Black Men in Britain
An Ethnographic Portrait of the Post-Windrush Generation
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Book Description
While extensive attention has been paid to black youth, adult black British men are a notable omission in academic literature. This book is the first attempt to understand one of Britain’s hidden populations: the post-Windrush generation, who matured within a post-industrial British society that rendered them both invisible and irrelevant. Using ethnography, participant observation, interviews and his own personal experience, and without an ounce of liberal angst, Kenny Monrose pulls no punches and presents the reader with a fierce but sensitive study of a population that has been vilified and ignored.
The widely disseminated portrait of black maleness, which habitually constructs black men as being either violently dangerous, or social failures, is challenged by granting black men in Britain the autonomy to speak on sociologically significant issues candidly and openly for themselves. This reveals how this group has been forced to negotiate a glut of political shifts and socially imposed imperatives, ranging from Windrush to Brexit, and how these have had an impact on their life course. This provides a cultural uplift and offers an authenticated examination and privileged insight of black British culture.
This book will be of interest to sociologists, cultural historians and criminologists engaged with citizenship, migration, race, racialisation and criminal justice.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: personal curiosity and research trajectory
2 Historical context
3 Research approach and methods
4 Black British self-concept
5 Being a black man
6 The crisis of the black family in Britain
7 Uneducated, educated or mis-educated?
8 Black British religious instruction
9 Criminal participation, desistance and preclusion
10 Conclusion
Index
Author(s)
Biography
Kenny Monrose is an Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and a College Research Associate at Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Reviews
"Monrose’s Black Men in Britain provides an in-depth qualitative study exploring the lives of Black men of the post-Windrush generation. Rich with participants’ narratives, and written in a lucid and engaging style, Monrose uses “formal interviews” with ten participants, and unstructured exchanges with thirty participants, to provide a counter-story to traditional academic and popular framings of Black Britishness. Against the academic framing of Black Brits, Monrose focuses on an understudied population: middle-aged Black men who grew up in the post-Windrush era. This empirical focus shifts attention away from the more regularly studied Black youths, and Black members of the Windrush generation. "
Prof. Ali Meghji, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge
"As contemporary scandals, relating both to the treatment of Windrush-era migrants and to the low value accorded to Black lives, batter against the platitudes that British society (and others like it) tells itself, this book does much more than simply contextualise Black experience and racism within a specific space-time."
Jonathan Ilan, Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Director of Undergraduate Programmes, Department of Sociology, City University of London