As a pioneer of cultural studies and coiner of the term
"Thatcherism", Prof Stuart Hall, who died this week, was in the
truest sense a public intellectual. He was also something else: probably the
only black British intellectual who most people could readily name.
A bit of prompting might produce mention of Paul Gilroy of
King's College, author of The Empire Strikes Back and Black Atlantic, who has
recently returned to Britain after several years in America's more fertile
ebony towers. But how many other black British thinkers have a public profile?
When I began writing a book called Black British
Intellectuals and Education, even friends sympathetic to the project asked,
"Are you sure about the title? What do you mean by black British
intellectuals?" This is not a state of affairs Hall would have relished.
But let's be clear. Britain has a powerful black intellectual tradition: from
Olaudah Equiano and the black anti-slavery campaigners, to those who arrived in
the mid-20th century, (think, for instance, of Claudia Jones, founder of the
Notting Hill carnival), up to the present day. Yet, Hall and Gilroy aside, most
struggle to gain coverage in our classrooms, lecture halls or TV screens.
Moreover, while it is certainly not the case that all great intellectuals are academics
(the great polymath CLR James, for instance, was not university educated),
British academia has offered poor soil for the coming generation of black
thinkers.
The division of labour in which blacks entertain and whites
think is deeply embedded in western cultures. Britain still seems, even in the
21st century, to struggle with the notion of home-grown black thinkers. In the
public sphere, black communities are too often viewed as social problems to be
theorised by white thinkers. For example, think back to the summer riots of
2011. David Lammy MP, alumnus of both the School of Oriental and African
Studies and Harvard, and Gus John, veteran of the anti-racist movement, spoke
insightfully about the causes of and potential solutions to urban disaffection;
yet media coverage was dominated by the commentary of David Starkey, whose
talents lie as a historian of Tudor England.
Truth told, interest in black thinkers rarely goes beyond
Black History Month. My own university students tell me they rarely encounter
black intellectual work of any kind on their courses. In contrast, several
contemporary black thinkers with British roots are now firmly established on
university reading lists across the United States. They include Kwame Anthony
Appiah, whose book Cosmopolitanism has reinvigorated debates on
multiculturalism in America, and Hazel Carby, Devon-born professor of American
Studies at Yale, who was one of Stuart Hall's early proteges.
The effect of these absences on black students' intellectual
confidence is rarely taken seriously. And for those who do seek careers in
British academia, there is little nurture. In its 2011 report on the
experiences of minority ethnic academics, the Equality Challenge Unit
highlighted dire rates of promotion among black scholars. At a conference a
couple of years ago in the US I remember being surrounded by American
colleagues aghast at recent reports that only 50 of Britain's 14,000 professors
were black.
In addition, the failure to embed black studies in the
curriculum has left many aspiring black scholars without a sense of an
intellectual home. The recent closure of bodies such as the Centre for Research
in Ethnic Relations at the University of Warwick has further narrowed horizons.
In this context the brain drain that has seen excellent black scholars head off
to the US and Caribbean is unsurprising.
Yet while they too rarely gain admittance to the front row
of public debate, there are contemporary black British intellectuals whose work
is helping to carry forward Hall's legacy. Let's hear more, for instance, from
black feminists such as Heidi Safia Mirza, whose Race, Gender and Educational
Desire should be compulsory reading for those concerned with
"intersectionality", the interweaving of gender, race, class. And
when barely a month seems to pass without a soul-searching crisis over racism
in sport, why not give a seat on Question Time to Kevin Hylton, our leading
expert on sport, race and culture.
