Thinking Black

It was a common charge among black radicals in Britain in the 1960s that Britons needed to start “thinking black.” As state and society consolidated around a revived politics of whiteness, thinking black, they felt, was necessary for all who sought to build a liberated future out of Britain’s imperial past. Thinking Black reveals black radical Britain’s wide cultural-political formation, tracing it across new institutions of black civil society and connecting it to decolonization and black liberation across the Atlantic world. A new history of black activism that retells the formation of New Left politics in Britain, this book shows how, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, black radicalism defined what it meant to be black and what it meant to be radical in Britain. Chapters explore the growth of British black radicalism through the U.S. and Caribbean Black Power movements; how activists negotiated gendered and ethnic difference and sought to utilize and transform new black expressive cultures; the popularization of black critiques of the British state; how black studies reformulated British education politics; and intellectual responses to conflicts between young black people and the police. The book closes with the decline of this politics in the mid-1980s, placing it in its national and international contexts.