Posted by It’s 10am in Brixton Market babies crying, vendors selling, plantain frying, light rain falling, soukous in the air. People shopping, buying, moving crowd the space and give it life; they’re black people mainly, en masse and in motion, a million and one shades of brown. Two among the moving many catch my eye: a man and boy the man about 6’6″ with locs, the boy, with cane-rowed hair. In a single stroke the man scoops up the boy and hoists him onto his sinewy shoulders; the boy laughs with delight as his gentle giant runs over the road to the Tube.
Watching from under a newsagent awning, I’m struck by the beauty of what I’ve just seen: black father and son in a moment of joy, pure and simple, an intimate instant. It’s only after I’ve watched them go, and the canerowed head has bobbed out of sight, that I realise what caught my eye in the first place: the rarity of the pair. When was the last time I’d seen a black father bounce his black son on his shoulders like that? Better yet, when was the last time I’d seen a ‘black father?’
Oh, that’s right.
In Wembley.
But this one was walking with a wan little blond woman, as was the black man I’d seen before him. In fact, most of the black men I see around London have white partners and/or mixed children. Absent black fathers, these newly-ubiquitous babies betray their patrilineal hue: caramel kids on the arms of white women, or peeking from prams, unexpected. If the father is there he will glance away warily, lagging just ever so slightly behind, with that odd combination of braggadocio and sheepishness, yeah, that’s my child when he does meet my eye.
Where is the Love?
The standard ‘pro-black’ platform would posit that men like these have abandoned the race; that black men with white partners manifest a self-loathing in their lust for blonde hair and blue eyes. The more psychoanalytic objector would question what it says about black men’s esteem of their blackness that they’d rather have children who don’t bear their features than be with black partners who do. What does it say about black men’s opinions of their sisters and mothers, their view of themselves — that so many are choosing white women, Asian women, anything but a black woman, to mother their kids? But what kids. There is something about the look of mixed race children that arrests the eye; even someone as fed up as I am with media’s multi-culti fetish can see that. A friend of African/American/Indian/French extraction is fond of saying: ‘The more you mix it, the better you make it.’ And I’ve often wondered. From the vantage point of history, it would seem a sort of triumph that the racial lines so long employed to subjugate are blurring. In this light mixed race children represent a kind of moving on, their loveliness a tribute to the feat of integration.
After all, it’s a slippery slope that begins with the stipulation that races shouldn’t mix; European racists popularised that prohibition, along with the notion of race itself. Obviously, some black people end up with their nonblack partners out of love (my African-American stepfather and his Caucasian wife, for example). Other black people avoid their own out of the sense that their own undervalues them. Told they’re not affluent/attractive/authentic enough, they peddle their wares elsewhere. Then, there’s the case for pure demographics, cited by professionals, students, celebrities: in certain circles, the number of suitable black suitors is proscriptively low.
All of which leaves a neo-revolutionary like me in a bit of a bind. What to paint on my picket placards? BLACK MEN FOR BLACK WOMEN! VIVE BLACK LOVE! Where to march. In Brixton Market? Who’s the opposition? How to express my deep dismay at the rarity of the sight of black fathers and children; at the number of black people choosing white partners (~50% of British-born black men) without sounding racist? How to express my genuine sadness at seeing black love lose its mandate and base — without buying into the knee-jerk jingoism that says BLACKS MUST DATE BLACKS? IS BLACK LOVE DEAD?
The short answer is – it’s not (just) about the relationships. The problem (and there is one) isn’t only that we’re dating whites but why, and why so many of us feel the need, of late. I tend to think of this predominance as symptomatic of a larger ill: the dissolution of black peoplehood.
It Takes A Village, People.
Welcome to Anthropology for Dummies. Our subject today is the Village. In its most basic sense the Village expresses the collective functioning of a People. At least two institutions shape the ideal-type Village: the Apprenticeship and the Marriage. The practice of apprenticeship advances Village industry, the population. For young men and women growing up in this Village, both practices lay a foundation of sorts: apprenticeship will channel them into various vocations, while marriage will found their new homes. The older of the Villagers will take an active role in this: by helping the young choose good partners and professions, they ensure the good health of the People.
