The Resolution of the Windrush Scandal Requires Far More than a National Day
71 years ago, the HMT Empire Windrush arrived near London and 802 Caribbean-nationals disembarked. Many had served as volunteers in the British military during World War II. All had attended schools with the Union Jack in the classroom; schools where they were taught about Britain, its history, and about the idea that they were British themselves.
As Labour MP and shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott recently told an audience at the London School of Economics.“A lot of effort was put into getting Commonwealth citizens…to absorb British culture….If…you find some elderly West Indian person and you ask them, ‘can you recite me a poem?’ They will recite you Keats…because they learned that poetry at school and they haven’t forgotten it. People forget how much effort in the British Empire was put into endearing people with a British cultural understanding.”
When newspaper ads were placed by the British government inviting them to live in the ‘mother country’, thousands packed their bags and boarded ships bound for England. Then, as Sunder Katwala of British Future put it, they “arrive in a Britain that doesn’t know that they’re British, and it takes 10, 20, 30, 40 years for them and their children to win the argument that their identity that they arrived with is now shared by everybody else.”
As Katwala continued, “why does Britain not know of the Britishness of people who’ve been taught they are British by Britain?”
As with all countries, there is somewhat of a disconnect between how the British population is taught their story and reality. This includes the relationship between the country and non-ethnically British people. For example, politicians like to praise the UK for leading the effort to abolish slavery while typically ignoring the fact that Britain was the most dominant country involved in the slave trade after 1640, having transported an estimated three million slaves to the “New World” before abolition in 1807. Indeed, the only reason the Caribbean of today is black is because the British brought so many slaves from Africa while simultaneously annihilating the native populations of the islands.
During the second world war, Britain’s military was supported by over three million soldiers from the Empire who fought for the ‘mother country’. In the case of black Commonwealth soldiers, they were paid up to three times less than white soldiers. Their rank seemed to not matter when it came to receiving respect from their British peers (in addition, it was nearly impossible for them to receive a promotion), and when they died their bodies were often not even laid next to the bodies of their white comrades.
Similarly, a generation earlier during the First World War more than three million soldiers and laborers came from the Commonwealth, over half of which were from India alone. But as Rahul Verma pointed out, “while the contribution of soldiers from Australia and New Zealand is well known in Britain, particularly in the battle at Gallipoli, the participation of non-white servicemen from Britain’s Empire is not.”
In a study of British GCSE modern history textbooks, it was found that “despite the fact that Britain drew on the resources and support from all reaches of the Empire, typically reference is made solely to ‘British forces’, ‘British victories’, and ‘British troops’. Where reference is broadened to include military activities with other nations, the term ‘the Allies’ frequently is employed. Abundantly clear, however, is that ‘the Allies’ refers to US, British, and less frequently, Soviet collaboration.” Of the four textbooks and 120 pages analyzed, only two sentences mentioned soldiers from the black or brown corners of the Empire (‘Africa’ and India, accordingly). Further, of the 86 photographs in the textbooks that depicted World War II, not one showed a soldier of color. Thus, the notion that plucky little Britain held its own against Nazism persists to the point that it is often cited by ardent Leavers as proof that the country will emerge from Brexit unscathed.
This whitewashing of the war is not merely an action of the history books but was actively promoted during the conflict itself. For centuries, many European nations, including the UK, have conducted their international affairs with a sense of superiority. One of the results of this was that the Allied commanders made a deliberate effort to ensure that the first liberators of Paris were white — black soldiers in the front units were actively replaced in order for the liberation to appear to be white-only.
This “white-only” notion is still prevalent today, as can be seen when the 2017 movie Dunkirk rightly came under fire for its whitewashing of the battle. While movies typically hire experts to design historically-accurate costumes and equipment, it’s quite possible that it never crossed the mind of director Christoper Nolan to research the ethnic makeup of the battle. People know that they are not experts in aircraft or military uniforms, but they think they know the basic history of their country.
