Abstract
Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements explores the spontaneous emergence and subsequent decline of Asian youth movements (AYMs) across Britain during the 1970s and ’80s through archival material and interviews with participants in Bradford, Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham. It shows that the focus of these struggles was on securing equal access to citizenship rights in Britain. State and individual racism in employment, education, housing and policing shaped the experiences of the children of South East Asian migrants. Young people, predominantly male, were mobilised in response to attacks on their community. Whilst they emerged spontaneously in response to local conditions in a number of areas, they also connected with each other and with existing black and left-wing political organisations, and developed an analysis of racism based on power. The struggle against racism was seen as part of the class struggle within Britain and globally. They articulated a black political identity forged by experiences of racism and the legacies of colonialism. The lessons of Black Power, the US Civil Rights movement, the struggle against apartheid and the influence of the Institute of Race Relations informed the development of an inclusive black consciousness. The movement was secular and used cultural activities to help to develop this consciousness. As well as local and national campaigns, it provided solidarity with struggles in South East Asia, Africa, Palestine, Ireland, Central and South America. The male dominance of many of the movements is acknowledged. This led to the marginalisation of women’s participation and concerns, and the emergence of black feminist organisations. The AYMs and black organisations engaged in alliances on a number of immigration and other campaigns.
The author explores how activists engaged with existing black organisations such as the Indian Workers Association and with the British left, and organised local political action as they sought to build well disciplined political movements. She identifies how some sections of the British left criticised the AYMs as black separatists, and failed to recognise the legitimacy of the grievances they articulated.
Chapters 5 and 6 explore the major activities of the AYMs against racist immigration laws and police criminalisation. Ramamurthy provides a concise summary of the effect of racist immigration controls and shows how, by taking up individual cases, the AYMs built a principled position that respected the individuals affected whilst challenging state racism. Their involvement with the Anwar Ditta campaign against a refusal to allow her children to come to Britain exemplifies this approach. They contributed to the building of a broad alliance against the injustices Ditta and her family were experiencing, eventually leading to victory. The case of the Bradford 12 exemplifies the response to ‘the lack of police response to racist attacks and the frequent criminalisation of victims’ (p. 120). The police arrested and charged twelve political activists in Bradford in 1981 against a backdrop of national conflict between police and black youth. The campaign organised public meetings, marches and pickets of the courts. Ultimately, the 12 were discharged, establishing the principle of the right to community self-defence.
Chapter 7 draws together previous material on state funding for youth and community activities for racial/ethnic groups, and shows how it undermined the self-reliance, solidarity and discipline of the earlier movements. The concluding chapters show how the principles developed in AYMs were carried forward by activists into new organisations that maintained independence from the growing ‘ethnic minority industry’. The black political identity developed through the AYMs was increasingly fractured by state support for separate religious and cultural projects. Muslims have been progressively demonised since the publication of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie in 1989. The official reports into the 2001 riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham failed to recognise the evidence of structural racism that young people experienced. Instead, they created the discourse of ‘community cohesion’, which locates the roots of the disorder in the failure of Muslims to integrate into the ‘British’ way of life.
Black Star provides valuable insights into the activism that emerged in response to experiences of structural racism in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. It charts the emergence of a black political identity amongst young Asians growing up in Britain, and the activities they took against racist immigration control, policing, education and employment practices. It shows how youth movements developed out of local community experiences, engaged in different types of local action and engaged in broader national and international movements. It recognises the failure to engage young women in many of the movements. The divisive nature of state funding for ethnic minority communities is exposed. A reliance on state funding has increasingly led organisations to adapt to the current political agenda. Resistance to state racism has been dissipated into projects seeking to integrate ‘disconnected’ communities and preventing violent terrorism.
The lessons from the emergence of the AYMs still have relevance today. The attacks on working-class communities by austerity policies, restrictions on collective workers’ rights, the demonisation of Muslims as part of the War on Terror, and hostility to immigration and consequently those who do not appear British, increasingly create a climate of conditional citizenship. To be a scrounger, criminal or a migrant provides grounds for exclusion. Experiences of racism and exclusion led young Asians in towns and cities across Britain to organise and articulate their demands for equal citizenship through the AYMs. An effective challenge to current orthodoxies will need to build local movements for action against social injustice, and provide the basis for the development of the collective solidarities that have been undermined by neoliberal policies.