“There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation”

“There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation”
By Paul Gilroy, (1987): HUTCHINSON.

This book ranges among other things, over ethnocentrism and contemporary British culture, British legality, youth, music and anti-racism; and explores the relationship between race, class and nation. Paul Gilroy makes it clear that he’s not restricted to the idea of modernising class analysis, and examines the relation between racism and nationalism - arguing that racial prejudice cannot be scraped by administrative means, since it goes beyond left-right political divide. He pays a huge contribution to the new social movements, by rethinking the position of black communities in terms of the theory of inner cities social movements.
Dr Gilroy highlights the general theoretical link, that racism was the identification and employment of racial differences as justification for biased practises. He particularly reflects on the question that the great black scholar W. E. B. Dubois had identified long before, the issue of being black and being seen as a problem. The problem of race relations should not be seen as something peripheral to the structures of social-economic concerns and political life, because this only sanction blacks as an external problem. Thus the “substantive challenge” Gilroy proposes, (11-12) lies ahead in the possibility of a black presence outside the characterization made as the ‘problem’ and ‘victim’ status.
There are two aims that this book seeks to emphasise; besides the reintroduction of history, the ultimate focus subsist a critical analysis to the more ethnocentric dimensions of the cultural studies. Gilroy presents ‘race’ as an effect, of a number of discourses and practices, which were crucial to the inner workings of the British society in the 1970s and 80s, (14). His approach in the study of race involves a great deal of opposition to idealised references of separating ‘race relations’ from other social relations.
Gilroy examines the theoretical ways in which race has been conceived by scholars in the twentieth century and discusses the problems where these writers have resisted the idea that race and class belong to separate categories of experience. The problems arise, he determines, when trying to monopolise the study of structures with the studies of meaning and action. Here he criticises the view of classical socialism for mixing up the two, on the basis of Marx historical materialism. Gilroy rejects the framework of historyless people and stresses for an alternative construction of identity, “specific historicizing of the African diaspora”. In addition he rejects the sociology of race that portrays ethnic minorities as “historyless, victimized, subcultural pawns, whose lives are characterised by intractable family pathologies” (4). “Rather than a biological, natural, or essentialist fixity… ‘race’, Gilroy adds is historically conditioned ‘relation’… that must be retained as an analytical category because it refers investigation to the power that collective identities acquire by means of their roots in tradition” (5). On this basis he claims that race must be reconstructed by the ‘radicalised resistance’, such as the construction of diasporic history, as an alternative to the white hegemony in England.
In his textual analyses the author reveals the difficulties that he personally encountered when treating culture within a strict homogeneous national units, which reflects the forms of nationalism that came to be by a discipline, where blacks’ have been systematically excluded from the sense of Englishness, founded upon historical memories of imperial greatness. “The evolution of racism from vulgar to cultural forms… Gilroy concludes (40), has introduced a new variety which stresses differences rather than simple hierarchy”. Thus class analysis should be reworked in its encounter with race as the author puts it, “reducing the race issue to class issue is an error of Marxist scholars”.
The industrial geography of the national crisis that took place in the early 1980s, also changes to class hierarchy and gender patterns of employment all contributed in creating new social and labour divisions. In this light Gilroy recognises that these must be taken into account in discussions of the political language of British nationalism, if so the dominance of authoritarian populist nationalism could be brought down. Apart from globalisation, changes to composition of capital, organization of labour, production structures and operations transcend the limits of the nation state and therefore as the author point’s “it cannot be combated by workers organizations trapped and confused within national borders” (68). What Gilroy really challenges is the consideration of the practises and unique customs of British institutions that fail to see them as discourses of race and nation, while interpreting such symbolisms of patriotism as emblems and expressions of a pure homogeneous national sentiment. As it has been pointed out above, emphases are laid on the limitations that the Labour party has placed in the analysis of the relationship between race, nation and class in the post-industrial era; namely the dismissal in the socialist writings that nationalist movements can arise from among “historyless” peoples.
The examination of the imagery of black people is another necessary point to the overall argument that Gilroy pursues in this book. The idea that blacks are a high crime group and that their criminality is a self-expression of their culture is integral to British racism. The attention is paid in turn to the definition of identifying both street disorder and robbery as an “expression of black culture” (109). It points to the autonomy and the manner in which anxiety about black crime has provided the means of development for popular racism, which is connected to the struggles of the police to maintain law and order. As with the themes of race and nation Gilroy points out again that what makes this form of racism invisible is its ability to unite the conflicting positions of formal politics. These ideas have featured both in the analyses of socialist and conservative annunciations seeking to use the anxieties of black crime as means to renovate their political support with the white voters in the inner-city areas. Gilroy expresses remarks for a more adequate conceptualisation of race relations, anti-racism must be an analytical concept he suggests “rather than merely descriptive term” (148). The task as he concludes of a more sustained anti-racism remains thus of how administration of institutional reform can be articulated as a matter of politics rather than policy.
This book is a credible source to race relations and offers criticism to the sociology of race used throughout twentieth century. Although difficult to read due to the sociological language the author employ’s, the analyses presented constitute a radical solution to the study of culture and race, even at present.