But he can’t quite get Britain – or England, really – off his mind. He has been working for several years on a book about the effects that the climate crisis is having on our ideas about race and humanity. Gilroy is a worldly scholar, who wants us to look beyond the nation-state and think on a planetary scale. In 2004’s After Empire, more than a decade before the referendum on EU membership, he diagnosed Britain with “postcolonial melancholia”: an inability to mourn the loss of imperial greatness, which was encouraging a corrosive nationalism. His 1993 follow-up, The Black Atlantic, still his most influential work, used the writings of enslaved people and their descendants to demonstrate their centrality to the making of the modern world. He first made a name for himself in the late 1980s with his book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, which argued that racism was “deeply interwoven” with nationalism in Britain. Over four decades his work has spanned disciplines – literature, history, philosophy, music, sociology – but it is built around a simple plea: that race and racism be taken seriously. It’s a status that he has acquired slowly, without fanfare, through a steady drip of books, essays and lectures rather than dramatic public interventions. Today, he is widely regarded as the country’s pre-eminent scholar of race, culture and nationalism. Gilroy, 65, has since returned to Britain. Time moves forward but, on this issue, Britain stays still, having the same arguments over and over. Twenty years later, it can feel like little has changed. Several other non-white British academics had done the same: an article in the Guardian from 2000 about this exodus – headlined “Gifted, black … and gone” – quotes one of Gilroy’s reasons for leaving: “Even to be interested in race, let alone to assert its centrality to British nationalism, is to sacrifice the right to be taken seriously.” The response to the Parekh report seemed to confirm that he had made the right decision. He had joined Yale University the previous year, having left Britain in search of greener pastures. Gilroy watched this “depressing and deeply symptomatic” episode unfold from across the Atlantic. This was the sentence that launched a thousand tirades, but where did this idea come from? Follow the footnote in the offending paragraph and you arrive at the work of an academic called Paul Gilroy. It said that “Britishness, as much as Englishness, has … largely unspoken, racial connotations”. Contrary to the Telegraph front page, it didn’t claim “British” was a racist word. The Parekh report, as it was known – its chair was the political theorist Lord Bhikhu Parekh – was not a radical document. Spooked by the intensity of the reaction, Straw distanced himself from any further debate about Britishness, recommending in his speech at the report’s launch that the left swallow some patriotic tonic. In the Telegraph, Boris Johnson, then editor of the Spectator magazine, wrote that the report represented “a war over culture, which our side could lose”. The line was clear – a clique of leftwing academics, in cahoots with the government, wanted to make ordinary people feel ashamed of their country. The Daily Telegraph ran a front-page article: “Straw wants to rewrite our history: ‘British’ is a racist word, says report.” The Sun and the Daily Mail joined in. It made the case for formally declaring the UK a multicultural society. It was honest about Britain’s racial inequalities and the legacy of empire, but also offered hope. The report was nuanced and scholarly, the result of two years’ deliberation. Launched by the Labour home secretary Jack Straw, it proposed ways to counter racial discrimination and rethink British identity. In 2000, the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust published a report about the “future of multi-ethnic Britain”. Your contribution not only helps Vincent with his medical bills and day-to-day expenses, but it also sends a message that we value and appreciate him, his friendship, and the way he makes us all feel when he's around.Professor Paul Gilroy (UCL Centre for the Study of Race and Racism), one of Britain’s most influential scholars, has spent a lifetime trying to convince people to take race and racism seriously. Those who have met him know that Vinnie is a guy that will give you the shirt off his back, he will loyally support a friend in any way needed, and he would jump in front of a bus if it would make a child laugh. Vincent Gilroy, everyone's favorite man behind the bar, everyone's friend, and the reason why the word "FUNCLE" was invented, underwent emergency open heart surgery on November 6th.Īnd while surviving this episode is sure to add to Vinnie's already long list of incredible tales and adventures, it has also left him unable to work for the foreseeable future, alongside a looming mountain of medical expenses.
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