Interview with Gary Younge
An interview with the author and former Guardian editor-at-large and US correspondent Gary Younge on the US and British political situations, the Afro diaspora and creative freedom as resistance.
Gary Younge is Professor of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences at Manchester University and a former Guardian editor-in-chief, columnist and correspondent from the United States; he joined the newspaper in the early 90s, and left in 2020 to start his academic career.
We meet at Cafe OTO, a famous café in Dalston, in the borough of Hackney, east London. Dalston is historically one of London’s Caribbean areas (but gentrification has been here a long time) where many Caribbean citizens settled after WWII (part of the Windrush Generation). Cafe OTO is a landmark in Dalston, famous for its brilliant evening concerts, ranging from psychedelic rock to jazz.
What is your perspective on the second Trump Administration and its war against DEI, as a journalist who has covered the US for many years?
It feels to me like an attempt that goes back a long way, but it has intensified in recent times, to roll back the advancements of civil rights in America, and because Trump does not exist in a vacuum, within Europe, to roll back the advancements in racial equality. This has been going on for some time. What Trump represents is an intensification, that ultimately desires to relegate Black people to their previous position, which is not that long ago, of second-class citizens, of being policed in a certain way and of having no intrinsic rights. I think that this is what is going on in America it is not just a political battle, it is a legal battle but I think it is also going on in Europe. The fascist government in Italy, the AfD, Reform, and so on..they all have a desire, in some way, to return to a happier and less complicated place. Now, each country has its own racial history; the place is not quite the same, the language is not quite the same, but the symptom is the same. If we look at the electoral landscape, you can see this in Holland, Sweden, Germany, France, and to a lesser extent in Portugal and Spain; it is quite consistent.
What are your views on the current British political situation, with the far-right Reform Party leading in the polls? Is this a legacy of Brexit?
I do not consider Brexit or Trump Year Zero in this, I think that they are part of a journey that has been going on for a while. First of all, Britain has never come to terms with its colonial past and its legacies; it was wilfully ignorant of where it has been and what it has done. There was a survey I found in the British Archives that showed that, in 1948, half of the British people could not name a single colony, this at a time when the Empire still ruled over much of Africa, much of the Caribbean and the year when the HMT Windrush ship came to Britain. Then you had people looking around, wondering where this people (the Windrush generation) came from. For most of Europe, there was this state of profound disorientation, and Britain more than most. If we combine that with a general trend across the globe of Neoliberalisation, then you see that the two main parties, at different times used to get (together) 89,5% of the votes (in the 1951 General Elections) at a time when there was a high turnout (83,9% in the 1950 General Elections, 82,6% in the elections the following year); what you have seen since 1997 (when Tony Blair led the Labour Party to victory for the first time in 23 years, also marking the beginning of the Third Way in Britain) is a rapid decrease in turnout and a massive splintering of the vote. You can win a landslide, as Keir Starmer did, with only 27% of the eligible vote, and in the last election the Greens were smaller and Reform did not stand. In this election, whoever wins, because we have first past the post, you would be able to win a constituency with 26, 27% of the vote, and that’s the people who vote. If you model that for turnout, you are talking about 15,16% of the vote, 1 in 6 people would be able to determine your MP. You have an electoral system with decreasing scales of legitimacy, because fewer and fewer people actually voted for whoever got elected. That was also true of the Tories, but it is becoming truer and truer. It is not specific to the party, it is about persistence. First past the post, in particular, could only work when there are two main parties and a sizeable turnout; now there are five parties (Tories, Labour, LibDems, Reform, the Greens), maybe six with Your Party, but five at the moment. None of them are polling over 30%, so it is the decreasing legitimacy of our political class which has been going on for a while and I think is reflected elsewhere, not to the same degree because of proportional representation, so people can at least turn out and vote for something.
When it comes to your book Dispatches from the Diaspora, are there any common threads that you have found between the different Afro and AfroDescendant experiences from South Africa to the US and the Caribbean that you covered in your career?
