British African-Caribbean people

But yeah, we'd love to know how exactly it works and, and what you've been doing.

I work with the Black Caribbean and Black African communities.

Mm.

So as you know historically, or may not know, um, Black Caribbean and African communities, not always been very well represented in research.

Mm-hmm.

So, um, when communities aren't represented, we can end up with gaps, as we've said before-

Yeah.

So I'm of Black Caribbean descent, and in the very diverse, you know, sort of world of living in London, but not in a particularly deprived area of London, when I became pregnant, it was like, oh, okay, you, you do tick that box.

But I think it was probably more about the weight than the ethnicity, to be fair.

So I had a, an, an oral glucose tolerance test.

Black Caribbean communities organized resistance not through violent rebellion, but by building institutions, music venues, community centers, and faith organizations that created an alternative civic space in a country where the state often denied them.

This has had long-term consequences for what Britishness can mean, from a multicultural diasporic identity that includes African Caribbean heritage to a contested sense of belonging tied to citizenship documents and historic economic contributions.

In sum, the arrival of the Windrush ship was more than a logistical event.

It symbolized Britain's post-war needs, the promise of an inclusive nation, and over time, the painful reality of institutional racism, bureaucratic failure, and shifting ideas about who can be considered British.

This is centuries ago in the 17th and 18th centuries.

And as a result of finding out this very unpalatable news, the Church of England decided that they wanted to put aside 100 million pounds of their assets, their investments into a new special fund that will be dedicated to doing impact investment for kind of black African Caribbean communities to try and in effect make recompense for their historic involvement in slavery.

And this hasn't actually been set up yet.

It's still been a kind of torturous process of getting all the new funds set up.

You know, how helpful are they? Are we perpetuating or continuing to use language that is unhelpful in this particular sort of context? So to me, it's sort of looking at the issues of the past and seeing, you know, what are the legacies of that, you know, what issues of the past are currently being played out today and other ways that we can sort of address them.

Particularly if you're sort of going to a church that is quite, or you attend a church rather, that is diverse, you know, ethnically or demographically diverse.

And, you know, some of the individuals with whom you worship are people who are from, you know, particularly from an African or an African Caribbean context.

But I think it's recognizing, again, that, you know, the events of the past continue to inform the present.

So for example, if you have, uh, certain kids who are unruly, uh, if they're not being excluded from class because you're getting a disproportionate number of kids from certain ethnic groups, let's say Black and Indigenous.

Um, although it's interesting in Britain that, that the Black African kids have actually lower exclusion rates than average, and the Black Caribbean kids have higher exclusion rates.

So it, it may not be as simple as, as, as Black.

Uh-

I'm proud of that.

But at the same time, if I see a Sikh or a Hindu being abused or an African Caribbean, I'm going to intervene because racism is wrong.

It's not about transactional solidarity that you help me and therefore I should help you.

It's racism is wrong.

Because Islamophobia was so bad post 9-11, you had Bosnia and Chechnya in the 90s.

I've written about this in my book.

You have the shift from South Asian Islamophobia to Muslim or Sikh or Hindu, but also there was a deliberate policy, state multiculturalism, which said, after the riots of 81, that we're going to put money into these poor inner city areas and suddenly you have the African Caribbean community centre, you have the Pakistani community centre, you have the Indian community centre, and communities that were once united in a shared struggle against racism are suddenly divided because they're all competing for the same pots of government funding.

And we then empower these so-called community leaders, who are always men, by the way, who are unelected, that the state just decides, well, they speak on behalf of this entire community, which was never a monolith.

And so they were confronted for the first time with like racism and discrimination.

And they never thought they, the idea of the, I guess the black Caribbean church was never meant to be a thing.

they were very it was meant to be they thought it'd be a diverse place of worship but it was born out of necessity by not being accepted and creating their own places of worship and so i thought that was quite interesting because now the church that i have always kind of gone to or i would say go or the church that i started to go to at least in my 20s it was a very diverse form of worship even the idea of like putting on your Sunday's best wasn't really a thing we could kind of just dress in jeans and a t-shirt and go to church and so there was a lot about that culture that I'd maybe seen as a younger kid that I wasn't really seeing anymore and so to see this church was so beautiful and I was really led to photograph them But it took convincing because they're really old school.

They have a lot of rules.