A Sunday night, recently. I’ve just come back from an overseas trip and I’m on the Tube from Heathrow, heading for north London. A white working-class guy, sharply dressed – black Moschino jacket, smart white jeans tapering down to brown shoes – perches opposite me. We sit there, label-rich clothes, legs apart, balls out, as is the manly fashion – pretty similar styles, I guess.

As we pass Kensington a japing tourist pulls the emergency cord, and the white guy gets up and hurls abuse at him for the delay he’s caused. Most of our rather genteel fellow passengers look embarrassed or even frightened by the extent of his venom while he starts looking around the carriage for approval. His eyes alight on me and he smiles. Warmly, intimately. His smile says: ‘I know you, your kind. Your kind and mine are close, not like these others. Your men are tough, real men, the type who’ll appreciate the action I just took.’

I nod to him in a neutral manner, then return to my paper. But he won’t stop, this one. He struts up and raises his fist in a black-Brit ‘Touch Me!’ greeting. I fist his fist and he drops down beside and starts chatting nineteen to the dozen.

This is Brixton, man. Aren’t you afraid?

Emerging at Seven Sisters station, Tottenham, one of Britain’s blacker neighbourhoods – which is to say around 50 per cent – I see a trashy, drunken middle-aged white woman scuttling across the busy High Road for a bus. ‘Raasclaat!’ she exclaims as a speeding car all but takes off her foot. ‘Raasclaat’ is a Jamaican swear-word…

Touching fists, an instinctive ‘Raasclaat’ – this doesn’t come from tuning into Ali G ; this goes deeper.

A few days later I’m driving up a south London road with a black female friend. A nice car comes from the other direction and we both slow down to inch past each other. As he passes me, the driver, a white guy I see now, with a fine black woman alongside, gives me an earful. I don’t hear most of what he’s shouting – it takes a few moments to sink in that he’s talking to me, and then to recover from the shock of this.

White timidity around black people, you see, is something you expect in ‘street’ situations in most parts of London. Only the week before I’d been held up on a Tube escalator, thick with City commuters. I looked down to see what the problem was, to find a black street-looking youth standing disdainfully on the wrong side. People were looking vexed, but no one did anything about it. It had gone against me that day, but I can usually rely on white middle-class timidity to ease my passage around town: to cut through traffic, say, or grab the spare seat on a teeming train.

So I’m surprised. I don’t think a white lad has spoken like this to me in a one-on-one situation since the mid-Eighties. I’ve had my hair shorn that day and, with the barber’s little razor cuts adorning my dome, I’m looking at my baddest. ‘This is Brixton, man, blackhead central,’ I’m thinking. ‘Aren’t you afraid of me? Don’t you know our reputation? Don’t you read the papers?”

We decide, my friend and I, as I drive on, that he must be one of these alpha males. Top car, top job. ‘Hell, I’ve even got one one of your top women, so what can you say to me, fool?’ seemed to be the size of it. This is a worrying, hypermodern development. With white timidity no longer guaranteed, I may have to rethink my whole modus vivendi!

Not to mention my love life. With these race thoughts buzzing, I meet up with an ex for a drink. We had what I thought was a good thing a while back and now, after ups and downs elsewhere, I have decided it is her I need in my life. She’s a black girl who grew up, untypically, in rural England. A happy type.

The evening – well, the half-hour – is a disaster. I’ve hardly sat down when she starts. She’s heard on the grapevine that I want to get back with her, so she puts me straight on a few things: our old relationship brought her down after a while, drained her vivacity. Me and my circle of friends were too much on the race trip, she adds, too cynical about Britain. Race isn’t a priority for her. When we started we used to do spontaneous things together, she says – going to various places, but the places we visited shrunk after a time. Race, in short, has made me boring, she says.

As she talks, I am thinking that our conversation confirms something I have recently begun to twig – how there’s an increasing number of black and mixed-race people out there who associate other black people with difficulty, with issues about and around Britain that they themselves aren’t feeling. It’s ironic, her saying race is not a priority for her, though. This was what attracted me to her in the first place.

Confused? I am, Britain is too…

What these incidents tell me is that when we talk about race in Britain, there are no grand narratives we can easily point to. New trends and new knowledge jostle with old fears. One black boy’s ‘cynicism’ is another black girl’s ‘he doth protest too much’. Age and where you live affect your viewpoint. But, even among generally more optimistic younger people, The Observer poll suggests that almost as many think racial tension is increasing as think it’s decreasing. I’m sure that, for many of our respondents, their answers are born of what happened to them last week or last month.

