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"Love Music, Hate Racism": The Cultural Politics of the Rock
Against Racism Campaigns, 1976-1981
*Ashley Dawson <16.1bios.html#dawson.bio> *
/ College of Staten Island, City University of New York/
adawson@gc.cuny.edu
© <#copyright>2005 Ashley Dawson.
All rights reserved.
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1. In his classic study of post-1945 youth subcultures, Dick Hebdige
suggests that Black British popular culture served as a template
for defiant white working class subcultural practices and styles
(29). The kind of affiliatory cultural politics that Hebdige
describes is best exemplified in the little-studied Rock Against
Racism (RAR) campaign of the late 1970s. As Paul Gilroy stresses
in There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, his seminal analysis of
British culture and nationalism, unlike much of the Left at the
time, RAR took the politics of youth cultural style and identity
seriously.[1 <#foot1>] Surprisingly, neither Gilroy himself nor
subsequent cultural historians have extended his brief discussion
of RAR; as a result, our understanding of this movement, its
cultural moment and its contradictions remains relatively
undeveloped. This is particularly unfortunate since, unlike
previous initiatives by members of Britain's radical community,
RAR played an important role in developing the often-latent
political content of British youth culture into one of the most
potent social movements of the period. In 1978 alone, for
instance, RAR organized 300 local gigs and five carnivals in
Britain, including two enormous London events that each drew
audiences of nearly 100,000. Supporters of RAR claim that the
movement played a pivotal role in defeating the neo-fascist threat
in Britain during the late 1970s by quashing the electoral and
political appeal of the National Front. Although there has been
debate about the ethics and efficacy of the campaign, there can be
little doubt that RAR provoked a rich and unprecedented fusion of
aesthetics and politics.
2. The anti-racist festivals organized by RAR responded to an
exclusionary ethnic nationalism evident among supporters of the
neo-fascist National Front, official discourses emanating from the
Labour and Tory mainstream, and British culture more broadly.
Drawing on cultural forms of the Black diaspora such as reggae and
carnival and juxtaposing them with the renegade punk subculture,
RAR sought to catalyze anti-racist cultural and political
solidarity among Black, Asian, and white youths. RAR thus offers a
particularly powerful example of what Vijay Prashad calls
/polyculturalism/, a term which challenges hegemonic
multiculturalism, with its model of neatly bounded, discrete
cultures (xi). In contrast to prevailing notions of
multiculturalism, the term "polyculturalism" underlines the
permeability and dynamism of contemporary cultural formations. As
a result of RAR's work, proponents of RAR argue, a generation of
white youths have been exposed to and came to admire Black
culture, to hate racism, and to view Britain as a mongrel rather
than an ethnically pure nation.
3. Polycultural transformation does not, however, just happen.
Rather, the forms of quotidian identification and exchange
experienced by white, Asian, and Black communities need to be
forged consciously into traditions of political solidarity. Unlike
in the multicultural model, which is predicated on the ahistorical
interaction of supposedly isolated cultures, the polycultural
carnivals organized by RAR stressed the interwoven character of
British popular cultures in order to build a grass-roots
anti-racist movement.[2 <#foot2>] By taking the quotidian bonds
and identifications shared by urban youth cultures of the period
seriously, RAR opened up a new terrain of politics predicated on
engaging with the spontaneous energies of subcultural creativity
rather than trying to ram preconceived politically correct
cultural forms down young people's throats. While an incendiary
fusion of culture and politics was integral to European
avant-garde groups for most of the century, RAR brought this
combustible combination to a mass audience for the first time in
Britain, blazing a trail for contemporary direct action movements.
4. The anti-racist tradition developed by RAR was also predicated on
evoking links with anti-racist struggles outside the sclerotic
confines of the British body politic, in sites such as South
Africa and the United States. Such transnational affiliations
suggest liberatory possibilities that break the boundaries of the
nation-state.[3 <#foot3>] This politics of spatial transgression
becomes particularly clear once we begin recuperating the legacy
of punk and of Two-Tone aesthetics. The genealogy of groups like
the Slits, the Clash, and the Specials, for example, runs not only
to the European avant-garde, but also to non-metropolitan
traditions such as Jamaican dancehall and South Asian
anti-colonialism.[4 <#foot4>] In turn, the dialogic performances
that characterize popular cultures of the Black diaspora need to
be connected to the assault on the culture of the spectacle
embodied in the punk movement.[5 <#foot5>] If, as Hebdige argues,
Black popular music provided the generative matrix of post-war
youth subcultures in Britain, at crucial moments Black, white, and
Asian subcultures have converged and exchanged musical beliefs in
electric circuits with significant political outcomes. The Rock
Against Racism campaigns of the mid- to late-1970s were a
particularly important effort to draw on the energies of
polycultural youth subcultures, one whose relevancy has grown more
apparent as xenophobic rhetoric has reemerged as a regular feature
of the British public sphere.
5. In mid-May, 1977 the Clash took the stage at the decrepit
Gaumont-Egyptian Rainbow theatre in London's Finsbury Park, backed
by a billboard-sized banner of the police under attack by
brick-throwing Black youths at the carnival of the previous August
in Notting Hill. The group launched straight into "White Riot,"
their anthem of identification with Black rebellion:
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
White riot - I wanna riot
White riot - a riot of my own
Black people gotta lot a problems
But they don't mind throwing a brick
White people go to school
Where they teach you how to be thick
An' everybody's doing
Just what they're told to
An' nobody wants
To go to jail!
All the power's in the hands
Of people rich enough to buy it
While we walk the street
Too chicken to even try it
Everybody's doing
Just what they're told to
Nobody wants
To go to jail!
Are you taking over
or are you taking orders?
Are you going backwards
Or are you going forwards?
