One of the questions that kept on cropping up in my research was ‘why is it that no matter how much you do and how hard you try, we never get anywhere?’. The young people in my working-class community want to make sense of their lives. You know, many young Black people have little sense of how they came to be here and do not know how my generation resisted state racism. It’s easy to see how some young people can end up with ahistorical views when there has been a deliberate attempt to not include Black histories in the school curriculum. What I mean is that many of the struggles that my generation faced with racism in housing and policing persist today, they just look different at times. I wanted to try and get across the continuity of struggle across the generations in Newham. My aim was to connect the dots for example between gentrification, austerity, youth violence, and describe how these processes have pressed down on Black youth.Īt times, it was difficult for me to write Terraformed because I was overcome with a sense of grief and rage at what is happening to our community in Forest Gate, something I think a lot of young working-class people can relate to. To be frank, I wanted to make sense of it for myself. Joy White: Topographically and sociologically, east London has changed a lot over the past forty years, and I wanted to support young Black working-class people to make sense of the challenges they face owing to these changes. Jessica Perera: Can you tell me the basics about ‘Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City’? But, as Joy White argues here, a deep nihilism has set in for young working-class Black communities in London’s inner city, and its effects are yet to be acknowledged.
The ‘failing’ are exhorted to find routes out of their culture to success.
IRR’s Jessica Perera interviews academic Joy White about her 2020 ethnographic book Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City, which reads as a telling riposte to the recent Commission for Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) report.Ĭommentators have argued that the approach behind the CRED report brings to mind a league-table, where points are awarded (or not) depending on whether you are deemed as coming from a good or bad ethnic minority, reflecting the winner and loser ideology of neoliberalism.