Mohan Ambikaipaker's new book, Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain, contends that racial violence and racialized state violence work to constrain the agency of Britain's blacks, situating them in everyday asymmetrical relationships with their white peers. He discusses “political blackness,” as a condition which persists because many white Britons fail to recognize how the British Empire's colonialism, participation in African slavery, and notions of racial inferiority still influence the nation's power dynamics. Racialized power struggles are constituted in spaces where blacks and whites interact, including public spaces such as the subway or a football match, as well as personal spaces, such as apartment blocks among neighbors. The British judicial process favors white Britons over black Britons, who find themselves otherized and stigmatized by police and in the courts. The resulting social order, he argues, privileges an everyday political whiteness, and is broadly associated with institutional racism, black policing, nativist anxiety around immigration, and the War on Terror.
Ambikaipaker describes blackness as uniform experiences of people from the former British colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East after the Second World War. During reconstruction, the British economy required immigrant labor to rebuild. The government invited thousands of immigrants from the former colonies to work and live in Britain; however, the 1973 Oil Crisis negatively impacted the economy causing massive layoffs. As a result, immigrants became the scapegoats and recipients of violence from nativists who blamed them for Britain's economic problems. To deal with social and political pressure in Britain, the immigrants adopted “black” to define their collective experiences of racially motivated violence and discrimination in their everyday lives. Political blackness is a grassroots movement that responded to oppression immigrants encountered.
Newham, a borough of London, plays a central role in Ambikaipaker's ethnographic research, as a place where local poor white and black communities have historically competed for scarce jobs and housing. Anti-immigrant sentiments for the past 50 years have been inflamed by political debates for tighter immigration control during labor shortages. Race relations in Britain and specifically Newham were very tense in the 1970s and 1980s often erupting into racially motivated violence against blacks. The Newham Monitoring Project (NMP) was founded in 1980 after Ali Akhtar Baig was brutally murdered by a mob of white men who set a five-pound wager to kill a “Paki.” NMP's goal was to hold the court systems accountable to provide justice for victims who faced racial violence, to report police misconduct, and to offer support for victims of civil rights violations.
Ambikaipaker's research details instances of racial, gendered, and state violence against blacks. Chapter one introduces the main concepts. The second chapter discusses Amina, an Indian Muslim woman, and her everyday struggles with neighbors. Chapter three intersects gendered and racialized violence against African and Afro-Caribbean women. Gillian is a key figure here, having suffered from sexual abuse by her white stepfather and police officers. She fears that racial violence will impact her son, who is stigmatized in school and harassed by the police. Chapter four is about Muslim women who experienced gendered anti-Muslim racism for wearing burqas (full face and body coverings) or hijabs (headscarves), which are feared as symbols of terrorism and signs of unwillingness to assimilate. Chapter five details the impact of the War on Terror on immigrants. Two hundred fifty officers raided two houses in Newham in June 2006, based on intelligence that the homes were bomb factories. The raid destroyed the homes and two brothers were arrested. Later the charges were dropped because there was no evidence of bombs in the houses. Chapter six speaks to post-War on Terror political blackness that racially profiles Muslims in particular, as potential terrorists. These chapters outline different instances of violence against blacks; however, the thread that weaves these encounters together is Amina's story.
Amina's father immigrated to Newham from a poor village in India during reconstruction. His white British neighbors harassed him and burned the family's apartment when Amina was just four years old. Afterward, Amina's father got involved with a plethora of petty crimes that landed him in jail. Feeling overwhelmed by racial tension, he committed suicide leaving behind his wife and small children. As an adult, Amina encountered harassment similar to her father's experiences. Her two white neighbors verbally abused, intimidated, and struck her. The violence escalated when the neighbors came home drunk one evening. They kicked in Amina's door, demanding that she go back to her own country. They threatened to assault her and to infect Amina's son with HIV. Amina contacted the police, but they treated the case as a domestic dispute between neighbors, not as a hate crime. Seeking help, Amina went to NMP to file a criminal complaint against her neighbors.
NMP brought significant evidence to the police, but nothing happened to the perpetrators. The white barrister who represented Amina did not think the preparators looked like thugs even though he had video evidence of them kicking her door. Amina's encounter with the justice system shows everyday political whiteness, whereby credibility hinges on the racial-moral perception of elite whites rather than actual evidence. The judge and barrister, who were both white, identified with the white British perpetrators but not with suffering blacks. Ambikaipaker points out that the burden was on the victim to prove a racial crime and, even with evidence, white supremacy prevailed in the justice system.
As the central message of Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain, Ambikaipaker posits that groups who experience racial oppression have a shared black identity. Yet readers might question why he disregards evidence of hierarchy within blackness, through which people of African descent, for example, experience more socioeconomic disparities, and have amassed less wealth and influence, than South Asians. Finally, his use of “political blackness” is sometimes unclear. Political blackness is presented as the opposite of political whiteness—but is this positive? Or negative?
