This meant that the signifier Blak, which was created within the counter cultures of the Afrikan Diaspora, had much currency and signified an alternative way of thinking about the Black presence in Britain. By using the term Blak, the British born of Afrikan descent expressed a defiant attitude that questioned and challenged the seeming acceptance by their parent’s generation.
References
Fryer, P. (2018) Staying Power. London: Pluto Press.
Henry, W. (2006) What the deejay said. London: Nu-Beyond Ltd.
Olusoga, D. (2017) Black and British. Paperback edition edn. London: Pan Books.
Please look out for my next blog : Why are Black people in France not called Noir?