
BOOK REVIEW
"There ain't no Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and 
Nation"
by Paul Gilroy
(Hutchinson, 1987, #7.95)

Questions of race and racism have come to occupy a central rÜle in political 
debate in Britain in recent years. At one time definitions seemed 
straightforward: racism was the identification and utilisation of racial 
differences as justification for discriminatory practises, and anti-racism 
was opposition to this. Classical socialism was implicitly anti-racist, 
emphasising class position and relegating race to a problematic but 
superstructural mystification for dividing the working class.

More recently positions have become confused. Anti-racism has become a 
program of affirmative actions to be realised by administrative means. 
Socialism has lost many of its 19th Century Progressivist assumptions of the 
superiority of some cultures to others. Its former belief in "colour-blind" 
meritocracy has been taken up by conservatives (such as those around The 
Salisbury Review); instead of biological essence, cultural differences (such 
as family relations) are considered as being to blame for any lingering 
inequalities. In discussion, the race "problem" and the often interchangeable 
one of "the Inner Cities" are the terms around which control over urban space 
are discussed.

Another aspect of contemporary socialist thought has been the attempt to 
counter the Right's monopoly on Nation State patriotism by constructing an 
alternative patriotism around the idea of the plain English working man. 
Present in writings by E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, this idealised 
reference point, despite excluding ever-larger proportions of the population, 
is now that by which Kinnock opposes the Labour Party "rainbow coalitionists".

In all this, the life experiences of those who actually experience "the black 
diaspora" are hardly present, except as the objects of the experts' 
discussions. It is this conjunction which forms the background for Dr. 
Gilroy's book. He wishes to "break the alternating current of racism between 
problem and victim status", an opportunity which he considers as lying in the 
possibility of representing a black presense outside these categories" (p12).

Such a presense is to be located by historicising the concept of race as a 
cultural, active category: "culture does not develop along ethnically 
absolute lines, but in complex, dynamic patterns of syncretism in which new 
definitions of what it means to be black emerge from raw materials provided 
by black populations elsewhere in the diaspora" (p13).

For example, Gilroy discusses the evolution of "race" as a policing problem, 
one largely missing until the definition of "mugging" in the middle 1970s 
(which crossed violent / non-violent lines by conflating robbery and theft), 
and now a synonym for the problem of control of space in the "inner cities". 
Urban disturbances since 1976 are seen as a race problem (whatever proportion 
of those arrested are "black"), and a spacial problem (in the insistence that 
there should be "No no-go areas").

Gilroy examines the inadequacies of anti-racism by contrasting the approaches 
of Rock Against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League and the Greater London Council 
anti-racism campaigns. He considers RAR to have displayed a breadth of 
analysis missing from the ANL: "RAR had allowed space for youth to rant 
against the perceived iniquities of 'Labour Party Capitalist Britain'. The 
popular front tactics introduced by the ANL closed it down." (p133) The ANL 
equated racism and fascism, representing the National Front as a "false 
nationalism" threatening the purity of parliamentary democracy; the antidote 
was to be a true patriotism, which actually closed off debate.

Emphasis on the "institutional / bureaucratic model of anti-racist strategy", 
as practised by the GLC, "allows the concept of racism to ascend to rarified 
heights where, like a lost balloon, it becomes impossible to retrieve. This 
induces a strategic paralysis which is further encouraged by the allocation 
of a pre-eminent if not monopolistic rÜle in the defeat of racism to the 
council's own agencies and activities... The would be anti-racist is 
abandoned in a political vacuum... The problem of what connects one 
anti-racist to the next is not recognised as a substantive political issue. 
Municipal anti-racism solved it by providing signs, badges and stickers..." 
(p144-5) So, rather than "revealing and restoring the historical dimensions 
of black life in this country" the emphasis on "institutionalised racism" 
"loses contact with both history and class politics. It becomes a policy 
issue" (p27)

Where then is this historical dimension to be located? For Gilroy, this is 
the specific achievement of black expressive culture. While the Labour Party 
tries to recapture support by returning to the "normal" British working-man, 
international economic realities mean that "the need to develop international 
dialogues and means of organisation which can connect locality and immediacy 
across the international division of labour is perhaps more readily apparent 
to black populations who define themselves as part of a diaspora." (p68) He 
attempts to demonstrate this through an analysis of musical culture 
(specifically reggae and rap), both in the economic and social relations 
existing in these subcultures and in the lyrical content of the music.

The core anti-capitalist themes in "black expressive culture" are identified 
as critiques of productivism and the State (eg in policing) and an assertion 
of a black history (eg in Rastafarian and other pan-African beliefs).

This chapter is one of the most fascinating in the book, but it also leaves 
an uneasy feeling. In the lyrics and their reproduction in dance-hall, Gilroy 
finds a "whole dialogic process that unites performers and crowds" and 
becomes "the basis for an authentic public sphere" But surely the anti-work 
"liberatory rationality" of the lyrics must be disentangled from the 
structural location where the song is played: on one side of the work / 
leisure system. And if a DJ removes the label from a rare import record, is 
this a subversion of the commodity or just its appropriation as a rare object 
to be coveted? Some differentiation from the Rock subculture (U2, Genesis) is 
surely required in a description like "Spectators acquire the active rÜle of 
participants in collective processes which are sometimes cathartic and which 
may symbolize or even create community." (p214)

It is important to ask the anti-work lyrical content developed and what its 
significance is - anyone denying its importance would also have an obligation 
to explain just why it had developed. However, Gilroy does seem to accept 
rhetoric at face value, whether in lyrics or in citation from leaflets such 
as those by RAR or that for a concert / rally  in support of the miners' 
strike. Leftist leaflets often use a "we" to elicit solidarity; they don't 
demonstrate it's existence.

This book is probably intended for an academic audience: the nods in the 
directions of others in the same field are sometimes intrusive for the 
ordinary reader, and sometimes too much effort seems to be involved in 
reconciling black expressive culture to academia (such as in the description 
of Smiley Culture as an "organic intellectual"). More specifically, the space 
which Gilroy is trying to clear involves clearing away the cruder class 
analysis on one side and beating back the prophets of "the death of the 
social" on the other. In between, he finds historical, temporal and economic 
awareness: signs of a healthy expressive culture refusing mediation and 
creating urban spaces within which identity can be created and preserved. 
This would go beyond orthodox class analysis (which would treat all such 
elements as mere surface phenomena) and post-modernism (which would doubt 
their very possibility), and serve as an example of the "new social 
movements" which some see emerging in contemporary modern societies.

From Edinburgh Review 78/9 1988