For the Clash, the Notting Hill carnival uprising was a symbol of
Black youth resistance to an exploitative and oppressive system, a
form of rejection that the punk generation needed to emulate.
"White Riot" suggests that Black kids had not just seen through
the lies and hypocrisies of the decaying British welfare state,
but had the courage to do something about it. By contrast, not
only were white youths brainwashed by the state apparatus of
education, but, according to the Clash, they also lacked the
courage to rebel and change the system when they were able to
penetrate the veil of ideology.
6. The Clash were touring in 1977 with punk bands the Jam and the
Buzzcocks, as well as with a roots-reggae sound system featuring
I-Roy and dub from the Revolutionaries. This line-up was an
expression of the polycultural character of certain segments of
punk subculture in the mid-1970s.[6 <#foot6>] Dub reggae was the
soundtrack for punk in those early days, with Rastafarian DJ Don
Letts spinning records at seminal punk club the Roxy. In addition,
many punk bands practiced in run-down areas of London such as
Ladbroke Grove, home to one of Britain's largest Caribbean
communities.[7 <#foot7>] But hybridity was not the only game in
town; neo-fascist skinheads also turned up at punk gigs regularly,
trolling for disaffected youths who might be turned on to racial
supremacist doctrine. Indeed, in case anyone in their fishnet
stocking-clad, mohawk-wearing audience didn't get the anti-racist
message, Joe Strummer announced from the stage before the band
barreled into their wailing version of Junior Murvin's lyrical
reggae classic "Police and Thieves," "Last week 119,000 people
voted National Front in London. Well, this next one's by a wog.
And if you don't like wogs, you know where the bog [toilet] is"
(Widgery 70).[8 <#foot8>] Strummer's terse statement attests to
the deeply racialized character of British popular culture in
general and to the menacing presence of neo-fascists at gigs in
particular, as well as to the determination of certain segments of
the punk movement to confront such racism head on.
7. The Clash's anti-racist stance was catalyzed by the evolution of
new models for political practice within Black British and Asian
communities during the 1970s. Such practices were based on an
explicit rejection of the vanguardist philosophy that underpinned
many previous Black power organizations. In an editorial published
in 1976, for example, the Race Today collective articulates the
new philosophy of self-organized activity:
Our view of the self-activity of the black working class, both
Caribbean and Asian, has caused us to break from the idea of
"organizing" them. We are not for setting up, in the fashion
of the 60's, a vanguard party or vehicle with a welfare
programme to attract people . . . . In the name of "service to
the community," there has been the growth of state-nurtured
cadres of black workers, who are devoted to dealing with the
particularities of black rebellion.
In turning against the tradition of the vanguard party, groups
such as the Race Today collective were not simply rebelling
against their immediate predecessors in the Black power tradition.
They were, rather, recuperating a tradition of autonomist theory
and practice that extends back to the work of C.L.R. James in
Britain during the 1930s.
8. By the mid-1970s, James had returned to Britain and his brilliant
writings on the tradition of radical Black self-organization had
begun to influence younger generations of activists in the Black
community there.[9 <#foot9>] For James and for other radicals of
his generation such as George Padmore, the impatience with
vanguardist philosophies stemmed from the failure of the Comintern
and the Soviet Union to support anti-colonial struggles during the
1930s adequately.[10 <#foot10>] In James's case, however, this
disillusionment with particular Communist institutions developed
through his historiographic and theoretical work into a full-blown
embrace of popular spontaneity and self-organization. From his
account of Toussaint L'Ouverture's tragic failure to communicate
with his followers during the Haitian revolution in The Black
Jacobins to his attack on the stranglehold of Stalinist
bureaucracy on the revolutionary proletariat in Notes on
Dialectics, James consistently champions the free creative
activity of the people.[11 <#foot11>] His theories gave activists
a way of talking about the complex conjunction of race and class
that characterized anti-imperialist struggle in the periphery and
anti-racist politics in the metropolis.[12 <#foot12>] Taking the
revolutionary activity of the slaves in Haiti as his paradigm,
James articulates a model of autonomous popular insurrectionary
energy that offers a perfect theoretical analysis of spontaneous
uprisings such as those that took place at the Notting Hill
carnivals of 1976-78 in London. He was, indeed, one of the few
major radicals to proclaim the inevitability and justice of the
urban uprisings throughout Britain in 1981 (Buhle 161). The impact
of James's ideas concerning the autonomy of the revolutionary
masses can be seen in the polycultural politics of coalition that
mushroomed in response to the violence of the British state during
the late 1970s.
9. Yet despite the increasing militancy of the Black community, the
grip of popular authoritarianism continued to tighten in Britain.
