Black, Listed
Black British Culture Explored
Jeffrey Boakye
Having read it
★★★★★
An amazing book that’s worth way more than the five out of five rating I’ve given it and, to be honest, the whole thing deserves to be quoted! It’s written brilliantly, insightfully and is appropriately entertaining and humorous in the right places and quite simply really needs to be made part of future generations’ education.
Whiteness has a lot to answer for, which it doesn’t ever seem to want to do, but texts like these can really help to spread the reality and the systemic racism inherent in lots (if not all) Western institutions, of just what that inaction can lead to. Importantly, it hopefully act as a help to spread legitimate ways to interpret oppression so society can learn and change.
A good passage
Blackness as a racial concept is inherently oppositional. It’s a binary truth that only works insofar as being the opposite of white, which means that I have spent the vast majority of my consciousness in a state of confirming something that is already very obvious: that a person who isn’t white, isn’t white. But labels don’t just identify what something is; they create meaning. Black is easily the most ubiquitous of all the elements listed in this book, so much so that the assumption is that it is neutral. A given. The terrifying reality is that it is quite possibly the most volatile of all the elements, in that it creates the sharpest contrast to a dominant, white other.
A second good passage
As long as conceptual whiteness exists, racism can’t die, because whiteness relies on a false dichotomy of the black/white racial divide to retain its sense of self. The fact that ‘white’ encompasses a whole range of fair-skinned peoples who have been historically marginalised, subjugated, prejudiced against and even enslaved highlights the true, political purposes of binary race labelling. America is an important case study here, in which persecuted groups including the Irish, Polish and Jewish communities have found ideological refuge under the Not Black umbrella, establishing themselves as white and therefore socially empowered. Let’s not forget that, historically, white people have been slaves too, in sizeable numbers, for considerable duration. [...] Race is a construct, but that construct is real, and its effects are binding and blinding in equal measure.
A third good passage
Social media might be to blame, where the sheer speed of digital transaction invites users to register dislike or approval in block primary colours, at foghorn volume. We either love it or we hate it, and every one needs to know. [...] we’re addicted to hierarchy. It’s part of the paradigm; our shared belief in better and worse, above and below, desirable and undesirable. We may appear to be making lava shifts towards equality and liberalism, but celebrity worship, brand worship and magnetism towards success proves otherwise. We believe in equal, but we want better, and by readily assigning status to things, persons and places, we implicitly support the concept of hierarchy at a basic level.