That nasty look in the street… was that racism or not?

Race, certainly for those who live in multiracial parts of this island, is mainly felt, and understood, at the daily level, via those little encounters in shops and on buses; that conversation you had with an African or Indian or white English person at work or in a bar the other day, that last girlfriend or boyfriend you had, and how it made you feel differently about their kind; that nasty look from that shopkeeper – now was that race, or not?

On hearing the ‘alpha male’ anecdote above, my ex would probably say it had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the stresses of London driving; and that my black youth on the escalator was nothing to do with white timidity, and all to do with British reticence. And possibly she’d be right. Determining what is and isn’t a race issue is a tricky business.

We live in a country whose most enduring national myth is that it is a beacon of fairness. Ask Britons to think of the defining British characteristics, and many locate them in an instinctive sense of tolerance, fairness, moderation. There is a feeling I’ve often picked up from various strands of white Britain that they feel themselves above racism. This comes with a correlating discomfort when faced with something like the Lawrence inquiry. Of course they’d acknowledge that there are racist ‘fringe elements’ here, but they feel that racism is generally un-British.

Travelling through Europe, you realise that this country is nearer to peace, and all the ease and comfort which that brings, than most others. In German, Dutch, Portuguese towns, black populations are still on the fringes of their societies. They haven’t ‘broken through’ in the way we evidently have here. They can still look a bit nervous around town, a hunted look in their eyes. They still have that refugee vibe in their look, their walk. But in Britain, in the cities, black folk walk like princes and princesses, like we’ve got rights in this joint. Which, of course, we have.

Outside the black centres of population, it’s a different story, but still often a pleasant one. In Cumbria, where I spent time last year, in Edinburgh where I was this summer for the festival, you notice a certain look from many young white people. You go into a McDonald’s, and they’re there in their baseball caps and baggy trousers, and they give you this look. It’s not threatening – it’s a look of interest. The black British writer Mike Phillips noted something similar in his recent piece, At Home In England . ‘Nowadays,’ he wrote, ‘moving through the “white” areas of the country, what I feel is far from the anxiety of the past. Instead I have the curious sense that I am in areas which have stayed stuck in the past.’ This feeling, he senses, ‘is overwhelmingly shared by the bulk of residents in the districts where it is a rarity to see a black or an Asian face.’

It’s as if the people in white England know that ‘mixed-up’ England might be the future, and they are interested in finding out about this ‘coming thing’.

Curiosity, sadly, is not universal. A couple of days after 11 September, I saw a gang of young black and white Britons abusing three Muslim women in Stratford, east London. One of the effects of 11 September has been a greater Asian – especially Muslim – visibility. A visibility that contrasts with one of the intriguing facets of the Asian story in this country. By and large, and certainly compared with blacks, Asians have been invisible.

Things are changing a little now but still you hardly ever see Asians in adverts, for example, whereas we’re always popping up as one of Jamie Oliver’s friends, or singing songs in cars. We have agitated more for representation and images of ourselves. We have integrated more, while Asians have been content to do their own ‘invisible’ thing, as indeed have myriad other smaller non-white communities. I have for a long time gained a sense from white people that we are liked more than Asians, no doubt because we are seen as being less ‘alien’ – most of us are Christian, Caribbeans have British names, our foods are less ‘stinky’ than theirs (though curries of course are popular).

So when we talk about race, we’re torn between stereotypes ruthlessly deployed and seeking out the particular. And, seeking the particular, should not race talk really be class talk? For instance, most of the Caribbeans who came here in the Fifties came to do working-class jobs, whereas most of the west Africans who came a little later, my parents’ generation, came as students or to take on graduate employment. The Punjabis and Gujeratis and east African Asians, so responsible for the ‘Asian economic success’, tended to have quite different class backgrounds from the Bengalis of London’s Tower Hamlets, the country’s most deprived borough, or from the Pakistanis of Oldham. But many white Britons don’t know this, can’t tell us apart; they just see blacks and Asians.

And so, what with black people being associated with ‘the street’, my white friend from the Tube strutted over. He touched my fist because we were ‘working-class brothers’.

‘Can you still write after 11 September?’