If people of African descent were particularly subject to
harassment and violence by the police, the Asian community in
Britain suffered especially heavily from both organized and
impromptu racist violence. In June 1976, 18-year-old Gurdip Singh
Chaggar was attacked and stabbed to death by a group of white
youths opposite the Indian Workers' Association's Dominion Cinema
in Southall (Sivanandan 142). Horrified by the lack of official
action in response to this violence committed in the symbolic
heart of one of Britain's largest Asian communities, the elders of
the community gathered to give speeches and pass resolutions
against the tide of racist violence.[13 <#foot13>] Asian youth in
Southall, however, were fed up with this kind of pallid response,
and with the quietist approach of their so-called leaders. They
marched to the local police station demanding action. When the
police arrested some of them for stoning a police van along the
way, the crowd of youths sat down in front of the police station
and refused to budge until their friends were freed. The following
day, the Southall Youth Movement was born.[14 <#foot14>] Other
Asian youth groups followed in its wake around London and in other
British cities. These groups were primarily defensive and local in
character.[15 <#foot15>] Unlike the class-based organizations that
traditionally dominated the Left wing in British politics, in
other words, these groups stressed the language of community over
that of class. Their struggle tended to turn on immediate goals
related to political self-management, cultural identity, and
collective consumption rather than on the more ambitious but
distant goals of the revolutionary tradition.[16 <#foot16>]
10. Like the spontaneous uprisings that took place during the Notting
Hill carnival, the Asian Youth Movement also led to the
development of new political formations that helped forge what
Stuart Hall afterwards termed "new ethnicities." Youth
organizations and defense committees that sprang up in one
community tended to receive help from groups in other communities,
and, in turn, to go to the aid of similar organizations when the
occasion arose. In the process, boundaries between Britain's
different ethnic communities were overcome in the name of mutual
aid. Asian groups like the Southall Youth Movement joined with
Black groups such as Peoples Unite, and, in some instances, new
pan-ethnic, polycultural groups such as Hackney Black People's
Defence Organization coalesced.[17 <#foot17>] In addition, Blacks
and Asians formed political groups that addressed the oppressive
conditions experienced not only by racialized subjects in Britain
but throughout the Third World at this time. Such organizations
regarded racism in the metropolis and imperialism in the
periphery, in the tradition of C.L.R. James, as related aspects of
the global capitalist system. Many of these groups hearkened back
explicitly to the Bandung conference of 1955 between African and
Asian heads of state by developing a politics of solidarity in the
face of state and popular racism in Britain. The polycultural
character and ambitions of these groups is reflected in the titles
of journals such as Samaj in'a Babylon (produced in Urdu and
English) and Black Struggle. While such coalitions always had
their internal tensions, they were sustained by their
participants' conscious reaction to the divide-and-conquer
politics that had characterized historical British imperialism and
that continued to manifest itself in the metropolis.
11. The emotional resonance of this politics of polycultural
solidarity is suggested by dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson's "It
Dread Inna Inglan." Composed as part of a campaign to free an
unjustly imprisoned community activist, LKJ's dub poem celebrates
the potent affiliations that racialized groups in Britain strove
to foster during this period:
mi se dem frame-up George Lindo
up in Bradford Toun
but di Bradford Blacks
dem a rally roun . . .
Maggi Thatcher on di go
wid a racist show,
but a she haffi go
kaw,
rite now,
African
Asian
West Indian
An' Black British
stan firm inna Inglan
inna disya time yah
for noh mattah wat dey say,
come wat may,
we are here to stay
inna Inglan,
inna disya time yah . . . (Johnson 14).
LKJ's catalogue of different ethnic groups closes with the
unifying label "Black British," which unites the groups in common
resistance to the racism of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher.
LKJ's dub verse creates a linguistic equivalent of this imagined
community by hybridizing standard English and Jamaican patois
(Hitchcock). This was a community forged by dint of anti-racist
struggle in the metropolis. Indeed, for prominent radical
theorists of the time such as A. Sivanandan, Blackness was a
political rather than a phenotypical label.[18 <#foot18>] Skin
color, in other words, only became an important signifier of
social difference when it was embedded in power relations
predicated on the systematic exploitation and oppression of
certain groups of people by others.[19 <#foot19>] If this
understanding of the social construction of "race" derives from
the bitter experiences of colonial divide-and-conquer policies,
the politics of solidarity found within local anti-racist groups
emerge from a tradition of struggle against the racializing impact
of state immigration legislation and policing in post-war Britain.
As the popular authoritarian ideology gained greater purchase on
the British public in the economic and social crisis conditions of
the late 1970s, such forms of solidarity became increasingly
important.
12. When LKJ published "It Dread Inna Inglan," Margaret Thatcher had
just won the general election. Her agenda was, however, already
quite clear to Britain's Black and Asian communities. In 1978, she
had given an interview on Granada TV in which she linked the fears
of post-imperial Britain to prejudice against Black people:
I think people are really rather afraid that this country
might be rather swamped by people with a different culture
and, you know, the British character has done so much for
democracy and law, and has done so much throughout the world,
that if there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are
going to be really rather hostile to those coming in. (Qtd. in
Widgery 14)
The assumptions behind Thatcher's infamous "swamping" rhetoric
are, of course, precisely the insular ones that legitimate the
increasingly exclusionary immigration legislation of the post-1945
period.[20 <#foot20>] Indeed, Thatcher's painfully sanctimonious
voice articulated views held by mainstream Labour and Conservative
politicians throughout the post-war period. What had changed was
the frankness with which such openly racist views could circulate
in the public sphere. Thatcher's speech delivered almost
immediately bloody results for Britain's Black and Asian
communities. The media began running reports about everyday
instances of "swamping," and notorious racist agitator Enoch
Powell was offered time on the BBC to discuss "induced
repatriation" of Black and Asian Britons (Sivanandan, "From
Resistance" 144).
13. The rising tide of racism had become inescapably evident to anyone
paying attention to mainstream British popular culture well before
Thatcher's campaign. For example, in August 1976, Eric Clapton,
the British guitarist who had made a career by appropriating music
of the Black diaspora, interrupted a concert in Birmingham to
deliver a drunken stump speech in support of Enoch Powell. Other
British musicians such as David Bowie were openly flirting with
fascist iconography and ideology at the time.[21 <#foot21>] Red
Saunders, a photographer and ex-Mod, responded to the endorsement
of racism by Clapton, whom he called "rock music's biggest
colonist," with a letter calling for a grassroots movement against
racism in rock music that was published in the main British
pop-music weeklies (qtd. in Widgery 40). His call provoked a
response of over 600 letters, and Rock Against Racism, a group
dedicated to amplifying the polycultural character of urban youth
culture using contemporary popular music and performance, was
formed soon after. David Widgery's editorial in the inaugural
issue of RAR's paper, Temporary Hoarding, was the group's first
manifesto: "We want Rebel music, street music. Music that breaks
down people's fear of one another. Crisis music. Now music. Music
that knows who the real enemy is. Rock against Racism. Love Music
Hate Racism" (qtd. in Renton).
