Beverley Bryan - The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain

History, more often that not, tells us the story of the powerful. It is the details behind their victories that are amplified and given room within the national consciousness to become words like fact and truth. Such objectivity, we know, is merely a form of subterfuge hiding those other stories that could be told of marginalised voices forced into positions of silence and obscurity. Thus to archive such sidelined narratives, collating and giving them a space in which to articulate their lived experiences, is no neutral undertaking. In The Heart of the Race: Black Womens Lives in Britain, it is the work of a radical feminist politics that seeks to serve and defend the communities of women represented in this groundbreaking book. It is work that wrestles the incredible power invested in memory making for those who, ordinarily, would be cast aside.

The stories of the women captured within cannot be obscured. They cannot be dismissed as insignificant or unknowable. Reading them more than thirty years later, todays generation of black feminists will be sure to recognise their mothers, grandmothers and aunties, and also, depressingly, ourselves. The struggles succinctly captured in The Heart of the Race continue to plague black communities in the twenty-first century. Black Caribbean and mixed white/black Caribbean pupils are three times more likely to face permanent exclusion from school, and it is a credible possibility that three-quarters of young black men aged eighteen to thirty-five have their DNA profiles in the polices

In their chapter on The Uncaring Arm of the State: Black Women, Health and the Welfare Services, the authors write that legislation designed to protect the NHS from abuse by foreigners means that hospitals now record our medical history and our immigration status. Three decades later, the current Conservative government is being condemned for forcing NHS doctors to act as border guards in its crackdown against migrants and forced to defend its appalling treatment of the Windrush generation.

Thirty years on from its initial reception, black as a political identity under which empires unaccounted-for children could unite has become hotly contested. Yet the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiments that made such solidarity possible, and which forcefully run through this book, can be seen in the work of activist groups today. The spirit of cogent anger and urgent activism that forms the basis of this book has been reignited, as the battles over equality outlined within it remain with us. It is a text pertinent to now precisely because it charts the ways in which those before us have engineered successes, despite a system of intractable sexism and racism. It teaches that through collective action and being grounded in our communities, we can recover our agency. The myriad black women whose stories have been preserved and passed down to us passionately proclaim their rightful place in Britains history. It is on their shoulders that we stand.

Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and opinion columnist at the Guardian.

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Danny Dorling, So You Think You Know About Britain?, London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2011.