‘Have you been able to write at all since 11 September?’ a white British poet asked me at a party a month after the attack. ‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

For her, and for so many others, you’d think this was the first time innocents have been killed, when, of course, thousands of innocents, many of them children, are dying every day, mainly in poorer parts of the world, of malnutrition, Aids, poverty, and in natural disasters. Of course, what made the 11 September events egregious was that they came in a new kind of terrorist attack, and perhaps it’s understandable that a sort of blood-link with America has been pronounced, that there’s been much talk of ‘our friends’. But it should also be remembered that for many of us Britons, Africans dying of Aids and Indians dying in the Gujerati earthquake, are more ‘our friends’.

I grew up in Manor House/Wood Green, north London, down the road from where I live now. It was a pretty working-class area and the wider borough, Haringey, is one of the most diverse in the country. I grew up around ‘native’ English, Irish, Africans, Caribbeans, south Asians, Turks, Greeks, Jews, both Hasidic and reformed. The first racial incident I can recall was a bottle-throwing spat between myself, then six or seven, and one of my brothers on one side, and a couple of Turks on the other. That apart, and some name-calling in the playground, from white kids and the odd Caribbean too, there was little aggravation. One of my brother’s friends was a Greek, another was tight with two Pakistani boys; we all knew a lot of different people.

Roots, routes (or how I discovered I was black)…

When I was 12, I won a fees-paid scholarship to a public school deep in the country. Again, no trouble. Indeed, you might say there was a lot of white love. If you’d asked me then what my self-conception was, I would have known, on a level, that I was black, but I had a much more acute sense of being from a Nigerian home. The home regime – the corporal punishment, educational expectations, emphasis on obedience and respect – was all, it seemed to me, to do with our being Nigerian. Which is to say that, until someone tells you different, what you feel you’re living in , is a culture. And race and culture are not at all the same thing.

Race is on the outside, culture on the inside. Which is why I don’t underestimate the gravity behind the thinking when a white Brit, with a sorrowful shake of the head, attempts to explain to me how my kind can never be really British: ‘It’s not ‘cos you’re black but it’s just that you don’t have the culture, mate. In your bones, you know.’ I have a less ossified view of culture, one that sees it as not fixed in a person’s or nation’s history, but as a fluid, ongoing process. Routes as much as roots. The Nigerianness of our home jostled with all the other cultures out there that took our fancy. One brother, famously in our parts, became a latter-day teddy boy, another hung out at a local soul pirate station. At 15, you would have caught me in my black eyeliner-wearing Velvet Underground period; at 18 I was rucking violently to The Smiths. More recently you’ll have found me in a hip-hop club, or dancing a rare groove two-step, and you’d probably assume I’m some orthodox black-Brit who has been that all along.

When I got older, armed with an Oxford law degree – not what I wanted to study, but my father insisted on law or medicine – I moved to Brixton, south London. I was pretty much your average lefty-liberal then. That didn’t take long to change.

My old Haringey people played a part. I noticed how quickly many of them, after our fluid, mixy-mixy teen years, began returning to their ‘home’ cultures once the real adult world had started. Financial inducements and family pressure were crucial. A Greek father would say to his son: ‘If you marry this Greek girl, this friend of our family, we’ll sort you out with a position in the family business, and a house in Southgate.’ And so my Greeks would settle down with their Greeks, Indians with their Indians. And I likewise was spending increasing time in my emergent ‘home’ culture – a maturing, increasingly sophisticated black-British vibe. If you were more middle-class, there were now bars and spots and people for you too, in places like Brixton. No doubt at some emotional level, after a long while in extremely white institutions, I was meeting a need.

I was sharing Brixton with a number of ‘right-on’ white friends and acquaintances from university, but here was the funny thing. In all my years there, we almost never found ourselves in the same social space. And though they, with their ethnic beads and accessories, and the pot they bought from the Rastaman in their pub, thought they were all part of some multicultural paradise, many knew little of what was truly going on in their communities. They weren’t noticing, from their eyries in trendy Notting Hill and Brixton, how deeply young urban Britain was changing around them. How it had become increasingly black-inflected. How average white, Greek or Asian kids on the streets where they lived, were pronouncing ‘ask’ like ‘arks’, Caribbean-style, and had a ready grasp of patois. And how, in the whiter suburbs, there were others too who wanted a piece of this new action.