14. RAR made its public debut at London's Royal College of Art in
December 1976. Headlining the bill was Dennis Bovell's dub band of
the time, Matumbi, who filled the hall with heavy bass frequencies
and caused joyous confusion among the pogo-ing punks. The show
brought together the radical Left and youth culture for the first
time. This was not an easy proposition. As Widgery states in his
memoir Beating Time, "the Left thought us too punky and the punks
thought they would be eaten alive by Communist cannibals" (59).
The traditional Left, of course, tended to see the cultural realm
as superficial, something that didn't really count in the final
analysis. Underlying the traditional Left's tactical failure was a
broader theoretical shortcoming: blinkered by an orthodox Marxist
reading of social relations, they tended to view "race" as a kind
of epiphenomenon of the class struggle. Once the basic economic
inequalities endemic to capitalist society were ameliorated
through either parliamentary reform or revolution (depending on
particular sectarian tendency), then the "race problem" itself, it
was believed, would disappear. This attitude was confirmed for
many Black radicals when the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) was formed in
1977. The very name of this organization, an outgrowth of the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that drew broad support from the
Labour Party and many major trade unions, suggested the insularity
of the white members of the British Left. The National Front was
regarded as a recrudescence of the Nazi party, an attitude that
ignored the emergence of the racist state in imperialist
high-Victorian Britain rather than in Weimar Germany. In addition,
the ANL seemed to assume that the NF was reanimating the putrid
corpse of a racism that was laid to rest during World War Two.
This attitude blithely ignored the discrimination and hostility
Black and Asian people had been exposed to since their arrival in
the metropolis after 1945, not to mention the enduring experiences
of imperialism and neo-colonialism of people throughout the Third
World during the post-war period. In order for the forms of
affiliation and solidarity imagined in the Clash's "White Riot" to
become anything more than rhetoric, the white Left would have to
tackle and overcome not simply the deep-seated racism that
characterized British nationalism, but also that which was
embedded in their own theoretical models.
15. Such an anti-racist project would therefore require a thorough
critique of British cultural and political traditions. Although
many of the core organizers of RAR were members of the SWP, they
were also products of the subversive countercultures of the 1960s.
Their experience working with underground newspapers and theater
groups, as well as the SWP's relatively unorthodox Luxemborgian
emphasis on rank-and-file initiative, led these organizers to
engage with the politics of everyday life and popular culture. As
a result, organizers such as Widgery, Syd Shelton, Andy Dark, and
Ruth Gregory realized that they had to appeal to both white and
black youths using cultural forms that spoke to the sense of
alienation and despair that was corroding Britain's hidebound
society, and, in the process, offer them alternatives grounded in
the polycultural affiliations emerging in contemporary British
cities (Goodyer 56). If they didn't, the fascist appeal to
nationalist notions of ethnic purity would win out, as the
experiences of Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities at the hands
of the State and neo-fascists were demonstrating all too clearly.
As Widgery puts it in his memoir: "If socialism is transmitted in
a deliberately doleful, pre-electronic idiom, if its emotional
appeal is to working class sacrifice and middle class guilt, and
if its dominant medium is the ill-printed word and the drab public
procession, it will simply bounce off people who have grown up on
this side of the sixties watershed" (84).
16. In seeking to mobilize subcultural movements such as punk and
reggae, the activists involved with RAR were treading on ground
prepared for them by C.L.R. James and by cultural studies scholars
like Raymond Williams, who emphasized the importance of the
"structure of feeling" that knitted people in a particular culture
together.[21 <#foot21>] Despite Williams's inattention to issues
of race and imperialism, his populist focus was leading at roughly
the same time as RAR's campaigns to groundbreaking work on youth
subcultures by members of the Birmingham Center for Cultural
Studies.[22 <#foot22>] For scholars such as Dick Hebdige,
subcultures engaged in forms of semiotic guerrilla warfare,
ripping signifiers of commodity culture from their original
context and refashioning them into signs of cultural and political
dissent. A simple safety pin could, according to Hebdige, become
an emblem of class warfare that placed the entire post-war
settlement in question (104). Although Hebdige's poststructuralist
take on subcultural behavior had the great merit of finding
politics where the Left had tended to see simply commodity
fetishism, it lacked an ethnographic component and hence could be
regarded as a form of projection rather than an accurate account
of youths' own perceptions of their behavior (Thornton 6). Unlike
cultural studies scholars such as Hebdige who pronounced on youth
culture from their theoretical armchairs, the organizers and
participants in RAR sought to harness the iconoclastic energy of
the punk and reggae subcultures in order to effect concrete
political change.
17. In their public events, RAR consciously drew on the subversive
shock tactics that fueled not simply the punk movement but
modernist avant-garde movements like Revolutionary Russian
Constructivism, the French Surrealist movement of the interwar
period, and the Situationalist International (SI), which helped
catalyze the uprisings of May 1968 in Paris. Purposely setting out
to denaturalize the dominant institutions of bourgeois society,
these avant-garde groups used jarring juxtapositions to disrupt
the society of the spectacle created by the capitalist media and
to stimulate utopian hopes of alternative social arrangements. The
debt of punk groups like the Sex Pistols to such movements was
clear to the activists of RAR, many of whom had been active in or
influenced by the Parisian uprisings in May of 1968 that were
partially inspired by the SI.[23 <#foot23>] RAR appropriated many
of the avant-garde's techniques, using them to speak to youth in a
fresh and direct way. Particularly important for RAR was the
technique of pastiche so prominent in punk fanzines of the day.