Britain, as a rich trading nation, has always worked with others in one capacity or another. As such, the country’s history is linked to those of others’. But one would never know it based on the narrative woven into the mainstream British consciousness. As a result of this Anglo-centric education system, “if you are an ethnic or religious minority, then you have to constantly prove your Britishness.” University of Essex’s Dr. Alita Nandi said.
Indeed, when Michael Gove was Education Secretary, he proposed a reform to secondary-level history education which he referred to as “our island story”. As if the history of a country which recently controlled 25% of the world could be simply boiled down to that of one small island (even Northern Ireland appears to have been left out). As the director of the South Asian Center at LSE has noted, British students arriving to study are “completely ignorant of the Empire.”
It is not merely an issue of how things are taught; it also matters who is doing the teaching. During the 2016–17 academic year, of the 18,940 professors in the UK’s higher-education system, only 90 were black men and only 25 were black women (more than 12,000 were white men). Without the perspectives that come with different experiences, it can be difficult to realize your truth is not the whole truth. Even when attempts are made to better understanding the Empire, institutions still have not perfected how to best go about it. For example, this spring Oxford University recruited for a post-doc position to study the institution’s role in colonization — a position which was only open to those with a legal right to work in the UK. As such, a research position to study the effects of colonization was not actually open to nationals of colonized countries who might best understand the impacts of that era.
As a response to the Windrush scandal, this year the government celebrated the generations of Commonwealth residents who made their home in the ‘mother country’ by establishing Windrush Day. In yet another example of an attempt to re-write the role Britain played in history, Theresa May and the Home Office both issued statements commending these immigrants while entirely glossing over their very direct role in the scandal.
While Windrush Day is a welcome move, it will take a lot more than a national holiday to fix the system which allowed for the scandal to happen. Immigration policies have not been changed to help them; instead, the government is threatening to treat European residents in the same callous and harsh manner that it has non-EU. Settled-status is chillingly similar to the beginnings of what happened to the Windrush generation— people who had the legal right to live in Britain suddenly found their futures in jeopardy alongside feeble promises from a government that their permanent residency rights will be respected. One cannot blame Europeans for fearing a similar scandal will happen to them.
First and foremost amongst the many things that must be changed to honor Windrush, however, is the way in which the British story is taught. Last year, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announced his desire to see more black history taught in British schools. Conservative MP Tim Loughton responded with the critique that Corbyn is more interested in “talking down [Britain rather than celebrate] the immense amount of good we have done in the world over many centuries.” Of course, Britain has done great things in the world. But the ignorance of the harm the former colonies still face because of colonization has helped to create a false narrative which pretends that Britain is a benevolent giant whose successes are down to it and it alone. Brexit is just one example of the consequences of this mindset. There are many more.
If the British education system better taught the truths about the Empire and the UK’s international history, perhaps more people would feel a stronger sense of kinship with the ethnic minorities of Britain. As Sunny Singh wrote in The Guardian, “would anti-immigration sentiment be so easy to weaponise…if…Britons knew and recognised how much of their lives, safety and prosperity are results of non-British sacrifices?”
That would be the true justice for those in the Windrush generation who were raised to believe they were British, were actively invited to live in the UK, and whose children were deported decades later because, to repeat Katwala, Britain does not know of the Britishness of people who’ve been taught they are British by Britain. As he recently appealed to an audience at LSE, “the armies that [fought]100 years ago looked more like the Britain of 2018 than the Britain of 1918…Why aren’t we in the textbooks?…If we taught children about the real history of this country, maybe we could find common ground about that.”
Britain claims to be proud of its diverse society. But to conclude with a quote from Professor Gurminder K. Bhambra, “As an Empire, Britain was irredeemably multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious. Britain doesn’t become multicultural after Windrush. It was always multicultural; its rather that the histories we tell ourselves are histories of purification not of the truth…If we don’t understand our past — the shared histories that have produced our multicultural and post-colonial present — then I don’t think we have any possibility of creating a politics that’s adequate for our time and for our people.”