Only a sense of disappointment, in each place, that the victories that were won were not honoured, whether that is South Africa or the anti-colonial struggle or civil rights struggle in America. I think there have been moments when the entire Diaspora has been more or less speaking the same language. The two that stand out would be the 60s, when in the colonies people were fighting for independence and in America Black people were fighting for their civil rights. If you look at 1960, when France lost its entire empire, there were other independence moments, but also you were sitting at the beginning of a real explosion of civil rights. If you think of Fidel Castro coming to the United Nations in the 1960s and leaving his hotel downtown, going to Harlem at the Theresa Hotel, his first visitor is Malcolm X, his next visitor is Khrushchev, then you see a confluence of interests. Post war, it was similar in 1945, when people from the colonies and African Americans fought for freedom and democracy that they could not enjoy. On VE (Victory in Europe) Day (8 May1945), people in Algeria rise up in Sétif and Guelma (the French response was brutal and came to be known as the massacre of Sétif and Guelma), India becomes free after two years, and similarly, in different ways, there is 2020 with Black Lives Matter. The way I frame it is that racism is a global language, but it has many dialects and in certain key moments, people can really understand each other and this language and that is true for the White as it is for Black people. Those would be three moments when there was enough overlap that everybody could see each other.
You have lived in the US and reported from there a long time, before returning to the UK. How do you interpret the different race and class divide in the US, and in the UK?
In America, Black people had been there longer, in large numbers, they do not necessarily have a migrant experience, in fact most of them don’t and they have a greater degree of class fracture, larger numbers of people in destitution and who are not working. In Britain, we have been here in large numbers for a shorter period of time. We came with certain restrictions, to do certain jobs and the class nature of Britain is that if your father is a bus or train driver, or your mother is a nurse, then the likelihood that you’ll be a banker or a doctor is quite limited. We existed in a narrow economic range, but also politically this has changed and will continue to change. Even now, our patriotism is more contingent and this is partly because British patriotism is more contingent, something that they are trying to change with all the flags. Our allegiance to the nation is weaker and more negotiated than in the US. I think this is changing in the US too, because of Trump. My wife is African-American, there was never a time when she did not think she was American; I only came to accept that I was British when I was about 18 and still, that allegiance is qualified.
Do you think, in terms of patriotism, that this also has something to do with the fact that in US school pupils pledge allegiance to the flag on a daily basis and that elsewhere people would find such gesture problematic?
America is a more hyper-patriotic country; it is also true that Britain is in decline and that America is not, well, it is now, but it was not before. In Britain, you are wedding yourself to a plane that is going down, in America you are wedding yourself to a plane that is going up. Also, Europe is a continent that imagines itself as both “raceless” and white, so the space to claim Englishness or Britishness was limited. When I was growing up, a lot of people told me I was not British, I could not be British whereas Americans would struggle to understand this as a non white only country. There may be different views about the status that Black people should have, but the idea that Black people are Americans was not contested.
In your last book, Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance, you focus on something that you debated at an event that I attended at the National Union of Journalists years ago; the fact that Black journalists and journalists of colour are often pigeonholed in covering certain issues. How is it possible, according to you, to create Black narratives that are pigeonholed at the same time, how is it possible for AfroDescendants and journalists of colour to fully express themselves?
It is a struggle for actualisation, and I think it is part of the broader anti-racist struggle, which is to insist on your own voice, your own narratives and the range, or potential range of those narratives which is way the subtitle is Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance. To insist on your freedom, to insist on your voice, to insist that you can talk about anything you like is an act of freedom. This is what we have to do, and it is a constant struggle. No one would just allow you to do that, as the limited European or White imagination will decide what you can talk about, before asking you what you are qualified to talk about. It’s our job as creative people to insist; that will not always go our way, but if we do not insist then we can be sure that it won’t go our way.
What is your take now, looking at the situation of British journalism, also comparing to when you started, based also on your profile, as a Black, working class journalist who did not fit in the Oxbridge educated box of journalists, given the fact that less than 10% of British journalists are Black and Asian?
It’s still a lot more than it was. One of my aphorisms is “We’re not where we were, but we are not where we need to be”. Technology has radically changed the barriers to entry, you can set up a magazine, you do not need huge amounts of capital and that also for a community which is essentially diasporic the new technology is also very important because it allows to pick up in Black America or Black Denmark. A lot has changed and a lot has got worse, the racism has got worse and the degree to which we can rely on representation to produce good things has also obviously changed; look at Kwasi Kwarteng, Shabana Mahmood, Kemi Badenoch. If we compare it to 1992-93, when I started in journalism, when we had four-five black MPs, there was a moment in the UK when there was not a single white male leader in Britain (in 2024, with Rishi Sunak as PM, First Welsh Minister Vaughan Gething and First Scottish Minister Humza Yousaf) so you had non white representatives, female representatives and yet none of that produced [hence my scepticism on Obama] more equality, but it did show that some barriers to advancements have diminished; this would have been unimaginable 30 years ago.
This is all for this week, the newsletter will be back next week for a Brit Beats/Italian Mambo summary of the year and a look at recent developments before the festive break.
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