Paul Gilroy
Paul Gilroy explores the construction of racial ‘otherness’ as an underlying presence within print media reportage during the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that criminalised representations of black males regularly stigmatised the black community.
Gilroys theory:
Paul Gilroy believed “unstable” and politicised identities are “always unfinished, always being remade” and ethnicity is an “infinite process of identity construction”. In other words, ethnicity and national identity are not actually fixed or permanent.
Gilroys main points:
- 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.
- Later representations suggested that black otherness had a corrosive effect on white youth culture too.
Info from TheConversation.com:
- ‘Ghost Town’: a haunting 1981 protest song that still makes sense today
- It was their last song before splitting up and reforming as The Special AKA and stayed at the top of the UK charts for three weeks.
- The music video was directed by Barney Bubbles and filmed in the East End of London, Blackwell Tunnel and a before-hours City of London.