ABSTRACT

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.

chapter Chapter 1|5 pages

Introduction

Personal curiosity and research trajectory

chapter Chapter 2|25 pages

Historical context

chapter Chapter 3|23 pages

Research approach and methods

chapter Chapter 4|11 pages

Black British self-concept

chapter Chapter 5|13 pages

Being a black man

chapter Chapter 6|13 pages

The crisis of the black family in Britain

chapter Chapter 7|16 pages

Uneducated, educated or mis-educated?

chapter Chapter 8|9 pages

Black British religious instruction

chapter Chapter 9|16 pages

Criminal participation, desistance and preclusion

chapter Chapter 10|3 pages

Conclusion