I was a journalist, working in liberal institutions such as the BBC. One or two funny things happened to me there, especially at lunchtime. Going out to get a sandwich on Shepherd’s Bush Green, quite a black neighbourhood, I’d notice how many colleagues whom I’d been talking to minutes before, wouldn’t recognise me on the street. They kept their heads down on the Green and hurried on about their business, or else, even if they seemed to see me, looked at me blankly, right through me. I began to develop a sharper understanding of white timidity, of middle-class ignorance. It seemed, still seems, that we knew so much more about you than you about us, that the Right didn’t like us, and the Left didn’t know us. My twenties, in short, were all about coming to terms with the limits of liberalism.

Race, or rather the disappointments around race, can breed an increasing non-alignment in, and semi-detachment from, this island’s story. And just as Oxford student Chelsea Clinton has found she needs to be around Americans who share and understand her pain since the terrorist attacks, so I found an increasing need to close ranks in the light of things I saw happening to my kind.

In part, semi-detachment seemed to be what the powers-that-be had wanted for some time. In a key speech in 1966, Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins laid out the policy of ‘cultural diversity’ that has guided thinking in this country ever since. He rejected the ‘flattening process of uniformity’. People should be encouraged to hang on to their ‘native’ cultures, within a wider integrated Britain. Since then, ‘Celebrating Differ ence’ has been all the rage. Hence the growth of black and Asian publicly-funded festivals; the ‘multicultural’ programming on Channel 4 and the BBC (generally broadcast after midnight); black sections in bookshops (go past the A-Z of literature, down to that dark corner, and there’ll you’ll find us, nestling between the sci-fi and the erotica).

Diversity, championed by both liberals and any number of progressive black people keen to find a space they could call their own, has utterly failed in bringing people in this country closer together, in disseminating knowledge. Sure, it’s had its beneficial effects for many minority people, and this should not be underestimated, but it has let the wider public off the hook. The Lawrence inquiry was supposed to change all this, but much that happened in that story only confirmed our impotence. Lawrence was killed in 1993, but it took three years for the national media and the Government to take up the fight, and only then because of the happy accident of Stephen’s father Neville Lawrence, painter and decorator, working on Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre’s house.

So what precisely did the Lawrence inquiry change?

This moment of our ‘greatest triumph’ was born in an old-fashioned ‘master-servant’ moment. It could, and should, have happened before, but only happened when middle England was up for it. Moreover, this killing of a black boy by white lads was an old narrative, still true of course, but an old first-order assault of the type that was happening 40 years ago, just as racism in the police force is an old narrative. It didn’t really speak to the subtler, second-order injuries this non-white generation more commonly feels.

More and more I could see what my father, in his insistence that I studied law, was trying to protect me from. The great thing about joining one of the old professions is that, once you’ve passed the exams, you’re sorted. It’s harder for employers not to give you jobs. This is one of the main reasons why so many Asians are doctors, and so many black working-class people go into sport. Immigrants tend to look for types of work where standards are objective.

This is part of the knowledge that non-white Britons take around with them. I have been lucky enough to travel across the world, and the story is uniformly similar, uniformly depressing. In Peru, Brazil, Australia, Europe, the United States, even in the Caribbean and black America (where ‘shadism’, the preference for lighter-skinned black people, is prevalent), darker-skinned people are at the bottom of the pile.

It’s been like this for a long time now. There’s – how would you put it – a ‘situation’ going on. I’d call it a war. Like the war on terror, it’s not a conventional war, but it’s a war nonetheless. A war to restore battered psyches, a war against white supremacy.

Forgive me if this sounds dramatic, but this is why I’m unlikely to settle down with a white girl. I don’t say this lightly. I went out with a white girl for some years in my early twenties. A lovely person and, needless to say, utterly blameless in race matters. We tried hard to make it work but it proved impossible because so often for me my commitment was affected by the fact that, outside our relationship, in the wider world, I felt there was a war on, one in which I was honour-bound to play my part. Most whites and many blacks don’t think there’s a war on, and that’s fine. Some will think there is a war on, but that their white partner, say, has nothing to do with it, and that is an eminently reasonable position too. Others are ‘colour-blind’, and just believe in love, and that’s great, if you can do it. God knows, I have nothing against mixed-race relationships. My analysis may be wrong, and the conclusions I draw from it are debatable. Like the stubborn Japanese soldier who came out of his bunker years after the war had ended, looking for Americans to shoot, I too may one day emerge from my trench to find that the war stopped long ago. But not yet. Where we are at present, I think, can best be illustrated by that most mainstream of TV shows, EastEnders, and a black Briton who’s made it to mainstream icon status, Ian Wright.

In EastEnders, the Queen Vic is the key location. Its white characters spend a great amount of time there, and its black characters go there too. But the reality is that many black people barely go to pubs; we prefer winebars or restaurants-cum-bars. So much so that, when I meet a black person who goes regularly to the pub I can assume that he’s spent some formative years in a white world – perhaps in a small town somewhere, or else at one of our old, predominantly white, universities.

A different way of drinking

If the BBC was interested in portraying black London life accurately you would expect the black characters, at least occasionally, to be found in a different drinking space. The fact that they’re not can only be due to the producers’ liberal desire to present the East End as a happily integrated community – all races socialising together under one roof. In fact, when many black people catch the show, they think: ‘This is silly, this isn’t what we want. When are they gonna have their black characters doing more “black” things?’

At the turn of the Nineties, the footballer Ian Wright would often celebrate his goals by running to the corner flag, and doing a ‘bogling’ move – the ‘bogle’ was a ragamuffin reggae dance then popular in the black community. The man was clearly charismatic, and I was excited at the idea of this black Brit bringing some of the black Brit vibe to wider public attention. But the media didn’t really get behind Wright in those days. He was seen as being a bit troublesome. Still, I noticed that, as the years went by, Wright, in his public pronouncements, began to sound more and more like a little Englander.

Last year he was one of those leading the chorus of indignation against the foreigner, Sven-Gören Eriksson, managing our English team. In the intervening years, of course, Wright’s media career had blossomed, although now he seems less the underground black Brit and more the cheeky chappie of British music hall tradition. Does this not tell us something about the price that must still be paid to make it big in this country?

Still, perhaps I’m being too hard… Given the situation in the rest of Europe, and the de facto segregation that characterises much of the US, maybe Britain is not badly placed. It is in some sort of position to make this island the most progressive, happiest multiculture in the world, to be a new beacon, and to give itself a new, invigorated identity in the process. But we must do much more talking with each other. There must be much more knowledge, more widely spread. At present, though, in our still all-to-play-for present, race remains enough to kill, or at least madden, a man.

As inhabitants of an unrigorous country concerned more with surface than substance, it’s time to get real.

Some years ago, in the late 1990s, I was invited by the writer Mike Marqusee to the first meeting of an embryonic “Let’s Kick Racism out of Cricket” campaign. About 20 attended, mainly white, some black – among them the former Gloucestershire and England bowler Syd Lawrence.

Speaking to the black contingent, I gained the impression that although we felt there were certainly issues around race out there, we also felt that many of these would be hard to target in this relatively genteel sport where much may be thought but little is directly said. And besides, there were other more urgent concerns, not primarily racial – chiefly the lack of cricket in state schools. And so the campaign died an early death, not for lack of white enthusiasm, which remained undimmed, but perhaps because of black indifference.

I’ve been reminded of this episode recently, reflecting on the John Terry court case (the England player was cleared of racially abusing QPR’s Anton Ferdinand). What has been most striking, at least to this observer, is how very upset white people seem to be about the “racism” that’s been exposed. In the papers and on the radio, people have been falling over themselves to express their progressive sentiments. But, as often when people protest too much, it seems to me that the loudness is as much to do with them as it is to do with anything more substantial.

For the great ship of state, it seems to me, chugs on as it ever has. UK black actors continue to head to the more career-friendly shores of the US. Increasingly black entrepreneurs are looking to African partners for assistance in pursuing their visions. Over here, we remain always “emerging” says one contributor to a recent book (Black British Perspectives) in which black artists speak among themselves.

We live in a rather unrigorous country that seems ever more concerned with the surface of things, rather than with any serious addressing of the more substantial stories beneath. And so we are all of a fuss about imposing heavy punishments on sportsmen and sports fans who say the wrong thing.

It is certainly good to take steps to reduce the amount of racial and other innuendo that some players and supporters have to endure at grounds. But being something of a Hobbesian, I have a slightly pessimistic view of the extent to which we can change people’s hearts. Violence and antipathy towards some “others”, however they are construed, seems to be necessary for many who need to counter their own insecurities.

Still, one thing this affair may do is deal a blow to one of the most tedious aspects of our surface times – our reverence of our sporting “role models”.

Growing up in slightly earlier, pre- role model times when one just had favourite sportsmen, and ascribed to them no higher function, it has been strange to see the almost total consensus about the idea that celebrated sportsmen nowadays guide young people’s opinions. After the full exposure of the abuse that John Terry and many other English footballers regularly dish out, we may begin to see some reining in of our excessive fawning over these rich, Xbox-obsessed children.

Novelist Diran Adebayo is currently writing a sports-centred memoir

2021 began grumpily for me. It was the last days of the Trump Presidency, and a couple of runoff elections in Georgia would decide the balance of the Senate and with it the last of the immediate political ramifications of his term. The Democrats needed both seats, I thought, to control the Senate. Maybe one would be a tie. I turned on the BBC World Service at the top of the hour the morning after the votes, hungry.

The news programme led with a clip from the victory speech of one of the candidates – African-American toned so Democrat I imagined, though wasn’t certain: about how he’d grown up on a housing project, the son of a cotton-picking mother etc. Well., okay, but it was the third iteration I’d heard of this ‘Child, grandchild of sharecroppers’ trope in this election cycle already – vice President-elect Kamala Harris had said similar when she’d accepted the nomination at the Democratic Convention and Joe Biden too around that period, and, to mounting horror, I realised that, rather than using this as a brief atmospheric ‘sting’ to take us to the hard news, the programme was playing this segment in full and the man, it turned out, was a pastor so he had stamina. After a couple of minutes of this – and this wasn’t even the purest version of this story you’ve heard as it turned out the pastor’s father had also been a pastor at his same church – the programme followed with an interview with the mother: how did it feel to have your son elected senator? Here a somewhat grisly sequence for the mother’s hearing, at her late age, was poor, the line was faulty and it took a lot of toing and froing to discover, eventually, that she was delighted. At this point, five or so minutes in and still no wiser about the bigger picture, I quit.

Not long after, I chanced upon the singer Joan Armatrading, who had a new album out, being interviewed on the impeccably liberal Channel 4 News. Presenter John Snow was establishing that that she’d moved from the Caribbean to the UK in the late 50s: “So you’re part of ‘The Windrush Generation’ then?” His expression flecked with sympathy and hope. “What was that like?”

This could be interesting. I’d spent a bit of time with Joan some years back when we were both part of a British Council delegation to South Africa – a motley crew that included the writer Jackie Kay, Diane Abbott MP and our recently departed Prime Minister, then in his Spectator days – and detected, it will not surprise to even the casual observer of her career, a reticent but independent spirit, not necessarily someone to get off the bus, you might say, just because someone else says so, and there were a couple of things that might make her bristle here: the arguable inflation of said Windrush Generation – with the Windrush Scandal the racial scandal du jour – to facilitate an entry, even a shadow, for her own independent project. A little something crossed her face, a move towards composure, you felt, as eloquent as the fleck: ‘I can’t give you a woe-was me-story, John, I had a happy childhood.’ Cue wailing and gnashing from the Production Gallery.

There have been many positives to emerge from the social justice movements of recent times, (shifts in atmosphere that start to emerge in our neck of the woods around the simultaneous millennial moment of the Macpherson Report and this anthology’s first volume), but one of the most striking consequences equally surely has been the calcification of a certain sentimentality around the presentation and discussion of the black subject, particularly the black diasporan subject, in our media and public spheres.

Black as fight, this being whose inner and outer is variously endangered from cradle to grave. One whose life is bigger than themselves somehow. Political, problematised (“Today, on ‘Business Weekly’, the black people who loved their hair but have hated it since coming into contact with whites…”), in need – of future empowerment; if a youth, often, of saving from a fall. Perhaps, if she’s an upcoming biracial artist and you’re a radio arts interviewer looking to freshen the pot, you start these days with a question about the troubles of finding a place, though some may hear shades of tragic mulatto.

Such an artist will often find their work couched within the hitherto low, treacly, persuaders of ‘celebration’ or ‘inspiration’, the language of a Hallmark greeting card. Some will collude in this themselves (‘Buy my book!! # Celebrating Black Women’s Voices…’). These received phrases reach their zenith across the land in Black History Month but any month will do. (“June 2022, Lenny Henry’s Caribbean Britain – Episode 1 BBC: Lenny Henry is joined by a host of famous faces as he celebrates his Caribbean-British heritage…’).