Appropriating this anti-elitist cut'n'paste aesthetic, RAR
activists sought to create images that appealed to iconoclastic
youth sensibilities while drawing out the sedimented political
meanings of contemporary culture. In Temporary Hoarding, the
broadsheet RAR distributed at their concerts, for example, images
of Hitler, Enoch Powell, and David Bowie were juxtaposed to make
clear the implications of the latter's dalliance with fascist
style. Similarly, Temporary Hoarding contrasted scenes from the
riots that took place during the middle of the decade at the
Notting Hill carnival with photographs of the Soweto uprising in
apartheid South Africa in order to make clear the implications and
historical background of British racism.
18. In addition to drawing on the European artistic avant-garde, RAR
also harnessed the celebratory blend of aesthetics and politics
that characterizes the Caribbean carnival tradition to enliven
their outdoor concerts. Savagely suppressed by colonial British
authorities during the late nineteenth century, carnival had
become a symbol of insurgent subaltern occupation of public space
in Anglophone Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Jamaica. The
tradition was revived by Caribbean communities in Britain
following the white riots of 1958 in Notting Hill. When in the
mid-1970s British authorities attempted heavy-handedly to close
down the festivities, Black youths rioted, producing the images
used by the Clash during their performance at the Gaumont in 1977.
Thus, in calling the events they organized carnivals, RAR was
self-consciously drawing on a tradition of resistance to racist
control of metropolitan and colonial space. Perhaps the most
important such event was the massive carnival of 30 April 1978.
After gathering in Trafalgar Square, the RAR carnival wound its
way through the streets of London towards the East End. With
100,000 participants, it was the biggest anti-fascist rally in
Britain since the 1930s. Labor-union activists, anti-racist
stilt-walkers, aging stalwarts of the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament, dreadlocked rastas, young punks in pink boiler suits,
feminists, militant queers, and every other possible permutation
of Britain's Left united in a celebration of solidarity that
decisively rejected the dour thuggery of the NF's bully boys.
19. The concert in Victoria Park that concluded this RAR carnival was
designed, like the other events the group organized, to create an
anti-racist consciousness using the twin musical subcultures of
roots reggae and punk rock. The radical historian Raphael Samuel
describes the carnival as "one of the very few [events] of my
adult lifetime to have sensibly changed the climate of public
opinion" (qtd. in Renton). RAR also organized concerts in British
Asian neighborhoods such as Southall, although Asian performers
were not on the bill. Critics of RAR have seized on this omission
as a sign of the blindness of the group's organizers towards
ethnic minority groups who lacked the cultural cachet of Britain's
Afro-Caribbean population (Sabin 203-206). Such a charge ignores
RAR's interest in connecting with organizations such as the Asian
Youth Movement, as well as the group's attention to anti-racist
organizing in Asian communities. In addition, Bhangra, a popular
music form that evolved in the British Asian community, did not
start to cross over until the mid-1980s, meaning that there was no
organic popular cultural bridge between Asian and white youths
until after RAR's dissolution. RAR's concentration on reggae and
punk subcultures was, in other words, a product of the cultural
conditions the organization confronted on the ground as well as a
reflection of the group's tactical decision to amplify organic
subcultural affiliations (Goodyer 51).
20. In order to spread the anti-racist message, RAR assiduously
programmed concerts in which British reggae bands like Aswad,
Steel Pulse, and the Cimarrons performed alongside punk bands like
The Clash, The Slits, and Generation X. Simply putting such
diverse bands together on stage was a triumph. Skinhead NF members
frequently tried to disrupt early concerts put on by the
organization by menacing Black performers backstage. In addition,
punk bands such as Sham 69 that had substantial skinhead support
had to make the same difficult decision concerning neo-fascist
followers that mainstream politicians had faced and botched. The
political solidarity demonstrated on stage by groups such as Misty
and Adam & the Ants in the face of escalating racist violence was
deepened by the musical cross-pollination that took place when the
bands climbed on stage together. The Clash's debt to reggae dub
music and to the insurrectionary Rastafarian ideology is the
clearest instance of such hybridization. Other examples abound.
When pioneering all-women punk band the Slits eventually got their
first album, Cut, released by Island records in 1978, it too
demonstrated the heavy influence of dub music. Similarly, reggae
bands such as Birmingham's Steel Pulse had come up through the
punk underground, playing in punk strongholds such as the Hope and
Anchor and the 100 Club during 1976's Summer of Punk in London.
Their militant Rasta style (fatigues, dark glasses, and wool tams)
made them kings of the gobbing, fighting, pogoing punk crowds.
Performing next to punk bands like the Stranglers, their voices
got angrier, guitars choppier, bass heavier, and drums rockier,
but Steel Pulse nevertheless retained a roots reggae style.
