With the theme of Black History Month this year being Reclaiming Narratives, we think it is a good chance to call in the migration sector. We think it is an important time to explore how the sector can embed anti-racism in their work, and steer clear of reductive narratives about Black communities, including Black migrants in the UK.
Embedding anti-racism
Migration has always been tied to colonialism and race, both in the ways that anti-migrant discourse is often dictated by anti-Black and Islamophobic racism, but also in the ways that displacement is shaped by legacies of colonialism, enslavement and imperialism in Africa, the Caribbean and beyond. The historic construction of Black people as “savages” in need of “civilisation” is echoed in the ways that Black and Muslim communities in the UK are today constructed as “threats” to the nation and framed as “perpetual outsiders”.
The tactics of colonial repression and surveillance have followed Black people from former colonies to the UK. Black people in the UK, whether migrants or not, all experience internal bordering within the nation. Policing and the prison industrial complex, alongside gentrification, shows us how Black communities continue to be segregated and punished by a White supremacist society. A really notable example of this segregation is the Grenfell Tragedy. As Nadine El Enany writes:
“Understanding the colonial logic of the Grenfell Tower atrocity demands a historical analysis. Many of the Grenfell residents and their ancestors suffered the dispossessing effects of European colonialism. They lived and fled not only the lasting material consequences of colonisation, but also the economic decline caused by global trade and debt arrangements that ensure the continued impoverishment and dependency of Southern economies on those of the North. The Grenfell residents whose faces now smile back at us from Missing persons posters could not escape their condition of coloniality. It haunted them, confining them to lives of poverty in a dilapidated and dangerous building in one of the wealthiest places in the world…The statistic that children who live above the fourth floor of high rise blocks in England are more likely to be black or Asian is striking in a country that is 87% white…Race and its ongoing colonial configurations in Britain overdetermined what brought the Grenfell victims to the dangerous heights of the high-rise tower and ultimately to their violent and premature deaths”.
Defying reductive narratives
The migration sector has repeatedly been guilty of upholding racist, Islamophobic and ableist binaries through their constant celebration of a select few people who “work hard” and “contribute”, which signals an obsession with the idea that achievements should dictate someone’s worth. To truly embed anti-racism in our work, the sector has to learn from the Black liberation struggle, which has often cautioned against proving your humanity on the oppressor’s terms, and instead encourages us to reflect on how we can use history in the service of liberation. We should bear this in mind when we see refugees who “defy the odds” and achieving extreme levels of success being celebrated by White liberals, and note how this actually erases the colonial origins of why they had to move in the first place.
In his book The Groundings Of My Brothers, the famous Guyanese anti-colonial intellectual, Walter Rodney, was adamant that Black people’s sense of worth should not come through proving cultural superiority as pertains to ancient African civilisational grandeur or feats. He insisted instead that Black communities could “prove their humanity in revolutionary ways”, and rejected the psychological colonisation that causes oppressed communities to want to prove their humanity on the oppressor’s terms. He stated that the ways ordinary Africans lived in communities with each other and organised their society instead should be worth noting, because this was the kind of historical knowledge that could be used “as a weapon in [the] struggle” against racism and imperialism.
Leading on from that, it is important to spotlight the resistance histories of Black British culture. There are countless British Black, including migrant, revolutionary figures, such as Darcus Howe, Claudia Jones, Olive Morris and Althea Jones Lecointe, as well as key moments of resistance in Black British history, such as the Black Power movement of the 60s, the British Black Panthers and their defence of the Mangrove Restaurant, the Bristol Bus Boycott, Notting Hill Carnival, the 1981 Brixton Uprising and the tearing down of Colston’s statue. Revolutionary movements, moments and figures often become co-opted into the capitalist ‘contribution’ narrative, and the liberal “colour-blind” narrative of multicultural post-racial Britain, so it is important to remember these struggles, and what we can learn from them, including the importance of working class and community based solidarity, and resistance to the violence of the State.
Anti-racism requires international solidarity
Because race is so tied to colonialism, displacement and migration, we cannot understand how race presents itself in the UK without understanding the oppression of Black people, and other marginalised communities, across the world. From Sudan to Congo, and across the Global South, Black and other marginalised communities continue to be murdered and exploited for the sake of profit. The racist logic that dictates the oppression of Black people, migrants, and other marginalised groups in the UK is the same one as that being used across the world in places like Sudan and Congo. That is precisely why Black liberation is international, and why liberation for one community is incomplete without liberation for everyone else.
Recognising colonial histories, and reflecting on the moments of resistance that followed, can allow us to map out a just and liberated future for all. For Black History Month, we would encourage you all to think about how we can build solidarity across borders, and across nations, for the benefit of the most marginalised.
“In predominantly white countries, it’s easy for us to forget that we are part of the global majority, that we are connected to billions of people across the world whose dreams for and actions toward liberation align with our own”.
-Lady Phyll