Getting back to the US with all my data and notes, I was really excited to finally start fleshing out my actual paper. Meeting with my mentor and sorting through everything, some of the larger movements I wanted to discuss began to crystalize. The UK’s history has clearly been deeply wrapped up in empire. Empire, however, doesn’t just end. The relationships and dynamics developed over centuries of imperial institutionalization are the ones that continue to define people’s lives. Casting that then back to the way that the UK deals with race has been really revealing. Race is tied very directly to ethnic identities, which are the direct locations of former colonial control. Maintaining imperial and racial repression, the police have developed gangism as a reverse-euphemism for Blackness to defend their blatant and targeted suppression of Black Brits.
From such a wide subject, the most challenging thing for me has been trying to develop a coherent narrative. There are so many moments and programs that intersect in the repression of Black British voices. As an American as well, I’m not always as familiar with the social intricacies that race takes on across British culture. I think, however, that that uncertainty is also deeply important. Race is a biological fabrication, but it has a social life. Across the world, race takes on its own cultural meanings. The social relation of race in the US, because of transatlantic cultural exchange, influences that of the UK as well. But pointing out the differences and learning the oddity of how race is understood in foreign places, helps to reveal the absurdity of race here at home. What I want to show, in my own little project, is how that absurdity destroys people here and now, and how it will and may continue to do so.
With a vision, and data to support it, I’m looking forward to just writing. The rest of the project will be drafting and editing, to hopefully end up with a paper that tells a compelling story.