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Multi-cultural Britain

My Lords, I am very much looking forward to reading Hansard tomorrow because so far this debate has been so rich, varied and interesting. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, for initiating it. I shall focus on the significance of racial stereotyping, which was developed and consolidated during the period of African enslavement in the18th and 19th centuries—ways of thinking about Africans that, one might say, have also plagued abolitionists. Those ideas have endured, and they have continued to exert their pernicious influence in many areas of our lives today. ““Race””, which I always use in inverted commas, is not an objective, culture-free designation of difference. The underpinning of theories of race and difference some 200 years ago was the supposed superiority of white Western Europeans. Newly developed scientific theories about physical characteristics and human evolution purported to demonstrate that Africans were intellectually, morally and culturally inferior to all other racial groups. The noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, mentioned Clarkson’s chest, which is in the current parliamentary exhibition in Westminster Hall on the abolition of the slave trade. The collection of objects and artefacts in that chest question the notion of a hierarchy of civilisations that was prevalent at the time. It is now generally accepted that the old biological definitions of ““race”” are spurious. However, notions of racial difference are deeply embedded in our society, and we are still locked into the habit of racialised thinking. It is a problem because it affects the ways identities are formed and social interaction experienced on a day-to-day basis. The belief that there are fundamental, essential differences between black and white peoples persists, resulting in particular psychological, physical and intellectual characteristics being attributed to each group. For people of African descent, the consequences have been devastating. Words and phrases such as ““big black bloke””, ““boisterous””, ““loud””, ““physically massive”” or ““good at sports”” may seem innocuous, objective terms, but such descriptors are often code words for what are seen as specifically ““black”” modes of behaviour requiring restraint and control. We can see this in the way that black people are prescribed stronger drugs more frequently than others within the mental health system, in the over-representation of black males in prisons and in underachievement in the education system. Some people argue that stereotypes are rooted in reality, but if we continually assess people on that basis we confine them; we trap them in certain modes of behaviour, and discourage aspiration and ambition. To some extent we have all internalised these ideas at some stage, and we must seek to challenge both black and white people who continue to promote these confining forms of categorisation. If we look at the specific instance of the association of people of African descent in the Caribbean with music and dance—I focus on that because it is a clear example, but I could also have mentioned sport—we see that there are logical historical reasons for the development of particular kinds of music and modes of communication. While enslaved Africans were encouraged by their owners to sing as they worked under the brutal plantation regime, they were forbidden to sing of freedom. It was in this context that the enslaved found ways to link their musical cultures to the European hymns that they were hearing to create new musical forms such as ““negro spirituals””, with lyrics that subverted the law that banned articulating the desire for freedom. As far as the plantation owners were concerned, these were harmless ditties, but, in reality, they were coded escape plans. Abducted Africans were split up in such a way that those within the same language groups were separated and forbidden to speak in their own languages. Therefore, non-linguistic forms of interpersonal communication, such as physical gesture, music, drumming and dance, were particularly important. These became essential parts of the repertoire of communication and resistance. In the Americas, the Caribbean and across Europe and Africa, individual and collective protest against prevailing political and social conditions has continued to be woven as a thread through the musical forms of African diaspora peoples, be it in gospel, jazz, blues, reggae, soul or hip-hop. The experience of enslavement, calculated to dehumanise and oppress, was resisted and given a voice and dignity through these forms, and they have both energised and transformed the vocabularies of modern music. Two weeks ago, as has already been mentioned, we launched the exhibition, The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People in Westminster Hall. One of the schools working with the poet in residence, Rommi Smith, sang three traditional west and south African songs. One could almost hear the children thinking afterwards, as they watched other performers play their music and sing, that they, too, would like to be able to play professionally the violin or to sing soprano. Three of the contemporary composers whose work was performed at the launch, Errollyn Wallen, Byron Wallen and Shirley Thompson, are black Britonswho are following in the footsteps of African 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century poets and musicians who drew on both European and African musical traditions, including people such as Joseph Emidy, George Polgreen Bridgetower and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. However, they all have to face the struggle to escape stifling categories which attempt to place one’s work in boxes such as ““street music”” or ““urban music”” linked to ethnic origin. The legacy of slavery has produced some wonderful achievements against all the odds, but it has led also to the creation of an alienated underclass with little or no stake in society. One of the legaciesof this year’s events must surely be a greater determination to be much more imaginative and effective in how we tackle this situation.