The Long Road Home

The long road home is the one that runs through history. The Jamaican and Caribbean community in Britain, in the second half of 2001, was travelling it in both directions: looking back at a half-century of migration and settlement, and looking forward into a world that had, in the space of a few weeks, become fundamentally different from the one it had been before

Briefing

• Riots in Oldham (May), Burnley (June) and Bradford (July 2001); community cohesion becomes national priority.
• September 11 attacks in New York and Washington; 67 British citizens among the dead.
• Afghanistan invasion begins October 2001; Caribbean community’s mixed response to War on Terror.
• UK Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 comes into effect; new duties on public bodies.
• Labour wins second term June 2001; Caribbean community assesses its political investment.

The summer of 2001 began with riots in England’s northern towns. In Oldham in May, in Burnley in June, in Bradford in July, serious violence broke out between young British Asian men and white men, with the police caught between. The riots were, in their specific character, different from the Caribbean community’s experience of the 1981 and 1985 disturbances: the protagonists were different, the precipitating incidents were different, the political context was different. But the structural conditions that had produced them — economic deprivation, educational failure, unemployment, segregated communities, a policing relationship defined by mutual distrust — were recognisable to a community that had lived through its own versions of each.

The Cantle Report, commissioned by the Home Secretary in the aftermath of the riots and published in December 2001, introduced the concept of “community cohesion” as the framework for understanding what had gone wrong and what needed to change. The report argued that Britain’s multi-ethnic communities were living “parallel lives”: separated by school, by housing, by social networks, with insufficient contact across ethnic boundaries to produce the shared public culture that cohesion required. For the Caribbean community, the community cohesion analysis was, in some respects, familiar territory: the debate about the conditions under which different communities could live together in shared cities had been one in which the Caribbean community had participated, with particular experience and particular perspective, since the first generation arrived.

The Eleventh of September

The attacks of 11 September 2001 arrived at 1:46 in the afternoon British time. The first aircraft hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 Eastern, fifteen minutes before most of Britain’s Caribbean communities had their televisions on. By the time the second aircraft hit the South Tower, seventeen minutes later, the significance of what was happening was clear to everyone who was watching. By the end of the day, the scale of the event — the collapse of both towers, the strike on the Pentagon, the crash of United 93 in Pennsylvania — had produced a reckoning that would reshape British and American foreign policy, security law, and the political discourse of the following decade.

For the Caribbean community in Britain, September 11 was, as it was for the rest of the country, an event of terrible grief and shock. The 67 British citizens who died included people of every background. The Caribbean community had its own connections to New York: the Caribbean communities of Brooklyn and the Bronx, of Crown Heights and Flatbush, were part of the same diaspora that had sent its members to London and Birmingham and Manchester, and the communities of New York were watching the same screens in the same horror on the same day. The grief was shared across the Atlantic along the same networks of family and community that usually carried money and news and music.

The War on Terror and the Community’s Position

The invasion of Afghanistan began on 7 October 2001. The British government, under Tony Blair’s leadership, committed its full support and its military forces to the American-led operation. The Caribbean community’s response to the War on Terror was, in the immediate aftermath of September 11, shaped by the grief and horror of the attacks themselves: the community was not without sympathy for the argument that those who had planned and executed the attacks needed to be confronted. But the community’s historical experience gave it a specific set of questions to bring to the politics of military action: questions about who bore the cost of the wars, about how power was exercised and who it was exercised against, about the relationship between the security powers that wars generated and the communities that those powers were used on.

These were not abstract questions in the autumn of 2001. The legislation that was being prepared — the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, rushed through Parliament by December — extended state powers in ways that the Caribbean community, with its own experience of extended stop-and-search powers and their disproportionate application, had reason to scrutinise carefully. The community did not oppose the response to September 11 uniformly; it scrutinised it with the specificity of a group that had learned, from long experience, to ask what new powers meant for the people least protected by existing ones.

The Long Road

The Jamaican and Caribbean community had been in Britain for fifty years by 2001. The first post-war arrivals had come in the late 1940s, and the main flow of migration had been established by the early 1960s. Five decades of settlement had produced a community that was, in 2001, in its second and third generations: born in Britain, educated in Britain, employed across Britain’s economy, politically active within Britain’s democratic system. The community was no longer, if it had ever been, a community of migrants: it was a community of people whose home was Britain, even as they maintained the connections to Jamaica that were one of the defining features of who they were.

The long road home, for this community, was not a road that led only back to Jamaica. It was also the road that led forward in Britain: the road of community organisation, of political engagement, of the slow and imperfect accumulation of the rights and recognition and belonging that the community had been working toward since the first Jamaican families had moved into houses in Brixton and Handsworth and Chapeltown and been told, sometimes, that they were not welcome. By 2001, that work was fifty years deep and far from finished. The Jamaican diaspora in Britain, in the second half of 2001, was carrying the weight of that history into a world that had changed overnight, and continuing, as the community had always continued, the long work of building something durable in the space between the place it had come from and the place it had made its own. The Black British community‘s story was still being written, and the pen was in the community’s own hands.