British Sociological Association Public Lecture with Gary Younge

Britain’s views on Black America are informed by a range of contradictory tendencies: amnesia about its own colonial past, ambivalence about its racial present, a tradition of anti-racism and international solidarity and an often-fraught geo-political relationship with the United States itself.

Image Credit: Grazia UK

From the vantage point of a postcolonial nation that both resents and covets American power, and is in little position to do anything about it, African Americans represent to many in Europe a redemptive force– living proof that that US is both not all that it claims to be and could be so much greater than it is.

This sense of superiority is made possible, in no small part, by a woefully, wilfully incomplete and toxically nostalgic of our own colonial history which has left significant room for denial, distortion, ignorance and sophistry. The result, in the post-war era, has been moments of solidarity often impaired by exocitisation or infantilisation in which Britain has found it easier to export anti-racism across the Atlantic than to practice it at home or export it across the Channel, the Mediterranean and beyond.

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