21. After just over a year of organizing, however, RAR was also
helping to fuel a second wave of punk that produced the indigenous
British fusion of rock and reggae known as Two-Tone music. Early
proponents of Two-Tone such as Jerry Dammers of the Specials
turned to ska, which Jamaican bands developed during the late
1950s in reaction to American R&B. Ska offered British Two-Tone
bands a perfect vehicle for the polycultural musical styles and
highly politicized messages that appealed to their racially
diverse audiences. Their lyrics were often overtly didactic. For
example, "A Message to You, Rudy," The Specials' second single,
addressed the young thugs of the National Front directly:
Stop your messing around
Better think of your future
Time you straightened right out
Creating problems in town
Rudy, a message to you
Rudy, a message to you
Stop your fooling around
Time you straightened right out
Better think of your future
Else you'll wind up in jail
Rudy, a message to you
Rudy, a message to you
Admittedly, the hortatory character of such songs was too crude
for later post-punk groups. As Simon Reynolds puts it in his
recent history of the period, post-punk groups "saw the
plain-speaking demagoguery of overtly politicized groups like The
Tom Robinson Band and Crass as far too literal and non-aesthetic,
and regarded their soapbox sermonizing as either condescending to
the listener or a pointless exercise in preaching to the
converted" (xxiii). Yet the Specials' work during the era of RAR
needs to be carefully contextualized; there was a literal battle
going on to win the sympathies of young white working class
Britons to overtly racist or anti-racist politics. Iconoclastic
intentions had initially led some punks, including members of the
Sex Pistols and their entourage, to wear swastikas. One of the
band's last singles concluded that "Belsen was a gas" (qtd. in
Renton). In addition, copies of Bulldog, the Young National Front
paper published during this period, demonstrate that punk and New
Wave gigs were seen by the neo-fascists as channels through which
British Nazism could proselytize and recruit (Goodyer 53). Music,
including that being produced by mixed race ska bands like the
Specials and Madness, was subject to fierce contention during this
period. What perhaps looks like crude agitprop in retrospect,
therefore, must have had an immediate existential appeal at the
time. As the Specials note on their website, during their "Two
Tone Tour" of 1979, for example, "it was a fact that racists from
the NF and the BNP [British National Party] were recruiting at the
shows, but the bands openly distanced themselves from these
people, and made it clear to all that they weren't welcome. It
goes to show how stupid these people were, canvassing music fans
who were dancing to multi-racial bands and singing along with
songs preaching racial unity, and yet some impressionables took
the bait" ("History"). The anti-racist exhortations and Two-Tone
aesthetic of groups such as the Specials were thus not simply a
pose, but rather offered potent examples of lived anti-racist
politics. By combining cutting edge subcultural style and radical
anti-racist messages, RAR helped transform what it meant to be
British for a significant number of urban youths.
22. A crucial aspect of this transformation of British culture was an
analysis of the historical roots of racism. As Paul Gilroy has
argued, RAR saw racism as a symbol of a far broader crisis in
Britain's economy and society (129). In order to understand the
relevance of race in British life during the 1970s, young people
had to develop a sense of the way in which Britain's imperial
history helped form their subjectivity. To hammer this point home,
Temporary Hoarding dug up the roots of British racism with
withering clarity:
Racism is as British as Biggles and baked beans. You grow up
with it: the golliwogs in the jam, The Black and White
Minstrel Show on TV and CSE History at school. It's about
Jubilee mugs and Rule Britannia and how we single-handedly
saved the ungrateful world in the Second War. Gravestones,
bayonets, forced starvation and the destruction of the culture
of India and Africa were regrettable of course, but without
our Empire the world's inhabitants would still be rolling
naked in the mud, wouldn't they? However lousy our football
teams or run-down our Health Service, we have the private
compensation that we are white, British and used to rule the
waves. It would be pathetic if it hadn't killed and injured
and brutalised so many lives. Most of the time, British
racialism is veiled behind forced smiles, charming policemen
and considerate charities. But when times get hard, the newest
arrival is the first to be blamed . . . From the wire cages of
Heathrow Airport's immigrant compounds to the gleaming Alien
Registration computer in Holborn, a new colour bar stretches.
Every retreat by officialdom inflames the appetite of the
Right. Once again racialism is back. It is growing where it is
not challenged. And challenged it must be. For when racialists
rule, millions die. (Qtd. in Widgery 75-78)
For RAR, the marches of the NF and police brutality in places like
Southall were the colonial chickens coming home to roost. In
arguing that the police riot in Southall was the return of
colonial violence to the metropolis, Temporary Hoarding makes a
point developed at length in Hannah Arendt's brilliant study of
the imperial roots of Nazism. The genocidal techniques employed by
the Nazis were developed, Arendt argues, during the mass
extermination of the Herero people in German South West Africa
(192). Temporary Hoarding makes a similar point about the British
racist state. Without the slave trade and the plantation system,
RAR argues, no industrial revolution in Britain. Without lousy
housing and unemployment after 1945, no racism. Without the deeply
inculcated notions of racial superiority and imperial destiny with
which the average white Briton had grown up, the spurious
connection between the so-called "ethnic minority" populations and
the nation's post-imperial decline could not have been made.
Unpacking the scapegoating mechanism behind coded racist talk of
"swamping" indulged in by politicians such as Margaret Thatcher,
RAR aimed to de-construct state authoritarianism and lay the
foundation for genuinely popular anti-racist alternatives.
23. In the process, RAR went some way towards meeting the objections
of Black Britons, who sometimes expressed distrust of white
radicals. LKJ was among this group of skeptics during the
mid-1970s. In his poem "Independent Intavenshun," LKJ challenges
the commitment of the white Left to anti-racist struggle. In doing
so, he offers a powerful argument for Black and Asian autonomy:
Mek dem gwaan
Now it calm
But a wi who haffi really ride di staam
Wat a cheek
Dem t'ink wi weak
An' wi can't stan up pan wi feet
Di SWP can't set wi free
Di IMG can't dhu it fi wi
Di Communist Pawty, cho, dem too awty-fawty
An' di laybahrites dem naw goh fite fi wi rites
Soh mek dem gwaan
Now it calm
But a wi who haffi really ride di staam (18)
LKJ's poem bristles at the tendency of certain Leftist groups to
arrive in Black and Asian neighborhoods in order to fight National
Party members in the streets, only to depart as soon as the
brawling concludes. All too often, these battles raised the ire of
members of the broader white community with whom Black and Asian
residents would have to deal following the departure of radical
activists. Indeed, this polarizing effect was a conscious tactic
on the part of the NF (Widgery 28). Since most racial attacks were
not committed by fascist cadres but by "ordinary" people, the
street-fighting policies of some of the white Left could backfire
on members of the Black and Asian community. In addition, as LKJ's
poem suggests, the interventions of white members of the British
Left too often assumed that Black and Asian communities were
helpless victims who had to be "saved" by the white vanguard.
Faced with this condescending attitude, Black radicals such as LKJ
insisted on the necessity for self-organization and autonomy
within their communities.
