“Racism, like most isms, is a very hardy virus,” says Gary Younge. “You get the inoculation for one variant and then a new variant comes through. They’re all trying to do basically the same thing – deny a version of history, marginalise a group of people, prevent or mock any new thinking.”
Younge’s new book, Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter, is a collection of his journalism about race and identity across 30 years. Younge spent 27 years with the Guardian, 12 as their US correspondent. He’s now a sociology professor at Manchester University, but still frequently writes articles in newspapers and magazines. The new book collects richly researched and beautifully written articles about, among other things, the murder of Stephen Lawrence, Hurricane Katrina, the election of Barack Obama, being an English-accented black man in America, 18 hours with Maya Angelou (he was only meant to get 45 minutes) and visiting his mother’s home of Barbados on the 50th anniversary of independence. Many of the themes he has returned to – institutional racism, white supremacy, colonialism, inequality, the way history shapes the present – are still very much part of the contemporary discussion.
He got his politics from his mother. “We had, as a mother, this very determined woman … a feminist, an antiracist and an anti-colonialist, who would never use any of those words about herself. I grew up knowing to identify with [IRA hunger striker] Bobby Sands and that I was on his team, not the other team ... I must have been like, 11 or 12, so I didn’t know all of the issues. I was raised, first of all as an outsider, and secondly, with a very broad assumption that the dominant narrative is a lie.”
Why so? “Because they were lying about us. My mum was a single parent with three kids, and therefore, we were supposed to be into drugs … into partying – not into education. And you couldn’t get three more square, decent, ‘Can I carry your shopping for you, madam?’ people. So, I knew that they were lying about us. They’d say in the playground, ‘At least my mum’s not on social security’ and I’d say, ‘But your mum doesn’t work! My mum works! What are you talking about? My mum’s not on social security!’... And that does make a difference in terms of how you approach the world … ‘What is that guy saying and why is he saying it?’”
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At 15 he joined the Young Socialists and manned picket lines during the miners’ strike. It was a great political education, he says, but he ultimately found them to be “barking”. “I was doing an A-level a couple of years early and they wouldn’t give me time off to do revision, ‘Because if the revolution is coming what are you revising for?’”
The nature of both my experiences and my politics and my interest in journalism is to look for the complexity … To try and get to the more granular stuff
He went to Sudan for a year between school and university to teach at a school for refugees. There he met privately educated British “posh folk” for the first time. “I realised, ‘Actually you’re not much smarter than the kids that went to my school. You’re just polished …' They could talk pretty fluidly about [Sudan]. But they had no idea about Britain.”
He joined the Labour party while at the university of Edinburgh, successfully winning election to their national executive, before becoming disillusioned with the heavy-handed way he felt the leadership quashed dissent. Around the same time, he was studying French and Russian translation and was discovering a love of language. He was accepted for a journalism bursary established by the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian, to encourage people from minority communities into journalism. “[The bursary] came about, because in 1987, there were uprisings, and [the Trust] could see there was an issue with a lack of black journalists in Britain … There’s an article in the collection – Riots Are a Class Act – where I talk in defence of rioting, with all of the problematic things that come with it. If there hadn’t been riots in the 60s, there’d be no Barack Obama. The French Revolution, that’s a riot blessed by history. That doesn’t mean that all riots are good, but these uprisings were the things that created the space for me and others to come through … I always understood that there’s a connection in my work between me and [the rioters], which I think is very useful.”
He joined the Guardian where he received conflicting advice from older white journalists (“the only older journalists available”). One told him not to write about race lest he be pigeonholed, while another advised he write only about race. He ignored them both. “A lot of younger black writers really get paralysed by [that dilemma] but I was lucky to have had a political education. I’d read Steve Biko. I’d read CLR James. And I’d seen black intellectuals and journalists write about the Haitian revolution, about cricket, about politics and Marxism and all the rest of it.”
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His first big story was covering the election of Nelson Mandela. Unlike the mainly white journalists covering it for western media, he stayed with black families in the townships and caught details they missed. He saw how everyone boiled their water before the election, because of rumours the Afrikaners would poison it. He heard how little they spoke about white people who “held no mystery” for them. “As we come walking into the polling booth, people are coming in from different parts [like] tributaries joining a thick stream and there’s this mist burning off and you can see the Sunday best shoes and the neat trousers and the long skirts, and you can’t see faces because the mist is too thick,” he remembers. “It’s also quiet. You could see journalists come through to do interviews, and particularly the television journalists wanted people to talk about how excited they were. They’d say, ‘Is this an exciting day?’ and the person would go [quietly] ‘Yes. Yes.’ Excitement really wasn’t the point... It was a kind of quiet determination and resolve.”
