Thinking about Race in a Time of Rebellion
Urban unrest over-determined the ways in which black British life, and particularly the life of black young men, was thought about in the late 1970s and the 1980s. This chapter provides an account of policing conflicts in this period and analyses how they were narrated by those black radical intellectuals who used such conflicts to talk about conditions of blackness and politics of race in Britain in the lead-up to and early years of Thatcherism. Such writers emphasized black youth culture as a repository of a long and continuing struggle against the historical experiences of colonialism and slavery, and they suggested that by looking to the experiences of black youth, the contradictions and antagonisms of Britain’s whole political structure might come into better focus.