Second-generation British Black youth were saved from identity collapse by Rastafarian culture.

Evidence

I wrote a very early pamphlet about second-generation black kids in Britain called “The Young Englanders,” which raises this question of divided identity, of young blacks of the second generation feeling themselves British but being refused. So the reading of Rastafarianism is important in the British context. This is what saves the second generation from a kind of social suicide. Refused by British society, unable to go back home, they save themselves by at last hearing through the transistor, Bob [Marley], and roots reggae. And this is absolutely profound. I really think that that generation was in deep, deep, deep trouble in a way that this generation of blacks are not. This doesn’t mean that they are not unemployed. They are. But they are not in trouble about who they are. They [i.e., the second generation] were in trouble about who they are. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1000

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the identity-and-refusal mechanics that postcolonial Islamophobia studies analyze: a group feels itself part of the nation but is refused membership, producing a surrogate identity culture. Connects to Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and to Naqvi’s Home Boy on refused belonging in Britain.
• SEED: An essay angle: how refused national belonging manufactures compensatory cultural identities (roots reggae for Black Britons, and analogous dynamics in European Muslim communities).