24. Like LKJ, critics of RAR argue that the campaigns of the late
1970s were not simply driven by the sectarian motives of some far
Left groups, but exploited anti-racist musicians and fans for
their own ends (Home, Kalra). Such criticism is an important
challenge to facile representations of anti-racist solidarity.
While RAR's core leadership was white and was affiliated with the
SWP, these facts do not necessarily vitiate the group's project of
proposing new modes of being British grounded in the evolving
polycultural solidarities of urban youth culture. First of all,
RAR did not demand ideological conformity from the bands it
sponsored. In fact, it did not even demand a political attitude at
all, but was content to draw on the dynamic energies generated by
putting Black and white musicians on stage together (Goodyer 56).
In addition, the often-stated intention of organizers was to draw
on existing subcultural energies rather than to shoehorn
performers and audiences into an ironclad political orthodoxy. As
a result, RAR largely avoided the drab didacticism of competing
organization such as Musicians For Socialism (Goodyer). Finally,
as Paul Gilroy has observed, RAR's project was essentially about
decolonizing /white/ culture in Britain (115). Thus, for an RAR
organizer such as Syd Shelton, "the problem was not a Black
problem or an Asian problem, it was a white problem. They were the
people whose minds we had to change--white youth, not black youth"
(qtd. in Goodyer 55). RAR sought to make the kind of flirtation
with fascism engaged in by some punks unacceptable. In this they
were largely successful; groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees
went from sporting swastikas in 1976 to writing "Metal Postcard,"
a song based on the collages of German anti-fascist John
Heartfield (Renton).
25. Crucial to this project of decolonizing white youth culture was
the recognition of new cultural affiliations. If Britain's
imperial heritage introduced a virulent strain of racism into the
body politic, it also helped produce the polycultural formations
on which RAR drew in order to forge an anti-racist popular
culture. As David Widgery puts it in his memoir:
Black is a metaphor for everything that white society cannot
face in itself, its past, its passivity, its savagery . . . .
We whites must realize, before it's too late, that the reverse
is true. That /they/ are here because we were there. That
there is no Britain without blacks and that we could not keep
our slaves out of sight forever. That there is no such thing
as pure English nationality or pure Scots or Welsh but a
mongrel mix of invaders and predators and settlers and émigrés
and exiles and migrants. That there is no /us/ without /them/.
(Qtd. in Widgery 122)
Temporary Hoarding's emphasis on the mongrel character of British
identity was a slap at the discourse of national purity employed
not simply by neo-fascists but by mainstream politicians such as
Margaret Thatcher. By reminding kids attending gigs of the UK's
imperial history, RAR offered an internationalist perspective that
goes beyond street fighting to illuminate the broader inequalities
on which the global capitalist system is founded.
Conclusions
26. In tandem with the fierce resistance of Black and Asian
communities to the violent attacks of the police, organized
neo-fascists, and racist Britons in general, RAR offered a potent
challenge to the neo-fascist threat in the streets and at the
ballot box during the mid- to late 1970s. As the election of
Margaret Thatcher in 1979 suggests, however, their attacks on
explicit racism were ill designed to combat the more subtle, coded
forms of discrimination deployed by mainstream politicians. In
addition, the forms of militancy that catalyzed polycultural forms
of unity such as those organized by RAR were frequently based on
models of masculinity and street fighting bravado that rendered
many women's identities and struggles invisible. As the formation
of the Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD)
by Black feminists during these years indicates, the male
chauvinist elements of the Black Power tradition were actively
challenged from within the Black community. All too often,
however, white activists and artists such as the Clash identified
precisely these traditions as the core of Black British
culture.[24 <#foot24>]
27. RAR folded after Margaret Thatcher's election. The organization's
dissolution no doubt reflects the severity of the blow dealt to
the Left by the electoral consolidation of Thatcher's aggressive
popular authoritarian neo-liberal ideology in Britain. Given the
repressive climate that characterized the 1980s, the dissolution
of RAR was a significant loss. For, although organized groups of
neo-fascist thugs largely disappeared from the streets following
Thatcher's victory, British racism did not recede. The 1980s saw a
series of violent conflagrations in Britain's cities that were
directly related to the forms of authoritarian policing and
structural economic neglect meted out to the nation's so-called
ethnic minorities. But RAR's demise was also, to a certain extent
at least, a product of its own success. As Widgery puts it in his
memoir, "Our aim was to become unnecessary by establishing an
anti-racist, multi-cultural and polysexual feeling in pop music
which would be self-generating, and to make politics as legitimate
a subject as love . . . . Whatever the follies of eighties pop,
there has been no sign of overt racism from white musicians"
(115). Despite the limitations that characterize RAR, the
traditions of polycultural solidarity that emerged from the
group's public events, from autonomous anti-racist defense groups
like the Southall Youth Movement, and from the popular resistance
at the Notting Hill carnival transformed British popular culture
for a whole generation.
28. The creativity with which such groups tackled Britain's
post-imperial legacy helped stimulate a renaissance in the popular
arts that would put Britain on the cutting edge of artistic and
theoretical innovation during the 1980s and 1990s, notwithstanding
Thatcherite political hegemony. Explicit racism largely
disappeared from British popular culture and an international
consciousness developed in the music scene that led to events such
as Band Aid and Live Aid. Black filmmakers such as Isaac Julien
and Sankofa produced pioneering work whose creolizing aesthetic
helped recode narratives of race and nation in Britain (Mercer).
