Black and British: We’re Not American

A Review of This is Not America. Why Black Lives in Britain Matter by Tomiwa Owolade (Atlantic, 2023).

In the popular perception, America is obsessed with race, while Britain is defined by class—but while both stereotypes have some basis in reality, they don’t tell the whole story. America is as class-ridden as any other society, and racial thinking has more influence on British society than people are generally willing to admit. Nevertheless, many Brits are concerned that the American culture wars are colonising our political landscape.

Tomiwa Owolade, a correspondent at the New Statesman, is one of the most interesting, eloquent and thoughtful young writers in Britain. In this, his debut book, he critiques contemporary antiracist politics in Britain for imposing an inappropriate American framework on the analysis of race in this very different country. When he saw students of University College London, his alma mater, use the acronym BIPOC (“black, indigenous and people of colour”) in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, in an open letter demanding more “diversity” in education, Owolade knew “something strange” was at work. As a progressive political category, indigenous makes sense in America, which is a country settled by colonialists who extirpated many Native American tribes as they expanded across the continent, but in Britain only fascists use that word, as part of their anti-immigrant propaganda. The use of that acronym, Owolade writes, confirmed the “dominance of American racial politics over the rest of the world.”

The so-called awokening of 2020, as Alex Hochuli has argued, represented the “global triumph of American idealism,” which has led non-Americans to go beyond expressing noble statements of international solidarity and imagine themselves as participants in American struggles, “eagerly adopting the slogans and paraphernalia of a uniquely American protest,” in a way that obscures their own specific problems, especially in regards to race. In essence, we are all Americans now.

Complaints about the Americanisation of Britain aren’t new. Over the years, curmudgeons have lamented such things as the many American colloquialisms that have been quietly colonising the English language and the dominance of American pop culture among the youth. The adoption of aspects of American ideology, as well as culture, seems unavoidable in a globalised world of which the United States is still the hegemon. As Owolade observes, we don’t just live under American power; our imaginations are enthralled by its national story. The modern epic that is the making of American civilisation is both inspiring and tragic. The United States is a revolutionary republic forged in the name of the highest human ideals, full of promise, but constantly betraying its own principles. Its story binds together freedom and slavery, universality and racism, a Promethean summit and a Mephistophelean underbelly. Hegel once said that America represented the future. In many ways, it still does. And, as with any cultural exchange, America is sending us both its best and its worst exports. We must be the judges of what to keep and adapt and what to discard.

It would be easy to presume that Owolade’s book is an anti-American tract penned in the name of a cringe British nationalism. But while a mellow patriotic motif does recur throughout the book, Owolade also makes it clear that he admires many aspects of American civilisation. The writers who have influenced his critique of the racial fetishism favoured by US progressives include American stalwarts like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. He makes it clear that “critical race theory is an American ideology” and that related ideas like integrationism and black nationalism can’t be understood without a knowledge of American history and must be judged on American terms and in an American context—hence, the awkwardness of trying to squish that vocabulary into a British idiom, where it fails to describe our local antagonisms.

That Britain is not America is a mantra that risks merely stating the tediously obvious. But sometimes the obvious must be restated. Despite both being Anglophone countries with a common political heritage, Britain and America are very different societies and cultures. This is reflected in their diametrically opposite attitudes towards firearms: many Americans believe in gun rights, while many Britons like to brag about having tough gun control laws and would see any attempt to proselytise gun ownership as an American infection of the body politic (even though, ironically, the roots of the Second Amendment lie in an English tradition of radical whiggery and republicanism).

Similarly, in 2020, many people got a kick out of mocking Black Lives Matter UK protesters when they shouted “Hands up! Don’t Shoot!” at our famously unarmed British bobbies. Only specialist firearms units carry guns—which are signed out and returned after each operation. Shootings by such units are very rare: the number of annual deaths by police gunfire are usually in the single digits, while the routinely armed American police shot and killed 1,176 people in 2022 alone.

Britain and America are different societies, then, and, as Owolade points out, “race doesn’t define British society the same way it defines American society.” This isn’t the same thing as claiming that Britain doesn’t have its own long history of racism or that race doesn’t still structure British society. It does—but in a very different way from the American model because of our very different history.  Most black Britons came here in two waves of post-war migration: first from the Caribbean and later from Africa. Most black Americans are the product of the human trafficking that formed the basis of the Atlantic slave trade and can trace their presence in America all the way back to the seventeenth century—longer than most white Americans. Moreover, there were no slave plantations in Britain itself—the slave plantations that financed the British Empire were located in the colonies—nor were there ever any equivalents of Jim Crow or redlining. There were, however, many unofficial attempts to enforce segregation in social venues, such as “No blacks” signs at pubs, until the 1968 Race Relations Act outlawed this.

These national differences have consequences for how race is structured within the two societies, which must be analysed on their own, separate terms. As Owolade stresses, “specificity matters more than mere generalisation.”

Fifty years ago, Britain, like America, was undoubtedly a racist society. It was common for black Britons to encounter hostility and exclusion from various institutions. Police brutalised black men with impunity. In Salman Rushdie’s words, they represented “that colonising army, those regiments of occupation and control.” “Nigger hunting” was a favourite sport of fascist thugs. Immigration policies were racially discriminatory by design. Interracial relationships were strongly taboo and severely stigmatised. Many blacks born and bred in Britain felt a profound alienation from society. They didn’t know whether they really belonged because they often received the message that they were permanent aliens whose “blackness” was a contradiction of Britishness.

British society has changed since then. Social attitudes to race have become more liberal and inclusive in many respects. Judging by the latest surveys and studies, serious opposition to interracial relationships is negligible, the mixed-race population is booming and most people don’t think being English has anything to do with a particular skin pigment. And, like America, Britain has become a magnet for mass immigration: around a sixth of the population of England and Wales were born abroad.

Also, Britain is far more racially integrated now. More people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds are living cheek by jowl than ever before. According to social geographer Gemma Catney, this is “something that’s happened really naturally over time without major government interventions.” London and New York are both world cities with very diverse populations of similar sizes; yet the former is far more integrated than the latter.

However, we shouldn’t be too quick to subscribe to a smug whiggish narrative of relentless racial progress, either. Britain is not a post-racial, egalitarian utopia. There are still entrenched racial inequalities and disparities. There are still far too many suspicious deaths in police custody, especially among black Britons. Moreover, black Britons are four times more likely to be murdered than white Britons, a disparity that has worsened over the past decade. And as the recent Windrush scandal demonstrated, immigration policy can still have racist effects.

But, as Owolade rightly states, “we shouldn’t assume that all racial and ethnic disparities are because of racism.” The existence of a disparity doesn’t tell you anything about what caused it. A single-minded focus on race can occlude other factors such as class, geography and economics. The obsession with disparities between whites and ethnic minorities can also lead us to neglect important achievement gaps within these categories. For instance, as Owolade points out, black Africans generally attain better educational results than black Caribbeans and poor whites. There are complex reasons for this, but the discrepancy reveals how impoverished and antiquated our understanding of race is. We desperately need to update it.

One of Owolade’s objectives is to recalibrate black Britons, to make them part and parcel of broader British culture in the realms of sport, pop culture and even Christianity. This is already happening. Multicultural London English, the new lingua franca of the urban landscape, has served as a glue to unite youths of various backgrounds—so much so that it alarmed David Starkey, who took it as a sign that white Britons were “turning black.” Black Britons, in Owolade’s words, are a “continuation of Britain”: irrevocably part of its present and future, but also linked to its past. As Owolade reminds us, “black people are British.” Likewise, black Americans are Americans. Both groups have more in common with their respective compatriots of every hue than with black people across the globe—something utopian black nationalist ideologies fail to acknowledge.

This is Not America is suffused with cautious optimism. Owolade is adroit at walking a thin tightrope: acknowledging the real progress on racial equality without succumbing to flaccid complacency or self-serving arrogance. What Owolade offers is not tendentious polemic, but an honest attempt to explore the difficult and subtle question of race in twenty-first-century British society. He does so in a refreshingly nuanced, yet intelligently provocative manner.