What is now glutinous fug has long time hovered. As a child I remember being struck by just how many TV news reports featuring African-Americans would, at some point, have a bunch of them singing in church. It could be, I don’t know, a piece about Gas price hikes in the US, and they’d speak to a white Pennsylvanian by his truck and a white Texan on the freeway and then they’d cut to a black couple and behind them would be some gospel-y robed ones. You sensed the push for symbol, for human archetype: the noble response to suffering, or something about community – the best of how ‘we’ used to be, perhaps? At a time when most of my schoolmates, most European moderns, were fleeing the church in droves, it did feel a tad quaint, and sat somewhat uneasily with their coverage of the then front line of black civil rights, apartheid South Africa, where, despite as many churches and as many Christians, their preferred group singing showed locals engaged in war-like chants and dances.

Then, as a professional, I was hired to write a BBC documentary ‘Out of Africa’, a show that would sweep through black world history with five-minute slots on various black heroes, such as the Fab Four (Marcus, Mandela, Martin, Malcolm). Anxious to avoid the impression that, if whitey didn’t exist to struggle against, black heroes would be out of a job, I argued to include decolonial heavyweights like Sankara, Nkrumah, Lumumba, politicians with strong, indigenous-centred programmes for their countries or continent, in vain. When they are bad they are very, very bad and when they are good it can be like that.

For sure it’s underdog, it’s vulnerable, but that has its glamour and there’s other meat too for the fashionistas to chew on in the big life, especially for those partial to a bit of retro chic. The Sky trailer for 2021’s Black History Month has images of Martin Luther King and black moderns with their arms raised, a la the Olympians of ’68, cut with shots from the new 60s Black Panthers’-themed ‘movie ‘Judas and the Black Messiah ‘. The widely lauded ‘(Black Is)’ album by the British ‘mystery’ group Sault, released during the Black Lives Matter days of 2020, similarly recalls those times in its stark ‘fist’ cover and its wish to summon a similar, Curtis Mayfield et al- tone and urgency for now (‘Why We Cry, Why We Die’). There are welcome signs of a globalist black sensibility here but you couldn’t quite call it vision. On ‘Bow’, the names of the countries of the African continent are intoned over drums, in a stirring-roll call that you feel would have worked better fifty years ago, before decolonial disappointments. Coming out at a time when Nigerian youth’s continuing ‘End Sars’ protests against their own police brutality were going viral, it avoids the hard questions.

The political, it turns out, is indeed personal. Aesthetic, fantasy, taste… To properly articulate my issues with the fug, I could speak of fears that oppositional or divergent energies among black culturemakers will be soaked up or squeezed out by the ‘‘Diversity and Inclusivity’ embrace, similar to what Mike Phillips in ‘London Crossings’ writes of happening during the official Multiculturalism of Britain’s 70s and 80s, and bemoan the lack of a radical centre, free from the sentimentality of the left and under-appreciation of the right. I might talk of sentimentality’s frequent failure to see whatever’s in front of it properly; to appreciate that, as Joyce Carol Oates writes of the sex-worker character Carlita in ‘How I Contemplated The World From The Detroit House Of Correction And Began My Life Over Again’, ’Beyond her eyes processions move, funeral pageants, cartoons.’ Or of how, partly because of this, so often it trades on essentially unearned emotion and cite the swift decimation of Netflix’s Diversity initiatives this year in the face of the company’s first economic setbacks as the latest testament, and all of that would be true yet still fail to account quite for this nasty, saccharine aftertaste, something like the taste my mother’s Sweetex pills left me with when you added them to tea.

There are various contributors to where we are now – the wider climate of identity politics and culture wars, the ubiquity of the once frowned upon tabloid-y ‘human interest’ approach across our media, the mainstreaming and increasing use of therapy, with its attendant language, in the West, all adding to our current tyranny of feeling. To these you can add the trickle down effects of certain modish books and concepts within the black world (of which the latest to my attention is Afro-pessimism), the world of the socials, whose currency is ‘likes’ and whose populist, Highest Common Factor tendencies will always favour the more visceral, straightforward, activist-y performance, and if I list them it is not to say these are all ‘bad’ in themselves or lack merits in some cases, rather that the tone and parameters that these have helped generate too often reminds me of a certain common kind of emotive, issue-centric Young Adult fiction, a genre that is not a favourite and, indeed, was not even around when I was in its demographic but which I see, if the reading habits of my Creative Writing students are anything to go by, now (along with Fantasy) dominates.