In modern times the notion of ‘a people’ has lost relevance, but the functioning of ‘the Village’ in this basic sense has not. Ethnic groups in the UK (and US) view marriage as a means to collective improvement; hence, Asian and Jewish mothers’ fuss over whom their daughters wed. Social groups like the upper class still use apprenticeship to advance their own; hence, my wealthy classmates from Oxford using their fathers’ connections to get their first jobs. From Asian grocers employing their nephews to Oxbridge debs dating family friends, there are people in London still acting like a People.
We are not. Black people, quite simply put, no longer practise Peoplehood (or are giving up the habit more and more each passing day). I n ever increasing numbers, we don’t date each other, trust each other, marry each other, hire each other: we don’t sustain our Village. Men (who traditionally perpetuate a people) and women (who traditionally sustain a culture) are defecting from the project, in favour of partnerships with whites. My concern is not that we date other races; clearly, we’re entitled to love whom we choose. But there’s a critical distinction between dating because you love someone and dating because you don’t love yourself. My Nigerian uncle is teaching his white wife Yoruba, as he has done with their kids; in his marriage he continues to affirm our culture, our Village (as does she). By contrast, a Ghanaian cousin who dates white men in the express hope of having ‘light-eyed kids’ rejects what is beautiful in African people, in search of ‘enlightskinment.’
Things appear no better in the realm of ‘village industry,’ where black professionals rarely take on (or seek out) black apprentices. Half of us appear to operate with a ‘last one in, shut the door’ mentality — getting our jobs then turning a blind eye to the hiring/advancement of ‘us.’ Meanwhile, as other groups engage in what I like to call ethno-nepotism, we operate on the assumption that white businesses are more professional/legitimate than ours. Absent the promotion of black professionals, the patronage of black business, the pairing of black paramours — what is left of black peoplehood but RBG and a bass beat?
The People are in exodus. The Village is falling to pieces. And as it falls, I wonder if some of us aren’t throwing bricks as we flee?
When we have concurred with the dominant culture that straight hair and light eyes epitomise beauty; when we hesitate to invest in (our own) urban business; when youth have abandoned respect for adults — are we not rasing the Village on purpose? Is ruin an outcome, or goal?
I ask, because some of us seem not to want to be Villagers — that is, not to be black — anymore. It’s a logical goal for those who view ‘Village’ as ‘ghetto,’ and ‘blackness’ as ‘lack.’ I’m thinking of black women masking their features and culture, loath to pass both to their kids; of black men esteeming white partners as symbols of status, or opportunity. It says something unsettling about British society that whiteness remains an access pass; that a black man on the arm of a white man or woman feels more entitled to privilege. But it says something tragic about black self-opinion that some of us, understandably tired of strife, see blackness only as disadvantage, a form of bad luck, and no more. For these village expatriates, black is less: black business, less business; black beauty, less beautiful. In the boardroom or bedroom, ‘black’ is a thing to be shed at one’s earliest chance.
The irony (or the tragedy) is killing. The very same blackness we’re throwing away is the western world’s number one export. Our style of dress, our limber limbs, our music, its vernacular, all are in perpetually hot demand by universal markets. I’d be the first to object to the objectification of black men and women for mass consumption, but hardly the last to question why we can’t see our true worth. The issue isn’t whether we are free to date ‘outside’ the race, but how we (mis)understand that race, its legacy and its power.
Which brings me to that tricky, tricky question: what is meant by ‘black’? To speak of dating ‘outside the race’ implies that would-be lovers lie ‘inside the race,’ but who are these — or how are they defined? If a ‘black man’ has a partner who is Cuban-British and chocolate brown, or Chinese-Jamaican with bone straight hair — does he fall into the 50%? That friend of mine (‘the more you mix it’) what is she? She’d say she’s black. But with creamy skin and squiggly hair, she’s often told she’s not (‘not really’). Who is ‘really black’ in Britain? Haitians? Jamaicans? Cape Verdeans? Me? My father is Ewe (100%) but my mother an Egba/Glaswegian blend. I’m often told that I don’t ‘look African,’ and more absurdly, that I don’t ‘talk black.’ If black love is dead, then ‘black’ must have lived but what has it meant/does it mean?
