Gus John speaks: on diversity, ‘Windrushisation’ and Palestine

At the end of November, JVL’s Antiracist Alliance network hosted Professor Gus John and we are pleased to publish this video of his presentation. Originally billed to talk about the findings in his book “Don’t Salvage The Empire Windrush.  The seminar took place, as Israel continued to pulverise Gaza and Professor John drew strong connections with the “othering” and dehumanising of Africans and of Palestinians today.  Both victims of colonialism and both with long term trauma  He talks also about the Black experience before Windrush and the presence of the Black (and, indeed, the South Asian) community before and after the Windrush sailed.  He also notes that the ship had previously been a Nazi troop carrier and much more.

Some background information about Professory Gus John:

For over six decades, Professor Gus John has been a constant source of Black intellectual generational wealth and seminal works, simultaneously grounding and ground-breaking as an unapologetic scholar-activist. Throughout those decades, Prof John has situated himself and his works at the intersection of race and class. As such, he is a historical repository beyond compare, not least because for all his adult life, he was present and unafraid to participate in the history that he chronicles. Adviser to governments in Britain, the Caribbean and Africa or mentor to educators like me, he is an acknowledged intellectual heavyweight in his division who understands the centrality of history.  (from the Foreword by Rosemary Campbell-Stephens)

And here is more information about the book:  
Don’t Salvage the Empire Windrush, as its title suggests, seeks to challenge the ever-encroaching Windrush narrative, which the state has adopted and is zealously promoting. Prof John debunks the notion that the arrival of the Empire Windrush on 22 June 1948 marked the beginning of the evolution and growth of multiracial Britain and the claim that the ‘Windrush generation’ rebuilt post-war Britain and made it prosperous again. It is a narrative that displaces the history of those settled black communities who struggled against racism and marginalisation in Britain since the 19th century, at least, and those who fought for national independence of the Black Commonwealth while building a global Pan-Africanist movement right here in Britain. It does not so much as nod in the direction of the even larger South Asian population that settled in the UK since the late 1950s and made no less a contribution to the building of multiracial Britain.  Building communities of resistance was a project that related as much to the heinous practice of ‘Paki bashing’ as of ‘nigger hunting’.  It also erases the historical relationship between our presence here as a reserve pool of labour Britain had created as a consequence of African enslavement and colonial exploitation, which left the Caribbean region grossly under-developed and unable to withstand global economic challenges and the impact of climate change. Prof John critiques the creeping ‘Windrushisation of everything’ as a colonial and backward project which suits the designs of the British state, does nothing for Black Britain and represents the personal ambitions of one man, Samuel Beaver King, who had determined, even before he boarded the Windrush in Jamaica, that he would make that ship as iconic as the ‘Mayflower’

Don’t Salvage the Windrush is published by New Beacon Books and is available to purchase if you wish:  www.newbeaconbooks.com