The Influence of Real and Imaginary Blacks

Abstract

‘The black man, by his presence in the community, made everything possible’, wrote Dick Hebdige.¹ It was an interesting observation. Since the large-scale immigration from the West Indies and the Caribbean during the 1940s and 1950s, the attitudes of the British people have undergone a great change. Whether this has been for the better or for the worse, and to what extent the blacks, either as individuals or as a community, have been a major cause is a matter for discussion and, so far, prejudice has prevented this exceedingly important question from being answered with the care and objectivity it deserves. If the introduction of large numbers of people with a different skin colour and a different culture has, over a period of thirty or forty years, so shaken British society that its traditional values and modes of expression no longer exist, especially among the young, then we have been witnessing something comparable to what took place in Russia between 1917 and 1921, something for which ‘revolution’ can hardly be too strong a word. But Hebdige may conceivably be exaggerating or he may be on the wrong track altogether. In order to be in a position to make up our minds on the point, we need to know what kind of black culture was brought across the Atlantic to Britain, how that culture expressed itself in words and other forms of behaviour, and how the British have reacted to an immigration which was upon them before they began to realise what was happening.