Kenny Monrose - Black Men in Britain: An Ethnographic Portrait of the Post-Windrush Generation

While extensive attention has been paid to black youth, adult black British men are a notable omission in academic literature. This book is the first attempt to understand one of Britains hidden populations: the post-Windrush generation, who matured within a post-industrial British society that rendered them both invisible and irrelevant. Using ethnography, participant observation, interviews and his own personal experience, and without an ounce of liberal angst, Kenny Monrose pulls no punches and presents the reader with a fierce but sensitive study of a population that has been vilified and ignored.

The widely disseminated portrait of black maleness, which habitually constructs black men as being either violently dangerous, or social failures, is challenged by granting black men in Britain the autonomy to speak on sociologically significant issues candidly and openly for themselves. This reveals how this group has been forced to negotiate a glut of political shifts and socially imposed imperatives, ranging from Windrush to Brexit, and how these have had an impact on their life course. This provides a cultural uplift and offers an authenticated examination and privileged insight of black British culture.

This book will be of interest to sociologists, cultural historians and criminologists engaged with citizenship, migration, race, racialisation and criminal justice.

Kenny Monrose is an Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and a College Research Associate at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Ethnography is a celebrated, if contested, research methodology that offers unprecedented access to peoples intimate lives, their often-hidden social worlds and the meanings they attach to these. The intensity of ethnographic fieldwork often makes considerable personal and emotional demands on the researcher, while the final product is a vivid human document with personal resonance impossible to recreate by the application of any other social science methodology. This series aims to highlight the best, most innovative ethnographic work available from both new and established scholars.

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An Ethnographic Portrait of the Post-Windrush Generation

First published 2020

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

2020 Kenny Monrose

The right of Kenny Monrose to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Names: Monrose, Kenny, author.

Title: Black men in Britain : an ethnographic portrait of the post-Windrush generation / Kenny Monrose.

Description: First. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge advances in ethnography | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019025376 | ISBN 9780815354307 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351133432 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Men, Black--Great Britain--Attitudes. | Men, Black--Great Britain--Social conditions. | Middle-aged men--Great Britain--Attitudes.

Classification: LCC HQ1090.7.G7 M65 2019 | DDC 305.38/896041--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025376

ISBN: 978-0-815-35430-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-13343-2 (ebk)

Many thanks to the staff at Routledge, especially Emily Briggs, Lakshita Joshi and Elena Chiu. I would like to thank Professor Dick Hobbs, Professor Les Back, Dr Rob Hornsby, Professor Lez Henry, Dr Martin Glynn and Suzanne Hobbs for supporting the intentions of this text. I also would like to thank the late Professor Michael Banton for calling me out at the Mannheim Institute of Criminology at LSE during the very early stages of my PhD. This was an experience that challenged my thinking, and resulted in a friendship involving many long lunches together at the George & Dragon in Downe in Kent. Id like to say a very special thank you to Dr Monica Moreno Figueroa and the Department of Sociology at Cambridge University for their continued support, as well as the President and staff of Wolfson College Cambridge. I must also thank Tony Russell who, albeit very late in the day, directed me to some essential music to soothe me through the final straight. Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Howlin Wolf complemented my writing backdrop of Mighty Sparrow, Erik Satie, Joe Higgs and Freddie McKay. Last and by no means least, a huge thank you to all those who afforded me the privilege of spending some incredibly valuable time together. Unfortunately, some have passed away, but their offerings will remain with us, and their insight and light will provide a lamp for our feet.

One of the experiences that propelled the challenge of writing this book occurred shortly after I had completed the Knowledge of London, and became a licensed (black) London taxi driver. I was twenty-three, raised in a neglected part of East London, and granted a license from the Metropolitan Police to roam the grey streets of London in order to earn an honest wage. This was both an adventurous and an overwhelming experience, as I discovered parts of London that my parents, who had arrived in London from the Eastern Caribbean almost thirty years previously, never had the privilege of seeing.

A cold, wet evening during kipper season like myself. After a long wait and whilst ushering a fare into his cab, in his heavy Barbadian burr he said to me:

Listen, young man, if youre smart in this country, you can be anybody you want to be, at any time. You can be an African, West Indian or an Englishman. Being a black man in this country is easy, you just have to know what part to play.