It’s not like I go into these situations without a view on Brexit or Trump or immigration, but if you think that you have nothing to learn, that you know why people are doing this, that produces incredibly bad journalism
He was surprised re-reading his articles how relatively nuanced his analysis was when it came to figures such as Mandela and, later, Obama. “My writing was actually less gushing than most. [There’s] a slight distance.” Later he says: “The nature of both my experiences and my politics and my interest in journalism is to look for the complexity … To try and get to the more granular stuff. So Obama or Mandela? It’s more complicated than just dancing in the street. Trump, it’s more complicated than ‘It’s just racism’. Brexit, it’s more complicated than ‘just xenophobia’. Things are usually more complicated than the dominant media narrative.”
“Complexity” is different, he says, to the much-touted idea of “balance”, in which the journalist poses as a perspective-free arbiter of truth. The delusion of perfect balance is only possible if you’re part of a dominant majority, says Younge. “They think they’re coming from a neutral perspective. I never had the luxury growing up to think that I wasn’t coming from a place . My capacity to triangulate, if you like, was imbibed from a pretty early age … I remember I’d written about the [second World] War, and [an American wrote], ‘Yeah, if it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking German.’ And I wrote back to him and said, ‘If it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be speaking Yoruba. I’m not coming from the same place that you’re coming from. And that’s fine, so long as you understand you’re coming from a place.’”
He couples this knowledge with open-minded curiosity. “One of the most common questions I ask is, ‘Why do you think that?’… It’s not like I go into these situations without a view on Brexit or Trump or immigration, but if you think that you have nothing to learn, that you know why people are doing this, that produces incredibly bad journalism.”
The media’s shock at Brexit, he says, revealed complacency and shallowness. “The media class in Britain draws from such a gene puddle, such a small group of people who are the same social class as the political class. And so, with the arrival of a Trump or a Brexit or a Corbyn, they lose their shit.”
Racism and loss of empire played a big part in Brexit, he says, “but there were deeper things going on in terms of dislocation, economic disintegration, alienation … The centre of British politics was always happy to cede the immigration discussion to the right … While I couldn’t have told you which way Britain was going to vote on Brexit, the Brexit vote didn’t change anything that I thought about Britain. People were saying, ‘I went to bed in one country, I woke up in another.’ Not only is that literally not true, it’s not even metaphorically true. You went to sleep in a country where xenophobia had been allowed to run riot for years and then you woke up with the consequences of that. The difference is that you didn’t think that it was going to affect you.”
There is this contested space, which I think has been happening for a while, with a new, borrowed xenophobia in a struggle with a very embedded sense of being an underdog and being a migrant culture
He writes frequently about the specific ways in which racism and identity express themselves across place and time. Younge’s brother lives in Ireland, so he spends time here. While visiting in the late 80s and early 90s he was sometimes treated with “a sense of exoticism”, but he also felt “a broad, reflexive identification with a sense of oppression”.
He has observed a lot of changes since, he says. “With the boom and with the arrival of a kind of post-colonial migration, people started to assume that my brother was a Nigerian asylum seeker on the make.” Younge himself experienced someone shouting racist abuse at him from a car during a recent visit. “I’m reminded [of Noel Ignatiav’s book] How the Irish became White … Ireland [had] been peripheral within the European space, then got a different lease of life ... You see this rising racial hostility, but the other stuff hasn’t gone – that sense of, ‘We’re all immigrants’... There is this contested space, which I think has been happening for a while, with a new, borrowed xenophobia in a struggle with a very embedded sense of being an underdog and being a migrant culture.”
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He’d like the media to get better at rejecting simple narratives. This partly involves hiring a more diverse array of journalists with a different array of perspectives. “Black Lives Matter doesn’t show us that more black people are being killed by cops. It’s what African Americans have been living through for ages. Nobody was paying any attention … When I got the bursary and went to journalism school there was that saying, ‘When a dog bites a man, that’s not a story. When a man bites dog, it’s a story.’” But now he increasingly thinks, “‘Who owns these dogs? And why do the same people keep getting bitten?’… This is what I try and engage in my journalism, the power of the everyday, the things that aren’t necessarily understood as news but should be.”
Younge is a measured and thoughtful writer even when writing about upsetting and enraging things. “I’ve never had the luxury of just being unstrategic,” he says. “And that was true at school. I remember a [white] friend going ‘Let’s nick some of those.’ And I went ‘No, that plays out very differently for you than it does for me.’ As time has gone on, I’ve become less concerned about the consequences … There’s a great line from a [American poet and activist] Langston Hughes article.” He paraphrases: “If white people love us that’s great, and if they don’t, that’s great, too. And if black people love us, that’s great. And if they don’t, that’s great, too. The tom-tom laughs and the tom-tom cries … I have things to say and I want to say them in a way that I think will make sure that they’re heard. But I’m not going to not say them. Freedom is more than just not having shackles. Freedom is, among other things, about your ability to say the things you want to say. That’s very important to me.”
Dispatches from the Diaspora by Gary Younge is published by Faber on March 16th
