Introduction: London Is the Place for Me

Notes Introduction: London Is the Place for Me “London is the Place for Me,” Lord Kitchner accompanied by Freddy Grant’s Caribbean Rhythm, London is the Place for Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950–1956. Compact disc recording (London: Honest Jon’s Records, 2002). 1. Following the work of anti-racist, transnational feminist scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, my use of the term Third World is, indeed, political as it signals a sociopolitical category/group. I do not use the term in a pejorative sense. 2. Britain or Great Britain is generally used to denote England, Wales, and Scotland. The term United Kingdom refers to England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and is also more formally known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 3. Within two months of the murder, the suspects—Jamie and Neil Acourt, Gary Dobson, David Norris, and Luke Knight—were arrested, ques- tioned, and released on bail; initially, two were charged with murder but the cases were dropped due to “insufficient evidence.” This pro- tracted, high-profile case caught the attention of the media and the public, mostly, I think, due to the perseverance of the Lawrence family. They refused to stop seeking justice. The Lawrence family launched a private prosecution, even though this eventuated in the suspects’ acquit- tal due to the judge’s dismissal of evidence and eyewitness testimony. This was followed up by a public inquiry (known as the Macpherson Inquiry) between 1997 and 1998 put into motion by then home secre- tary Jack Straw and carried out by former High Court judge Sir William Macpherson. The inquiry resulted in what is known as the Macpherson Report (1999)—a document that shed light on “institutional racism” in the Metropolitan Police Force. Years later, in January 2012, Gary Dobson and David Norris were charged and convicted of murdering Stephen Lawrence. They were sentenced to a minimum of 14 and 15 years. Technological advances provided crucial DNA evidence connect- ing Dobson and Norris to Stephen Lawrence’s murder. 4. Ethnic minority is a term used descriptively in the United Kingdom to refer to people of color. 5. Southwark is pronounced “Suuthuck.” I have retained the British spell- ing of this organization and of various other words in the UK context. 150 Notes 6. There is a large body of literature on this. See, for example, Dolowitz et al. 1996; Evans 1999; Hall 1988a, 1988b; Hall and Jacques 1983; Hall and Jacques 1989; Laybourn 1995; Pierson 1995; Porter 1994; Taylor- Gooby 1988, among others. 7. Borough refers to “mainly urban local authorities [councils] entitled to have a mayor (or provost) instead of a chairman of the council” (Byrne 2000, xii). Boroughs differ in geographical size, the outer ones tend to be larger. A council, also known as a local authority, is a group of people “who are elected to be councilors and form a council, a body which takes authoritative decisions for the local areas” (240). The term “local authorities” is also frequently used when referring to a member of the local government. 8. See the works by A. Sivanandan. 9. Claire Alexander provides a good discussion of this by drawing attention to the two discourses that have emerged in the process of the splin- tering of black as a unified category of political activism. 10. I thank the women of the Gender and Cultural Citizenship Working Group—Kia Lilly Caldwell, Kathleen Coll, Renya Ramirez, and Lok Siu—for our numerous conversations over the years about the impor- tance of the vernacular, and people’s own understanding of their social and political worlds. 1 Citizenship, Belonging, and the Racialized State 1. Times, June 8, 1959. 2. In 2003, at the request of Kelso Cochrane’s seventy-five-year-old brother, Stanley, the Metropolitan Police reviewed the case. The case, however, was not reopened as the Metropolitan Police found that there was no new forensic evidence to even reopen the case, let alone to convict any- one of Cochrane’s murder. Retrieved in March 2009 from http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/4871898.stm. 3. In my discussions of people from the Caribbean or the Caribbean region, I am referring to the English-speaking region. This area was colonized by the British and later became part of the Empire/Commonwealth and/ or independent countries. The countries include Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St, Lucia, St. Vincent, Guyana, St. Kitts-Nevis- Anguilla, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, British Virgin Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. 4. By using the term migrant, I follow historian Winston James’s argument. He states: “It should be pointed out from the outset that it is preferable to use the terms ‘migrants,’ ‘settlers,’ and ‘black Britons’ as opposed to ‘immigrants,’ when describing black people in Britain, because that is precisely what the vast majority were . [T]here have been relatively very Notes 151 few immigrants to Britain. Most of those that entered Britain in the twen- tieth century, including the post-war years were simply moving from one part of the British Empire to another as British citizens . .Unless one is prepared to call Yorkshire men in London immigrants, then we should not call Barbadians entering London on British passports immigrants. The immigrant label attached to such persons largely developed in the 1960s largely to deprive black Britons of their citizenship rights.” 5. I also wish to signal the fact that black migrants’ understandings of blackness were informed by overlapping legacies of slavery and colonial- ism, and by class hierarchies in the Caribbean. 6. It is difficult to determine exactly how many blacks were living in Britain during these years. Spencer (1997, 2) estimates that during the late eigh- teenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britain’s black population was about 10,000. 7. The Act of Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Empire passed in 1833 and was implemented in 1834. See Public General Statutes lxxiii, 1833, 913 (see Walvin 1973, 140). 8. Although shilling are no longer part of UK currency today, in compari- son, one shilling is the equivalent of twelve pence or sixteen cents in US currency. 9. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the London bombings, “difference”—espe- cially around issues of race—is vectored in Britain’s state debates. To be specific, in the post-9/11, post-London bombings, there continues to be an onslaught of attacks on British Muslims, Muslim communities, and the religion of Islam. Anti-Muslim prejudice is a current manifestation of racism in Britain. 10 See Paul, Whitewashing Britain, 9–10; Dummett and Nichol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens, and Others. Also, in The Commonwealth (1995), Patricia Larnby and Harry Hannan state: “The modern Commonwealth grew out of the former British Empire—it is the outcome of the decline and eventual demise of British Imperialism. If there had been no British Empire there would today be no Commonwealth. The origins of the Commonwealth association date back to the Durham Report of 1840 which initiated the gradual growth of self-government in the colonies of British settlement.” The term Empire/Commonwealth or Commonwealth/Empire is used to denote the irony as well as the inter- connectedness between the two classifications. Commonwealth countries are independent countries. 11. Paul (1997) gives a penetrating account of these processes. 12. The Nationality Act came under strong attack during parliamentary debate in 1948. While members of the Conservative Party criticized the Bill for undermining imperial nationality, Labour Party members argued for “imagined political community of Britishness” (ibid., 22). 13 The 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act identified the means by which members of the British Empire could attain nationality and become a British subject. This Act confirmed the existence of 152 Notes a universal status—that being British subjecthood—and its uniformity throughout the Empire. The “code” by which one acquired subjecthood was based on being born or naturalized in the Empire. One could be a British subject anywhere and everywhere within the Empire. Moreover, the Act ironed out ripples in Britain’s fabric of unity and put a stop to the dominions’ individual policies with regard to who is considered a subject or alien (ibid.., 11–12). 14. See Fryer (1984); Brown (1995); Gerzina (1995); Spencer (1997). 15. To give one a sense of the rent exploitation during these years, at the beginning of the twenty-first century a person could rent a room—bed included—in a large, bright, well-kept three-story Edwardian house that included full access to an eat-in kitchen, two bathrooms, a washing machine, refrigerator, a garden/backyard and pay about forty pounds per month. 16. Historian Kathleen Paul (1997) provides an excellent discussion of the outward migration schemes in Whitewashing Britain, see chapter 2, “Emigrating British Stock,” 25–63. 17. Paul notes that between 1946 and 1960 annual UK emigration aver- aged about 125,000. Overall, dominions with substantial white settlement such as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada absorbed eighty percent of the migrants and received at least 1.5 million UK residents (ibid., 25). 18. Polish veterans and their families responded to the 1947 Polish Resettlement Act, which provided financial provisions (i.e., pensions) as well as eased the transition into British society; within two years of the Act, at least 120,000 veterans and their dependents were living in Britain. Many found work in construction, agriculture, coal mining, and textiles (ibid., 69). Together with other Eastern European groups, thousands settled in Lancashire, South Wales, and Scotland (Walvin 1984, 104). 19. In 1922, religious-geopolitical lines were drawn, and Ireland was divided into two countries: one of which would remain a free, independent state within the Commonwealth, and the other, a unique country within the United Kingdom.

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