The Ordeal of Integration

"All my choices have a personal aspect. I didn’t know about Patterson until I was appointed as a lecturer at the LSE in 1987. I was, I was told, the first black British lecturer ever to be appointed to the LSE. But there had been some black lecturers before from the Caribbean. Orlando Patterson was one of them. He’d ended up going to the US, to Harvard, among other places. I was interested in these people of colour who had been at the LSE before me. Patterson was a social conservative – I wouldn’t describe myself that way. He looked at the idea of race in America through a different prism: he wasn’t trapped by the mythology, he wasn’t trapped by history. He was quite bold in his analysis, so much so that he ended up being called an Uncle Tom, and a sell out. I wanted to look at this, why he was called these things. If you dig down into his method, all he’s doing is providing empirical data to say that the debate should shift because, on the ground, things are shifting. That gave me the courage to look at things empirically and see that it was possible to share your analysis of the facts—which might get you into trouble with some people—but nevertheless wasn’t just repeating old claims. “The remedy isn’t just to focus on the black condition, it needs to focus on the human condition.” When you look through the literature on race and racism, the overwhelming majority of texts have been written by people of a Marxist persuasion. How useful is that if it’s all coming from that direction? We live in a pluralist society, so that’s not a good thing. We need people approaching this from different perspectives, looking at the problems our society faces, and giving their analysis of that. Patterson’s book looks at America’s racial crisis. It investigates the political emancipation of the period after the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1960s. Things moved very quickly. The paradigm that emerged was that black people had to be helped all the time through state agency. In other words, the state had got it wrong: they’d oppressed black people, or at least people within the state had oppressed black people, and the state had done nothing to help them be free agents in a free society. Then the civil rights movement had come along and given people that agency, but the purpose of that agency was to create a collective mentality, to fight oppression. You had black rights, black activism, the call to arms of black people, which of course, in adversity, was important to drive political changes. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Then, as time passed, Patterson suggests, we got trapped in that new paradigm where success was failure: wherever there were failings in a black community, the solution was to bring in the state – as if whenever there were failings in a black community it simply has to do with their blackness. But inequality doesn’t just attack black people, it attacks people of all colours and all creeds: the remedy isn’t just to focus on the black condition, it needs to focus on the human condition. Patterson appreciated that. He gave the data to show this shifting territory."