Chapter 9 African-Caribbean and South Asian adolescents, adulthood and the ‘generation gap’ in late Cold War Britain, c.1970–89

Schooling and education

The structural racism that both African-Caribbean and South Asian teenagers faced in school was framed by the belief that they were unable to grow up into psychologically and emotionally healthy adults. To a degree, this affected white working-class adolescents as well, as it was assumed they would never reach the more advanced developmental stages of abstract reasoning, an idea that has affected the treatment of non-elite people since at least the early modern period. However, African-Caribbean and South Asian teenagers were framed as more deviant, diverging even further from the ‘correct’ developmental pathway. African-Caribbean or ‘West Indian’ students were stereotyped as loud and disruptive, with a disproportionate number labelled as ‘educationally sub-normal’, an issue that sparked activism among black communities.¹⁷ D.L. Edmondson, the headteacher of Holyhead secondary school in Handsworth, in Birmingham, where 85–90 per cent of the students were teenagers of colour, reflected in 1977 in the journal Multiracial School, published by the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME): ‘one’s first impression of Jamaican children is that they are noisy, volatile and excitable … I have noticed a good deal of bitchiness among the girls … When stirred up and in full flow, many of these children seem to abandon all restraint … They can be extremely offensive’.¹⁸

An article in the same journal published in 1983 highlighted similar views held by teachers in a Yorkshire comprehensive school where a third of the pupils were African-Caribbean: one teacher commented, ‘I am prepared to expect louder or noisier behaviour from West Indian pupils than Asians or other groups’ and another said that they gave West Indians more oral work as ‘even the able West Indians become agitated when not writing well’. They encouraged them to participate in sport, where they had a ‘chance of success’ as ‘West Indian pupils seem to be more muscular, more physically developed and have better physical skills than white children of the same age’.¹⁹ These racist ideas framed teenage African-Caribbean students as precociously physically advanced but essentially childlike, unable to demonstrate the greater self-control expected in adolescence. Sometimes they were intended ‘benevolently’, suggesting that African-Caribbean students needed to be cut more slack than white or Asian students, but this only emphasised the idea that they would never be able to attain maturity.

African-Caribbean and Indian-Caribbean students challenged these ideas when given the opportunity to write about their experiences. They were acutely aware of where these stereotypes came from. In the 1980s, they cited popular television programmes like Grange Hill that, as sixteen-year-old Mike, an African-Caribbean boy at school in South East London, commented in 1982 in his ACER essay, presented black pupils as ‘extremely stupid and/or disruptive’.²⁰ Sharon, an African-Caribbean girl, wrote in an ACER essay on ‘What It Means to Be Black and British’ in 1981, when she was seventeen, that, at school

there is already built-up by the teacher (who is usually white) a comical view of black children … Feeling now, alienated, you sit quietly brooding in the corner, or as you realise that you got the class laughing, you continue playing the Black comedian. Gradually, you get behind in your work and sent to the remedial unit.²¹

Another way of challenging racist ideas linked to the language of age and maturity was to point out that the racist behaviour of white peers indicated that they were the ones who were truly immature. Fifteen-year-old Paul, whose surname suggested that he was likely Indian-Caribbean, wrote in his ACER essay in 1982, ‘Has Racism Been a Factor in School-Life for Me in Britain?’, that ‘Racism plays such an active role in my school-life that it is rarely possible for me to travel between my school’s two buildings without being physically or verbally assaulted.’ When he started secondary school, ‘I naively imagined my fellow inmates to be responsible, mature young adults … they soon proved me wrong.’²²

A play written by an African-Caribbean teenage boy, Michael McMillan, which was published by the Black Ink Collective in 1978, attacked these stereotypes. In ‘The School Leaver’, Lester is introduced in these terms: ‘A TEENAGE BLACK BOY sits at a desk, academic and brilliant, doing his physics.’²³ Nevertheless, McMillan recognised the social and cultural costs of trying to achieve on the terms set by white British society; Lester is bullied by his peers and doesn’t feel ‘truly’ West Indian. When his dad asks him, ‘has your teacher asked you if you’re going to stay on [at school], boy, you nah want fuh go out on the streets’, Lester replies, ‘Yes, Daddy, I’ve told him that I intend to stay on, but you should try and learn to speak proper English’, indicating that he has rejected his family’s language and heritage.²⁴ In contrast, another black teenage boy, Errol, finds school pointless and leaves as soon as possible, but listens to Bob Marley and adopts Rastafari clothing. The play ends on an uncomfortable note, when Lester ends up working for Social Security and refuses to help Errol when he applies for unemployment benefit. McMillan suggested that neither adult path chosen by these two boys was a fulfilling one because of the way their choices were restricted.

The wider black community saw education as a central issue in this period. As Jessica Gerrard has shown, black supplementary schools and Saturday schools expanded from the late 1960s in reaction to the inadequate education being provided by British state schools. Local activist groups, like Camberwell’s Black Parents Association, also united around the ways black children and black parents were being treated by the school system.²⁵ Students developed their own activist groups, such as the Black Students’ Activism Collective founded at Tulse Hill in 1974.²⁶ In Chapeltown in Leeds, Olivia Wyatt has argued that older women temporarily supported more militant forms of resistance during a playgroup takeover in 1972 and a school strike in 1973 because of the importance they placed on the interests of children.²⁷ What was happening to African-Caribbeans in schools was identified by the black community as crucial to the ways in which white supremacy functioned in Britain, and part of that was the way they were framed as both adultified children and childlike adolescents.

