Thread by @paulaakpan

Someday, UKBP is going to have to reckon with its “politically black” roots & the fact that it makes some Black people, especially younger BP, very uncomfortable. Plus, historically, “political blackness” has always been contentious, esp. for some Asian communities (Tariq Modood)

“Political blackness” is understood & remembered as a solidarity-building tool but, in my area in particular (contemporary Black lesbian histories in the UK), we don’t really engage with the fact that a no. of communities & individuals struggled to meaningfully embody it

I’ll never forget reading about Ambalavanar Sivanandan’s “moment of truth” during the Notting Hill riots. A Sri Lankan Tamil who moves to Britain in 1958 (later becomes director of the institute of race relations), @rob__waters’ book ‘Thinking Black’ sets the scene:

“…he was with Sri Lankan friends in a pub in Bayswater…when the riots broke out. On voicing his alarm, he was assured that “this is nothing to do with us, they are only attacking the Negroes””

While this seems to have shifted Sivanandan’s thinking, his friends were able to disregard because they were not the target. How do you build solidarity when stakes & goals may converge but are ultimately disaparate? When there is an oft-times unnamed hierarchy always in play?

Jay Bernard (2014): “The term ‘politically black’ is fraught for obvious reasons. I feel the women who said black is ours, not yours, had a point insofar as they were uncertain of how other women were really perceiving them…

“…it's still opposing whiteness as if there are no racial dynamics among people who are not white.”

Anyway, all of this is to say that Black fungibility - the infinite possibilities that were impressed upon enslaved Black bodies - continues to shape how Black people negotiate all manner of relations, including to other racialised groups

For me, unifying movements that don’t centre a logic of antiblackness (and how non-Black racialised communities perpetuate this) will always be limited in their usefulness and, perhaps, goes someway to explain frustration with UKBP 🤷🏾‍♀️