On black empowerment

A deeper and yet more problematic and controversial issue related to the previous post is the question of whether black people living in the West deserve special treatment in order to heal the historical wounds of the past and the ways in which they impact negatively on the present.

In the UK and US since the 1980's, there have been various policies, principally focused on education and the job market, that focus on "positive discrimination" (UK), or "affirmative action" (US). Alongside these practical policy options, there has been the continuing discourse of reparation. The NGO founded by yesterday's demonstrator, Ligali, is a good example of the kind of background political stance that such pressure groups take.

The framework belief is that the playing field is simply not level: a combination of racism and white supremacy continue to make access to education, jobs and resources more difficult for blacks than for whites, therefore there must be forms of structural redress in the form of pro-black intervention mechanisms. Running alongside the specific lobbying points, there is often a pan-African theme which aims to provide softer forms of support, spiritual, psychological etc. See Ligali's chat rooms for examples of this. More recently, the South African government has developed its own "Black Economic Empowerment" (BEE) initiatives which have tended to focus on education and business networking and support.

It must be said that both positive discrimination and affirmative action discourses are on the wane in the UK and the US, in the sense that the words are no longer in prominent currency. That said, the consciousness of black participation (or not) in various sectors is often present, in the form of job adverts that stress that "such-and-such organisation is an equal opportunities employer keen to receive applications from ethnic minorities." There are also the occasional news stories about a specific sector being a white enclave, such as the article on the BBC's website about the UK publishing industry yesterday. Only last year, there was a furore about the BBC itself being 'hideously white'. In many ways, it still is.

As with the logic of the apology, there are two entrenched viewpoints. On the one hand, it is clear that slavery has a tangible legacy, in the plantocracy that is America today, and to a lesser extent, in the terminally disempowering council estates up and down the UK, such as the concrete monstrosities in Peckham and Elephant and Castle. One only has to wander around Roxbury in Boston, or the precincts of South Chicago, to see communities that continue to be ravaged by inequity and injustice. Although Boston has a subway system, Roxbury ain't on it - it literally is not on the map, even though it is just a few miles from one of the centres of New England liberalism.

In these circumstances, relying on the individual's will to succeed will never be sufficient. The combination of lack of access to quality education, the pyschological stain of living in a dirty, disenfranchised and under-resourced area, the media's incessant negative stereotyping and a heavily biased penal system will do its best to ensure a disproportionate number of black men go to prison, and black children grow up fatherless. The case for a positive and progressive structural intervention rings loud and clear.

On the other hand, there is the sense that if one positions one's community as always needing external intervention and support, one's community is perpetually framed as weak, vulnerable, in need of support. This is often the stance of Nigerians to issues around positive discrimination, affirmative action and BEE. With the in-built self-confidence that many Nigerians are blessed with, the idea that one goes around asking for help is anathema. Being labelled as someone who needs special treatment is viewed as patronising and automatically disempowering.

This is just one way in which the Afro-Caribbean community in the UK is put at odds with an ascendant African (most especially Nigerian) community. Its easy to see that the demographic trend of increasingly more Nigerians in the UK and the US making the West their home, setting up businesses and generally applying an energetically entrepreneurial 'can-do' attitude to their circumstances is challenging the racial status-quo. Rather than hand-outs or interventions, Nigerians are showing what cultural and psychological self-confidence can do. More significantly, they are undermining the basis for affirmative action programmes, by demonstrating forms of economic and cultural autonomy that disrupt the liberal agenda.

What to make of all this? Which stance to take? While black empowerment programmes may be critised for unwittingly sustaining a black-as-victim paradigm (and falling within a liberal hand-out control agenda), at the same time, superabundantly confident Africans/Nigerians need to reflect on the psychological difficulty of the homeless feeling of many black Britons (and equivalent psychological/symbolic challenges in the States): "this is not my home, the Caribbean is not my home, Africa is not my home, therefore I have no home". It often seems almost impossible for Nigerians brought up amongst their own, grounded in a strong sense of home, to appreciate the difficulty of growing up within an historically excluded racial group in the context of a white supremacist society (as in the UK and the US).

Perhaps what is most needed is an internal dialogue between the two communities: the difficulty of living close to the wound of slavery and a plantation economy on the one hand, and the sheer power of collective self-belief on the other.

What do I know about all this? More than ever, I welcome your comments.