Black and British: A Forgotten History

The BBC series ‘Black and British: A forgotten history’ provided new learning, contexts and background knowledge around the history of people of African descent in Britain, Europe and worldwide. The content challenged me to reconsider the roots from which the cannon of knowledge within Higher Education stems. In this series the notion of ‘race’ is represented as a concept that began during the colonial era, as a weapon of power that enabled the oppression, possession and capitalisation of black people from the Global South. The capitalisation and commodification of the ‘black body’ is explored further in ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ by Eric Williams, first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, and 20th century scholar of Oxford university. His research further informed my thinking around political, social, cultural and spiritual implications, legacies and debate concerning ‘race’, while providing an insight into how established systems of power have formed over the last 500 years. His writing was banned for 25 years in the UK until finally being recognised as a core text that should be distributed and read by academics to inform contemporary consciousness and debate around social justice within academia.

Olushoga, D. 2023, Black and British: A Forgotten History. Available on BBC iplayer

Williams, E. (2022) ‘Capitalism and Slavery’, London : Penguin. Article at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/02/capitalism-and-slavery-eric-williams-back-in-bestsellers-list