A Discourse Analysis of UK Black Rights Activism in the Post-war Era

In 2020, large scale Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were mounted across the transatlantic, criticising institutional racism and police brutality. In response, scholars have been considering whether the historic white supremacy of western states haunts modern politics . At the same time, the influential post-colonial scholar Paul Gilroy described himself as tentatively 'pessimistic' about BLM and the black feminist Stella Dadzie stated the movement gave her 'dejà vu' of the black rights movements in the 1960s . While Gilroy and Dadzie are in support of BLM's ethos, they argue BLM can learn from evaluating previous black rights movements. Considering the post-war period as a significant era for black rights movements, we can analyse their rhetoric and strategies to synthesize effective methods for BLM. Building on the theoretical contributions of post-colonial theories (and discourse analysis, as theory and method , this project will empirically examine archival material to contribute to academic knowledge of British black rights movements in the post-war period youth organisations (Educate & Celebrate, Don't Settle, Warts and All Theatre) have expressed interest in using the findings to educate future activists.
Although calls for decolonising the curriculum has seen a renewed interest in black activists, teaching black politics has rarely been essential to mainstream political education. Charles Mills has grown to prominence in his critique of racial liberalism, a critique of the furtive racial hierarchies which have existed in Western egalitarian declarations. To examine Mills' theory, this project will examine how different social groups interpreted the role of British institutions in reproducing racism and what their demands were, and the little research undertaken on them. Determining how these differing organisations brought the plights of black and brown peoples into public discourse will pluralise our understanding of their experiences. Equally, this project seeks to celebrate intellectuals and activists who resisted against oppression to deny narratives of black passivity in response to colonial authority and to contextualise modern black rights movements in the long history of black resistance to white dominance .
Using the discourse analytic approach, this project will explore the dialogic construction of black rights movements in the post-war era UK . Using Wetherell and Potter's analytic tool, the interpretive repertoire, this project will contrast differences in the construction and interpretation of concepts to understand why black rights movements differed on key issues. The object of study will both be the construction of black identity/community and critique of white racism. Groups identities are emergent, often defined post-hoc, through the rhetoric of 'origin stories' and raison d'etres. Just as their construction of the 'other', the 'other's' offenses toward the 'us' and what should be done about the 'other' imply we-ness through negation (Chantal, 2005). After differentiating the argumentation, this method provides an analytic opportunity to draw on contextual and theoretical resources to the factors which cause the differences and evaluate which strategic choices are most useful for modern activists.