This book is brilliant and should be compulsory reading for everyone, but if not at least on the GCSE syllabus. I learnt so much about the way black people have been mistreated and still it goes on. In my humble opinion, it is at least as bad as the way Jewish people have been mistreated. At least the Jews got some recompense. Whereas when Britain abolished slave trade, it was the slave owners that were compensated! It certainly wasn’t just abolished and every slave was now free. Other countries continued and the slaves in British colonies still continued with their miserable existence. I also hadn’t realised how black africans had communities in England way back in Roman times and there was no racism then, as far as skin colour was concerned.
The language that some politicians and others used was horrifying, especially when eugenics reared its ugly head. I always thought that we had invited the Windrush immigrants to help after the war when we were so short of manpower but actually the government in power, actually tried to stop it docking because they were “negroes”. They wanted white people and invited many europeans to come to Britain (and they did come). But the Windrush did eventually dock and those people all got jobs bar two. But even then they experienced racism.
All commonwealth citizens were entitled to British passports at one time but the government put a stop to this. Families were split up and they wanted to repatriate a lot of the black people. Is this ringing any bells?
There is no doubt that there is institutional racism within the police force – a remnant from special teams that were created at one time to target the blacks.
My country has many things not to be proud of but in my opinion this is one of the biggest stains on it. We have not made amends.
There is a BBC programme that accompanies this book.