The unified ‘Black British’ category collapsed under internal demographic and religious differentiation.

Evidence

Relatedly, the fractured and fractious homogenizing of a singular Black Britannia, drawing together West Indians, Africans, and South Asians into a blackening singularity as uninvited immigrant presence deserving only disdain and repatriation, eventually tore apart beneath the burden of differentiating histories, competing interests, contrasting relations to the state and civil society, shifting demographic proportionalities, and rising religious and “civilizational” anxieties. But it collapsed also beneath the weight of efforts to “provincialize” England within the configuration of Britain, in relation to Europe, in regard to imperial orders, old and new, and in the reinvented global. The hints of a more troubled and troubling solidarity have begun recently to reemerge, revealed in the fact that of the recent spate of home-grown British bombers bent on spectacular public attacks in the name of Islam, two have been of Jamaican background. The ghosts of racial pasts return to haunt the master’s house in unpredictable variations. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 919

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Jamaican-background bombers claim deserves verification and contextualization — it’s a striking empirical detail doing heavy analytic work.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that imposed racial singularity collapses under its own internal differentiation, and that the residue resurfaces unpredictably (religious terrorism recruiting across racialized groups), is dense with implications for how racial categories are both imposed and unstable.
• XREF: connects to: Lumping all non-Black multiracial people into one category erases their distinct experiences. — Tatiana I. Zamora and Amado M. Padilla, Making sense of conflicting messages of…, 51