Britain Must Engage the West Indies as it Engages with the Scots, Welsh & Irish!
The big deal being made out of the journey of Anglicised blacks from Britain’s overseas plantations to the heart of the Empire does more to show how people are racialised in Britain than to improve historic race relations between Britain and its black subjects. The narrative seems to be shaped as the arrival of the “other”, when it is not really the case.
The fact that the celebration of Windrush takes place in a climate where West Indians have been blocked from entrance to the UK under various immigration acts for decades seems to have missed many of the Windrush champions. The celebration of the Windrush takes place in a climate of political apartheid where black Britain’s are forced to live on Britain’s former plantations in depressed economies with little support from the British state, whilst for decades being treated as outsiders despite their historical and ongoing relationship with British culture and society.
Windrush Day exists in a climate where many of the said Windrush Generation are fearing deportation. Although they should be technically treated just like Scottish, Welsh and Irish people, as part of Britain.
The arrival of the Windrush Generation in Britain is significant in some way but it signifies nothing more than Anglicised black slaves coming from the periphery to the centre of the British Empire. It is as significant as the migration of black Americans from the Southern states, where most of slavery took place, to the Northern cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia. For which there is no day of celebration. Just as the movement of black Americans, though vast in distance, took place in one Empire, the movement of West Indians to Britain’s major cities in search of economic opportunity and labour also took place in one Empire.
At the time of the arrival of West Indians in Britain on a large scale, the British West Indies still existed as a political idea. This meant that those citizens that came on the Windrush were not immigrants but British subjects living on the periphery of the Empire who migrated from Britain’s plantations to the urban city centre. If anything it could be considered akin to the journey from rural Britain to urban Britain that many Brits make each year. Something that is not seen as significant or historical.
The West Indians that arrived in their hundreds in 1948 and would start to arrive in the ten’s of thousands in the 50’s could not be turned away on arrival. They were British subjects just like the rest of British society. On arrival, the people of the West Indies did not bear names that the wider British population found difficult to pronounce, they had the same names. There was no need for the government to organise ESOL classes because the people of the West Indies spoke English. Many may have spoken with an accent that was not a London accent but it would not have been much different from the accents of people from Glasgow, Swansea, Manchester, Liverpool or Newcastle who arrived in the capital. West Indians on arrival were not dressed in culturally inappropriate clothing that was distinguishable from the clothing worn by the wider British population.
There are no images of West Indians arriving at Tilbury in the loin cloth of Mahatma Gandhi or the animal skins of Ethiopian nobility. Tarzan may have been a character conceived out of the white British imagination but it was totally alien to West Indian people who had little interaction with guerillas, elephants, lions or the African or Indian jungle. The cultural myths that may have been applied to other visitors to the British Isles could not reasonably be foisted onto West Indian people. The West Indian did not understand the language of Africa or Asia. The British West Indies were not like colonial outposts in Africa where the staff of the colonial authority were instructed to learn the native tongues in order to engage with the native population. Engagement with the colonised in Jamaica was done in the mother tongue of the inhabitants, English.
Of course, there were some political differences from the past between the black British of the West Indies and the people of the British Isles but this was no different than the differences between England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, nations that collectively make up the United Kingdom. Differences that produced William Wallace, the Scottish warrior and subject of the movie Braveheart and Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary who has been depicted on screen by Liam Neeson.
Rather than playing up the outsider narrative of West Indians arriving on the British Isles, like some invaders on a ship, we should consider the arrival of West Indians just like the arrival of a Welsh, Scottish or Irish visitor in the capital, as part of the nation.
If Britain is seriously going to respond to the slogan Black Lives Matter, the apartheid that exists between Britain and its historical slave class must change. If Britain is going to show a moral authority to America it is going to have to incorporate its overseas black population into the UK infrastructure more clearly. It is going to need to significantly increase the financial assistance that is given to Black Britain in the West Indies. If Britain is going to be a light to the world, it is going to have to have a serious conversation about those that it cannot see because they are the same in relation to Britain as black Americans to the US state.
Britain cannot take the moral high ground on its policing and its history of outlawing slavery and forget that it has a population just like black America that it has placed on plantation islands for centuries. Who it has refused to acknowledge as part of itself. The unseen.
ALT
