Black Power on the Telly: America, Television, and Race in 1960s and 1970s Britain

Abstract

This paper proposes the importance of television, the televisation of US and British race politics, and the framing of "Black Power" in this television coverage, for race politics in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. British politics and culture was "re-racialized" in the postwar era, and television, for white and black Britons, became a site of racial knowledge, racial identification, and racial dislocation. The rise of television as a central medium of everyday life saw it emerge, too, as a central site for the imagination of community. As critics have long noted, the community imagined in British television programming of this era was overwhelmingly white, and black people were featured most often only as a marker of social difference or social "problems." Many black Britons, excluded from the national "everyday" as it was constituted on television, and facing increasing institutional and interpersonal racism in daily life, found in coverage of the burgeoning black liberation movements of the United States a useable politics through which to articulate new sites of identification, community, and solidarity. For others, though, coverage of race politics in the United States could be a source of anxiety and alarm. The televisation of US race politics was central to the growth of cultures and politics of radical blackness in Britain, but it also reconstituted the politics of white racism, recasting blackness in Britain as a sign of violence and impending social disorder. I n the late 1960s and early 1970s, race politics and the processes of racialization in Britain were reconfigured through television coverage of US Black Power, urban uprisings, and global black resistance politics. In the postwar decades, the end of empire and the onset of large-scale nonwhite immigration from the former colonies resulted in the "re-racialization" of national identity and citizenship in Britain. This process has been explored as it worked through the cultural legacies and memories of empire; however, historians are only now beginning to investigate the place of the United States in the race politics of postwar, postimperial Britain. 1

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“…76 Television became a 'site of racial knowledge', as authorities worried that the UK would follow the pattern of racial conflict in the US. 77 Coverage of uprisings and black resistance was used to mobilise fear that this could be Britain's future if Commonwealth immigration was not limited 78 -a fear famously articulated through Enoch Powell's 1968 'rivers of blood' speech.…”

Hai Karate and Kung Fuey: Early Martial Arts Tropes in British Advertising

“…Concerns about the 'whiteness' and negative portrayals of immigrants on British television programmes during the 1960s and 1970s led to initiatives -such as BBC conferences in 1965 -to deal with racial tensions and conflicts relating to Afro-Caribbean and Asian immigrants, as well as fostering integration and promoting a better representation of immigrants (Waters, 2015). The BFI (British Film Institute) 'Race and the Sitcom' provides an historic potted history of British televisual depictions of race from the 1960s where stereotypes, racist attitudes, 'browning up' white actors and racist name calling were commonplace (Waters, 2015). These 'Enoch Powell sitcoms' (Schaffer, 2010) included: 'Till Death Us Do Part' (BBC, 1965-75), 'Curry and Chips' (ITV, 1969), 'The Melting Pot' (BBC, 1975), 'Love Thy Neighbour' (ITV 1972-76), 'It Ain't Half Hot, Mum' (BBC, 1974-81), 'Dad's Army' (BBC, 1968-77) (Duguid, nd).…”

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“…Since the 1950s, at least until the digital present, television has been the chief conduit for performances, interviews and videos that have made the star images of musicians of African and Asian descent from North America, the UK and the Global South part of popular culture in continental Europe -just as televised representations of Black Americans in activism, music and sport made television "a site of racial knowledge, racial identification, and racial dislocation" in 1960s Britain. 10 Popular music has typically also been among the first televisual domains where Afro-Europeans and other members of racialised minorities have been represented to national audiences as part of their nation, albeit within a racialised division of labour that casts it as "natural" for Black people and Roma to participate in music, entertainment and dance but not in roles involving reason or authority. 11 Minority contestants' participation on European reality television, as Kaarina Nikunen argues for Finland, thus make it "a site where the definitions of the ordinary and the nation are being circulated, contested, and, at times, stretched."…”

“…34 Croatian TLZP upholds this observation in the proportions of Croatian, regional and international impersonations it contains. As of November 2020, it had featured 204 impersonations of US singers, 180 Croatian, 54 from the UK, and 35 from other Yugoslav successor states (mostly BiH): other well-represented countries of origin were Italy (10), Germany, Spain, Puerto Rico (9), Sweden (8), Australia (7), Colombia, Canada (6), Barbados (5 -all Rihanna) and Jamaica (11, the fifth most popular country of origin if other Yugoslav successor states are combined into one figure). The imagination of 'the global' behind this pattern follows the contours of the contemporary global pop industry rather than, for instance, reflecting any strong presence of socialist Yugoslavia's former Non-Aligned partners in the Global South, another echo of how deeply these connections have been forgotten since late Yugoslav times.…”