South Asian teenagers navigated issues around age in different but parallel ways. South Asian girls were framed by the school system as permanently childlike in a different sense, passive and acquiescent. Sometimes they were seen as the helpless victims of an oppressive religion. Edmondson recited an accepted narrative about Indian girls being caught between two cultures, which inhibited appropriate adolescent development because this involved socialising: ‘Any child naturally wants to associate with his or her peer group.’²⁸ Pratibha Parmar, a young Kenyan Asian woman, argued alongside Nadia Mirza in Spare Rib in 1981 that ‘Asian women are portrayed as either sexually erotic or completely passive’, and linked these assumptions to TV representations, where Asian women were depicted as ‘pathetic’ people who couldn’t speak English or ‘smiling air hostesses’.²⁹

South Asian boys and girls tended to have better educational outcomes than their black peers, despite being framed by white teachers as having ‘unrealistic aspirations’.³⁰ Some early research from the 1970s, as Sally Tomlinson has argued, ‘may have unwittingly colluded in ensuring that Asian pupils were offered a fairer deal in education than pupils of West Indian origin’ because their achievements were so much more significant.³¹ This interpretation, as well as distorting South Asians’ struggles, views childhood experience solely from the perspective of adulthood and assumes it was good because these students managed to hit traditional milestones of social mobility. However, this ignores the ways in which teenage South Asians were treated as naïve children in schools, and how adult South Asian women, in particular, continued to be framed as ignorant and childlike. As Amrit Wilson argued in 1978, the Grunwick strike (1976–8), led by East African Asian women, was so ‘exceptional’ precisely because it was assumed that Gujarati women could not face the world and demand their rights, in other words, that they were too weak to act as ‘true’ adults would.³²

Girls, marriage and motherhood

Marriage and motherhood were crucial milestones for heterosexual white female adolescents in modern Britain, as Hay’s chapter has shown, but did not mark a pathway to adulthood in the same way for African-Caribbean and South Asian teenage girls.³³ For either first- or second-generation migrant girls from the Caribbean, early marriage and childbearing might represent danger, and they were much more likely to resist these expectations than their white counterparts. Evelyn G. Christie published ‘Lissen Sisters’ in the journal of the Ahfiwe school in 1974, when she was still only nineteen. She warned other black girls:

A black girl have to think about life not just having babies and boyfriends … I hear a lot of girls saying to hell with ‘A’ level, ‘O’ level, CSE and GCE but it will help get you somewhere in life … But no, you believe you’re 20 when you’re just 14 or 15, and men use young black girls for they say she fool and don’t have any sense … We should have ambition, education and a career in front of us.³⁴

In a series of studies conducted with school-age African-Caribbean girls in the 1970s and 1980s, this point was continually emphasised. Michelle, a sixteen-year-old African-Caribbean girl attending a London comprehensive school, stated in 1976:

I want a proper job first and some kind of skill so that if I do get married and have children I can go back to it; don’t want just relying on him for money, ’cause I’ve got to look after myself … Maybe I’ll be a housewife or something like that, but I always picture myself working.³⁵

Like Michelle and Evelyn, many African-Caribbean girls explicitly stated that they would put work above marriage, whereas white girls were more concerned with figuring out how to fit work around domestic responsibilities and childbearing.³⁶ Kathryn Riley worked with a small group of fifteen- to eighteen-year-old girls from Jamaica attending an inner-city girls’ school in South London, publishing her findings in Multiracial Education in 1982. Unlike working-class white girls, who overwhelmingly gravitated towards traditionally female jobs, these working-class black Jamaican girls wanted ‘male’ jobs. Christine commented, ‘It’s good if you’re getting a job that men usually do. You’re achieving something’, while Annette said, ‘I couldn’t do that job of being a secretary sitting at a desk every week.’³⁷ These kinds of accounts indicated the pressures on African-Caribbean girls, who needed to ‘prove’ their worth in a racist society. However, ironically, by achieving these very goals, they were setting themselves at odds with the traditional milestones of female adulthood in post-war and Cold War Britain.

Sharon, now twenty years old, reflected on these issues in another essay written for the ACER black young writers’ competition in 1984. She started her essay by vividly illustrating that, although black girls themselves might not want marriage or early motherhood, this was not the way they were viewed by outsiders: ‘ “Is it true that all West Indian girls leave school and have babies?” the white girl in the office asks.’ Sharon felt that black women were

still living in the same trap of having children when we are not physically, mentally or economically prepared for them … This results in the stereo-typical view by the indigenous population that the problems really stem from the home. How often do we hear the familiar echoes from teachers now, ‘well, she’s probably rebelling against a strict West Indian upbringing …’³⁸

This trapped African-Caribbean girls in a double bind, unable to reflect upon the problems they felt their communities faced because these would be used as evidence that they, and their families, were unfit adults and parents.

South Asian girls negotiated a different set of cultural and social expectations around womanhood. It was assumed by the institutions they encountered that they would be ