This Is Not America by Tomiwa Owolade review – black and British… and a world apart
www.theguardian.com
In this passionate and timely if sometimes tetchy study, the cultural critic argues that Britain should consider race from its own perspective rather than adopt America’s battles
  • It starts with an anecdote of how the author was namechecked as a “Black historian”. He says, “Who knew? Until then, I was simply known as a historian. The editor was dismayed when I complained about not wanting to be racialised in this way; he imagined I’d be delighted with the capitalisation and upgrade from black to Black.” The editor had been advised to do this by Americans… “America’s obsession with race and its culture wars, focused in recent years on Derrick Bell’s critical race theory (the notion that racism is an ineradicable feature of the US)”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory – Wikipedia describes the theory as including tenets that “race is… a normalized feature of American society… and that racism in the U.S. is permanent.”

This is about as relevant to the 96% of humanity as gender relations in China. Relevant to a smaller number of people, in fact

  • “Owolade contends that Britain continues to cede authority to the US, especially in matters of race… Britain’s problems with race pale beside the awful day-to-day enmity in the US. Increasingly, though – with the murder of George Floyd, the adoption of acronyms such as Bipoc (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour)… Black Lives Matter, and the mass incarceration of African American men — insights from across the Atlantic are embraced. This is tied up with the allure of America generally, believes Owolade. Which is undoubtedly true: even today British newspapers are more likely to genuflect in front of an African American than a black Briton.”

This is right. America has unique race-relations that I don’t claim to understand and amn’t particularly interested in. An American will screech, “But they’re objectively important!”. Well they are objectively less important than Amhara-Oromo relations, for example; they cause fewer problems and kill far fewer people.

Racial issues happen everywhere, or almost everywhere. And I believe that the is a global-scale hierarchy of whites over blacks (Europe exploits Africa, not the other way around). But these issues are deeply, complicatedly, finely specific to each country. You can’t copypaste the USA’s theories on race (or gender for that matter, or right-and-left, or Islam) to another country.

  • he warns that America’s battles have been adopted here and should be rejected. “This book argues two main points,” he writes. “We should understand race in Britain through a British perspective, and we shouldn’t reduce black people to their race.”

This is the take-home point.

  • An example of how race relations are different in different countries: Britain has Caribbean blacks and African blacks, and they have different social issues, different statistical outcomes. I don’t think that’s a thing in the USA (is it?)

  • “I hold no brief for Andrews but I don’t think his proposition is without merit.”

lol @ academics and their excessive use of negatives

  • “Even when two nations speak the same language, [race] can be lost in translation.” His book shows that in this country’s polarising culture wars its attitude towards race is being shaped by the enlightened and the bigots in the US. But he concludes: “To define someone exclusively by their race is to acquiesce to the visions of racists.” Amen to that.