Racial otherness- Gilroy’s study of black representation ‘There ain’t no black in the union jack’ – focuses on the story of UK race relationships from WW2.

• The immigration from the west indies caused anxieties.

Post-colonial melancholia- Substandard living conditions produced racial representations. There were intensified fears that immigrant communities would fill up Britain.

• Underlying presence within print media during 1970s-80s arguing that criminalised reputations of black males often stigmatised the black community.
• Wrote the book ” There ain’t no black in the union jack”
  about the anxieties regarding immigrant behaviour in the UK after WW2 – in which post-war wave of immigration from the West Indies.
• Draws attention to “Lurid newspaper reports of black pimps living off immoral earnings of white women”
• Produced racial representations that were “fixed in a matrix between the imagery of squalor and that of sordid sexuality”

• WW2 immigrants were seen as an alien ‘other’ to an imagined white Britishness.
  Black immigrants were perceived to be ‘swamping’ white communities.
• Black communities were demonised through the representations that associated them with individual acts of criminality – knife crime and muggings were particular media concerns.
• These representations construct a ‘common sense’ notion of the criminal black male.
• Later representations constructed the black community in general, and black youths in particular, to be naturally lawless and incompatible with British white values.