QUARTZ: “Political blackness”: a very British concept with a complex history

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“Political blackness comes out of that,” says Claire Alexander, a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and author of the 2017 paper “Breaking Black: The death of ethnic and racial studies in Britain.” Alexander identifies political blackness as a unique response to a British understanding of race and racism. Young people of color identified as black and campaigned together to fight racial discrimination, she says, adding that at the heart of political blackness was a shared feeling of being unwanted. Political blackness resonated as term adopted by academics and political activists and took on a considerable life of its own in the 1980s.