{"id":50021,"date":"2016-11-19T02:58:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-19T02:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50021"},"modified":"2017-02-19T21:27:11","modified_gmt":"2017-02-19T21:27:11","slug":"black-and-british-by-david-olusoga-review-reclaiming-a-lost-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50021","title":{"rendered":"Black and British by David Olusoga review \u2013 reclaiming a lost past"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black and British by David Olusoga review \u2013 reclaiming a lost past<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a>
\n2016-11-17<\/p>\n

Colin Grant<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nDavid Olusoga<\/a> at St Michael\u2019s Church, Burgh-by-Sands<\/a>. Photograph: Des Willie\/BBC\/Des Willie<\/em> <\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Olusoga\u2019s insightful \u2018forgotten history<\/a>\u2019 amounts to much more than a text to accompany a TV series. Yet despite its many attributes, is it too temperate?<\/em><\/p>\n

How do you make black British history palatable to white Britons? Actually, hold on a second. How do you make it palatable to black Britons? Let\u2019s start again. How do you compose a history of Britain\u2019s involvement with black people? The answer during my childhood was to accentuate the positive; to tweak the past, for instance, so that schoolchildren were left with the impression that slavery was somehow an abhorrent North American practice and that the British, through the good works of William Wilberforce<\/a>, should be commended for their part in bringing about the end of the Atlantic slave trade<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Three decades ago Peter Fryer<\/a> offered a corrective, stripping off the historical bandage. Fryer\u2019s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain<\/em><\/a> was an excoriating book by a tireless Marxist historian skewering British imperial mendacity, which, when young black readers stumble across it, delivers a punch to the sternum, a remembrance real or imagined of tragedy and sorrow. But it also elicits a flush of excitement and pride. At last! A history that is not sanitised or sugar-coated; and one written by a proxy black man, namely a white man who in his own apologia aimed to \u201cthink black\u201d. The British-Nigerian David Olusoga<\/a> has a head start on Fryer. But whereas Fryer had an independent radical publisher (Pluto<\/a>) at his elbow, Olusoga had to satisfy BBC managers \u2013 the book<\/a> accompanies a TV series<\/a> \u2013 who are largely petrified about \u201crace\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black and British by David Olusoga review \u2013 reclaiming a lost past The Guardian 2016-11-17 Colin Grant David Olusoga at St Michael\u2019s Church, Burgh-by-Sands. Photograph: Des Willie\/BBC\/Des Willie Olusoga\u2019s insightful \u2018forgotten history\u2019 amounts to much more than a text to accompany a TV series. Yet despite its many attributes, is it too temperate? How do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,8,10],"tags":[4651,25334,2103],"class_list":["post-50021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-colin-grant","tag-david-olusoga","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50021"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51613,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50021\/revisions\/51613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}