The Loveliness of Blackness
Now. There is, as we know, no scientific basis for human classifications of race. ‘Blackness’ was long ago given away as an expedient social construct. The people we call ‘black’ today are in fact the polylithic progeny of Africans, Indians, Asians, Europeans — depending on where you find them. Sharp, progressive scholarship has debunked the myth of racial type, exposed the roots of scientific racism, troubled the notion of ‘race.’ The trouble is, to say that black is a social construct (and stamp it INVALID for speaking of us) can obscure the ways in which blackness has moulded a culture, a people, a past.
All brown-skinned folk are not the same. From Bajan to Batswana to Burkinabé, we speak different languages, live different lives, have developed in different contexts. We nevertheless share certain features: origins in Africa, years of oppression — above all the habit of forming, in contexts of hardship, cultures of strength. If ‘black’ was wrongly applied to a people (let’s call them the people of the African Diaspora), it has also denoted the brutalities they suffered as well as the cultures they formed in response.
I’m all for the rejection of language and thinking that binds us to hardship (what révolutionnaire isn’t?). But we might be throwing out the baby of black culture with the bathwater of black oppression. The badge of blackness was given to us; be we Bajan, Batswana, Burkinabé we were given conditions of slavery, colonialism, economic disenfranchisement, hunger. But we created under these conditions of blackness the cultures of blackness that now span the globe; in Bridgetown, Gaborone, Ouagadougou ‘black culture’ is and has always been real. Africans of the Diaspora have done with ‘black’ what we do with everything: transforming that which is devalued by dominant culture into something vibrant, strong. Just look at our cooking: kontomire, soul food — the remnants of industrial farming remixed. The ingenuity common to ‘black people’ is unique, in the history of the world. To look at the condition (social, historical) and define it by hardship and wanting and strife is to misunderstand what we’ve made out of blackness: the most triumphant culture on earth.
The problem (and it’s a big one) isn’t whom we date but what we know, or what we don’t know/read/learn/tell our kids about our People. Nor is it the case that kids can somehow transcend being (treated as) black; even mixed race children (and professionals, celebrities) can run into contemporary racism. If all our children know of ‘being black,’ they learn on London streets (where women clutch their purses when they pass, or store clerks watch them shop) — we are to be faulted for not teaching them the rest. If they knew that the West tried to steal then destroy us, succeeding only in making us make more of life; knew that we set on metropolis margins the cultural trends that world masses adore; knew that we’re heroes, survivors, inventors, ingenious — by very definition, per force; wouldn’t they love being part of this People?
Wouldn’t we love being black?
It’s 10:02 in Brixton Market. One man shelters his son from the rain. With his looks he could come from anywhere warmer: Accra, Dakar, Negril. How he got to London, Lambeth — waiting, wet, on a Brixton street — is anyone’s guess: to work? to study? send money back home? to eat? There must be pain and wanting here, some measure of hardship, exhaustion, fatigue; despite its recent run-in with gentrification, Brixton works. But there is also movement here, the pulse of a people who won’t stay down; they’re hard and hopeful, joyful people, pressing through the rain. Babies sleep in mothers’ wrappas; vendors sell to feed their kids; soukous plays, infectiously cheerful; people work and laugh and live. One of them, a village elder, white-haired, waves a woman down. She smiles wide, in recognition, laughing like my auntie.
Despite the load he must be carrying there, a father settles his son on his shoulders. The little boy’s laughter floats through the air. These are black people.
RGB – Red, Black, and Green – are the colours of the African Liberation flag. Kontomire is a Ghanaian dish made of coco-yam leaves and smoked fish. Bridgetown, Gaborone, and Ouagadougou are the capitals of Barbados, Botswana, and Burkina Faso. But you should know that.
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