- Explores the construction of racial ‘otherness’ as an underlying presence within print media reportage during the 1970s and the 1980s.
- Argues that criminalised representations of black males regularly stigmatised the black community.
- Shifted his attention during the 1990s to consider the mass-media constructions of British identity in post-industrial Britain.
- Studied the importance of black representation. ‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’ relates back to the race relations from the Second World war. Thus where the poster-war wave of immigration from the West Indies produced a series of worries and anxieties regarding immigrant behaviour. The black community are constructed as a racial ‘other’ in the predominantly white world of 1950s Britain. There were worries that immigrant communities would swamp / take over white Britain. These fears were further noted in the news in late 1970s and 1980s and routed the black community with assaults, muggings and other violent crimes.
Reggae: the sound that revolutionised Britain:
It was punk’s “Summer Of Hate”, 1977, and the required pose was a sneer, a leather jacket and something hacked about – a spiky haircut, a ripped T-shirt, a sawn-off school tie. And, of course, no flares, the despised flag of hippiedom. But at the cold, concrete roots of Britain a very different aesthetic was also in the ascendant, one calling for an oversized tam, dreadlocks and a display of “the red, gold and green”, the colours of Rastafari.
In reggae terms, it had taken the emergence of Bob Marley to effect the uneasy coalition of rock fans, black youth, lofty Rastas and proto-punks that confronted each other at his celebrated 1975 Lyceum shows. After Marley, reggae was taken seriously as music of substance and innovation, where previously it had been treated at best as a novelty or simply ridiculed.