ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author suggests that there is a significant body of young, or youngish, white people in Britain's urban centres who don't feel they have an 'ethnicity', or if they do, that it's not one they feel too good about. She also wants further to suggest that this feeling bad is not a very useful response to the issue of contemporary racism, or indeed to anything else, and that there must be more to being 'white' than this. Paul Gilroy has described how Jamaican reggae – crying out against hunger and confinement in the Caribbean – was equally powerful as metaphor for the black experience in Britain. But the metaphor could go further; white youth, too, read into 1970s reggae a metaphor for the growing sense of containment that state responses to the crisis were producing.