My own youthful stories were different. Like the SARS protesters, the first, ongoing threat to me and my siblings’ bodies was another black body. There was the senior, religious relative who told of the Biblical curse of Ham and its application to black folk as if he really believed it, a tale I’d first come across in an abridged children’s version of the Bible at the time I was guzzling Greek myths like the myth of Sisyphus and perhaps the combination of these two have fostered a suspicion of any curse-like, agency-free story where we haul the same type of stones up the same hill, forever encumbered. Then the close young adult relationship with a friend whose emerging mental distress was signalled by disproportionate reactions and manipulative behaviours so that when I hear of the Jordanian-American author whose contract was cancelled by her publisher, citing her failure to appreciate ‘historic racism’ after she’d posted about an African-American subway employee whom she’d spotted eating on the network, contrary to regulation, triggering a condemnatory Twitter storm, I too feel triggered. A truly unappetising story with sneaks all round… Were they not taught my first rule of the playground: don’t sneak. Ah, perhaps too adolescent, this aversion to the screamers. Like Joan, perhaps, a generational thing. My own head so caught up in those years in the tough world of film noir, the bloody zones of Jacobean theatre, an atmosphere I saw summarised in an article by the critic W. A. Edwards, writing in Scrutiny II magazine about the plays of John Webster, that was as chime-y and as dreamy as anything more orthodoxly inspirational: “Events are not within control, nor are our human desires; let’s snatch what comes and clutch it, fight our way out of tight corners, and meet the end without squealing.” Overarching doom here, too, you could say, but there seemed some dignity, heroism in the response, and a notion of cool that feels lost in the world of ‘likes’.

How do we as cultural producers expel the fug, resist its intrusiveness?  In our journalism, we’d do well to resist too swift a resort to the someway manipulative ‘As a black person’…/’As an x…’-style set-ups, with their capacity to mute the voice, the reason of anyone who is not x. In our fictions, one starting point is surely to imagine what the fuggers might want and then avoid…If it’s an immigrant story, you might want to go easy on scenes involving the ‘exiled’ newcomers and homeland cooking, with all its obvious metaphoric load. Where there is pain from the traditional sources do not let it dominate so Sisypheans and self-flagellators can score on your behind. You may wish to avoid whites as characters completely, as I tried in one novel, so all that is at most a distant echo or informer, allowing other conversations their centre-ground. Let not your weak prove too strong and noble but sidestep with the mischievous, the less pronounced, the more opaque (perhaps no-one doing it better in Black Britain currently than Hackney’s musical bag of tricks Dean Blunt).  Above all, insist on the art of your art so that those who are looking for simpler find no safe harbour there.

Everyone wants lives that have the weight of story: to live in historic times and/ or have a grandiose sense of self. Understandable, but we must be careful of the stories we tell ourselves or that are disseminated on our behalf. Nations have relied on heroic YA notions of war for aeons to fill their armies and prosecute their wars (‘N-N-N-Nineteen’ as the eighties chart-topper about the average age of American soldiers in the Vietnam war went, albeit there was conscription there too). The widespread notion that black people have a higher pain threshold than other races has surely fed into the disproportionate violence meted out to some black suspects by the police or immigration services at the moment of arrest, with sometimes fatal consequences. My own attachment to Webster’s way, alongside a football team, Hotspur, with a predilection for high-scoring, fluctuating fortune type matches, no doubt encouraged a jeopardy-seeking ambition that may have slowed adult progress. Few, it turns out, want too much adventure in the partnerships they seek long-term, much less difficulty; they choose, we know, comfort, security and if black (as a trope, an idea) remains problematic, then it may be fled from. One can envisage a time in a 1000 years, as technological advances increase the ability to choose biological traits via digital coding, when, if this and other current phenomena continue – colourism, intra-racial tensions and disparities etc – the number of people claiming and self-identifying as black is increasing while the number of people who actually are black, in the sense of having significant recent and ongoing black blood, has withered in the diaspora, a little like the fate that has befallen Native Americans, with those remaining ‘true’ black people largely confined to some hardy outposts in what used to be (before ecological change) the mother continent.

Still, there’ll be some glory in it, in them, if they’re living an adult story.