In addition, the radical cultural tactics generated by RAR remain
a touchstone for efforts to overcome the toxic contradictions of
popular authoritarianism in contemporary Britain. Although the
lineage of direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets, which
organized a massive anti-neo-liberal street festival that
disrupted commerce in the London in 1999, clearly calls back to
the Situationist International, the countercultural politics of
the DiY groups of the 1990s also owe a lot to RAR's innovative use
of style.[25 <#foot25>] The recent revival of RAR's strategy in
the "Love Music, Hate Racism" campaign suggests that, for some
Britons at least, the campaigns of the late 1970s offer important
resources of hope. Most importantly, RAR and affiliated Black and
Asian community groups helped give marginalized youths a sense of
their collective agency at a particularly bleak moment in British
history. As LKJ was to write in the title track of an album he
released in the late 1970s: "it is noh mistri/ wi mekin histri/ it
is noh mistri/ wi winnin victri" (24).
/ Department of English
College of Staten Island, City University of New York
adawson@gc.cuny.edu /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. For a discussion of RAR's emphasis on the autonomous
value of youth culture and a critique of other anti-racist
traditions that failed to take this approach, see Gilroy 121-129.
2 <#ref2>. For a critique of multiculturalism, see Kundnani 67.
3 <#ref3>. Paul Gilroy has consistently challenged the implicit
but habitual xenophobic nationalism of the British Left. For a
particularly strong critique, see Gilroy 26-27.
4 <#ref4>. Much has been made of the debt owed by punk to the
Situationalist International. However, discussions of punk's
genealogy rarely mention specific interactions between punk bands
such as the Clash and reggae musicians. For a particularly
interesting discussion of the links between punk and the European
avant-garde, see Marcus.
5 <#ref5>. Paul Gilroy writes suggestively in There Ain't No Black
of the call-and-response aesthetic of black diasporic musical
forms (164), but does not relate this aesthetic to underground
musical traditions within the white community.
6 <#ref6>. For an excellent ethnographic account of the
cross-racial affiliations of British urban youth of the era, see
Jones.
7 <#ref7>. I am indebted to a very knowledgeable anonymous
reviewer for this point.
8 <#ref8>. David Widgery's memoir is the only detailed history of
Rock Against Racism to date. As a result, his perspective on the
organization necessarily looms large in retrospective analysis,
although he was not necessarily the most prominent or involved
organizer at the time. In-depth interviews conducted by Goodyer
suggest, however, that there is substantial agreement among core
organizers over Widgery's account of the movement. See Goodyer 60.
9 <#ref9>. James's influence is, for instance, very much evident
in Paul Gilroy's analysis of the riots of the 1980s in Britain's
cities. See Gilroy 245.
10 <#ref10>. For a detailed discussion of this period in James's
life, see Buhle.
11 <#ref11>. One of the earliest and most succinct discussions of
James's autonomist theory can be found in Robinson.
12 <#ref12>. See, for instance, Stuart Hall and associates' subtle
characterization of race as a modality of class (394).
13 <#ref13>. The lack of police reaction to such killings is
partially explained by the fact that racial hate crimes were not
recognized as a specific category of criminal behavior during the
mid- to late 1970s in Britain. This fact is, of course, a symptom
of broader forms of institutional racism in Britain at the time.
14 <#ref14>. The radical experiences of youths in self-defense
groups such as the Southall Youth Movement (SYM) often led them to
question not just the older generation's leadership but also
"established" community values such as sexism. See Widgery 32.
15 <#ref15>. As Paul Gilroy notes, these groups reflect the
changing mode of production in the post-Fordist economies of
developed nations such as Britain. See Gilroy 225.
16 <#ref16>. Gilroy attributes these goals, derived from the work
of Manuel Castells on urban social movements, to British
self-defense groups such as the Southall Youth Movement. See
Gilroy 230.
17 <#ref17>. Additional details concerning these organizations can
be found in Sivanandan 142-143.
18 <#ref18>. Sivanandan has been and remains one of the most
powerful advocates of this political mobilization of the category
"black." For his critique of the decline of "black" as a political
color, see Communities of Resistance. For an analysis of
challenges to this unificatory terminology over the last decade,
see Alibhai-Brown xi-xiii.
19 <#ref19>. The social construction of "race" has, of course,
been one of the central concerns of post-colonial theory. For an
early example of this line of thought that draws heavily on the
British context, see Gates.
20 <#ref20>. Gilroy offers a withering critique of this strategy
of "ethnic absolutism." See Gilroy 43.
21 <#ref21>. Bowie made the following comments to Playboy
journalist Cameron Crowe:
PLAYBOY: You've often said that you believe very strongly in
fascism. Yet you also claim you'll one day run for Prime
Minister of England. More media manipulation?
BOWIE: Christ, everything is a media manipulation. I'd love to
enter politics. I will one day. I'd adore to be Prime
Minister. And, yes, I believe very strongly in fascism. The
only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that's hanging
foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a
right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as
fast as possible. People have always responded with greater
efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes
time saying, "Well, now, what ideas have you got?" Show them
what to do, for God's sake. If you don't, nothing will get
done. I can't stand people just hanging about. Television is
the most successful fascist, needless to say. Rock stars are
fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.
Bowie was also photographed arriving back in the UK around this
time in an open topped Mercedes, giving a fascist "sieg heil"
salute. This was shortly before he went off to live in Berlin and
record albums like "Low."
22 <#ref22>. Williams first articulates the concept of "structure
of feeling" in Culture and Society. He develops this concept in
relation to Gramsci's theory of hegemony in later work. For a
discussion of the debates that circulated around this concept
among members of Britain's New Left, see Dworkin.
23 <#ref23>. The most germane example in this context is Hall,
Resistance through Rituals.
24 <#ref24>. For a discussion of these avant-garde/punk links, see
Marcus.
25 <#ref25>. This was true both for white and for Asian activists.
For a discussion of the masculinism of the Asian Youth Movement,
see Westwood. A more extended critique of the masculinism of black
nationalist political formations can be found in Samantrai.
26 <#ref26>. For a discussion of DiY groups in the 1990s, see McKay.
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