Racism is Distraction
'There
were Africans in Britain before the English came here': how Staying Power shook British history
“The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison argued in a lecture in Portland, Oregon, in 1975:
It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and
over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language
and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head
isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working
on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge
that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None
of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
For the longest time the central distraction for black Britons
was insisting on our existence. That we were black was unarguable. That
we were in Britain was acknowledged if only to be contested. But the
notion that we could be black and British, both from
this place and in our bodies, confounded many, if not most.
Britain, we were told, was an essentially white place in which we had
only just arrived. We had no history here. The colonial connections that
explained our existence were at best opaque and at worst unknown to
most, even as they were mythologised in the very
statues and monuments that surrounded us. Our past did not come up in
curricula or mediated conversation. To the uninformed, ill-informed and
misinformed, which included those who charged themselves with curating
the national narrative, we came from nowhere
and for no good reason.
This had an impact on both our politics and our self-perception. “The
belief that we have come from somewhere,” wrote historian EH Carr, “is
closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere … our view of
history rejects our view of society.”
Effectively orphaned by the most accessible and partial national story
available, many black Britons sought surrogate historical parents
elsewhere and found them in America, whose story of racial
disenfranchisement and resistance we adopted as our own.
continue…
think
absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption
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