Why Black Matters - Rahila Gupta

[NonnyMouse1337]

As an Indian woman who moved to the UK in adulthood, I've been bemused by the concept of being 'politically Black' or 'political blackness'. I could never envision calling myself 'Black' for any type of political and socioeconomic struggle as to me it would feel deeply disrespectful of the unique historical issues faced by black people in general.

A few years ago I became aware of a fascinating side of British history whereby people from African, Carribbean and Asian heritage came together under the label of Black to mobilise and fight for their rights as a minority group. It's a shame that there is so much blind swallowing of Americanised cultural ideas these days, that interesting historical developments in Britain are obscured.

This is a long article by Rahila Gupta, but I found it very interesting. It charts the rise of this concept of being politically Black but also follows its disintegration over time.

newint.org/features/2020/10/06/long-read-political-blackness

The article also looks at how feminist movements were organised around this idea and I will post quotes from the article here because that's why I thought to start a thread in this board. I'm sure there are women here who have knowledge of this area, so it would be interesting to hear your perspectives.

The Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD), set up in 1978 by African women, was the first black women’s organization of which I became aware. An unnamed member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group, writing in Feminist Review (FR), described her surprise when 250 women turned up to its first national conference.

They had no idea of the appetite for political organizing on the ground. It was the women who attended that conference who went back to their local areas and set up Black Sisters organizations around the country – Camden Black Sisters, Liverpool Black Sisters, Birmingham Black Sisters and so on. It did not matter what their internal composition was, or which ethnic group dominated, because Black was accepted as an organizing principle. Only one survives today: Southall Black Sisters (SBS).

OWAAD organized a protest at Heathrow Airport against the virginity testing of Asian brides by immigration officers to assess whether their marriages to British spouses were genuine (based on the state’s stereotyping of Asian culture in which women were always virgins at the point of marriage) and against ‘sinbins’, a shorthand for the exclusion of African-Caribbean boys from school.

Despite mutual support for each other’s struggles, OWAAD closed in 1982, unable to deal with ‘the complexities of putting the political principles of Afro-Asian unity into practice’, according to the FR article. Even the understanding that colonialism had divided the Asian, African and Caribbean peoples into ‘coolie’, ‘savage’ and ‘slave’, as Sivanandan put it, did not save them.

There were tensions between women who were involved with liberation struggles on the African continent and Caribbean women who wanted to focus on issues of racism in the UK and, although they knew that the two struggles were connected, they were unable to come up with a practice that accommodated both. They were reluctant to address the issue of cultural differences with Asian women because they were focused on unity, afraid that it would prove divisive and unable ‘to grasp the fact that recognition of cultural differences can be a political strength’.

Those who pushed for separate organizations in the 1980s argued that Asians and ‘Afro-Caribbeans’ (the label then in vogue) faced different issues: Asians were up against immigration laws and the Caribbean struggle was about black boys underachieving at school and being overrepresented in the criminal justice system.

For SBS (Southall Black Sisters), the term ‘Black’ freed us from our religious and caste identities and provided space for a secular politics. Nationalist and religious forces which recrafted identity in increasingly narrow ways were exacerbated in the 1980s by funding policies introduced by the state to placate black communities in the wake of uprisings in Southall in 1979 and Brixton and Moss Side in 1981. It was partly that rush for funds that led us to not just split up into Asian, African and Caribbean but into Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Jamaican or Nigerian.

Those national identities split further into religious identities such as Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. The Greater London Council (GLC) under Ken Livingstone even funded the cultural arm of mosques and temples. At SBS we stood against that tide by arguing that the cultural similarities between women of the sub-continent were so great as to make the provision of services based on religious identity nonsensical and unnecessarily divisive. In fact, many were escaping religious pressures to conform to unacceptable ideals of womanhood. In addition, as Pragna Patel, director of SBS, says: ‘We invested the term with secular and progressive political values that sought to emphasize unity and solidarity across communities in the quest for social justice, while resisting the myth of “community” that failed to reflect caste, class and gender fault lines.’

Given the current situation we are in regarding womens rights, personaly I have little appitite for intersectionalism.
My general feeling is that it has let all women down badly, and has hindered economic equality in society generally.

I have been commenting on another board regarding the Government Equalities Office submissions. My view is that women should not be grouped with other discriminated against groups because we are unique and we are also discrimiated against within other groups such as race, disability, religion etc. Whilst we have to share our platform with other groups we are always having men represent us and men are able to affect how women's equality is discussed.

Look at the debacle with Crispin Blunt and Caroline Noakes, their anti women stance has a profound effect on all women including of colour and faith.

placemark

Yes, I was taught this by my mother who is black Caribbean. It is true that Asian women did not, when she was doing her masters in the 80's, not want to be considered as socioeconomically black. The same remains true politically today. However many socioeconomic strides made by the Afro & Caribbean communities, e.g in health care and maternity services in focusing on the specific and different needs by black and Asian communities, were started and progressed by black women.

TeaAddict235 that's amazing that black women spearheaded a number of improvements that benefitted Asian communities as well.

I can understand women of different backgrounds wanting to have groups or movements that focus specifically on their ethnicity or racial background as there can be issues that predominantly affect them and it can be easier to organise and campaign that way.

I wonder if it was easier back then to have various marginalised people come under a single banner of black to mobilise the numbers needed to push for significant societal change. Whereas once those broad goals of equality have been achieved, then it's inevitable that such groups will split to focus on the problems still outstanding in their own communities.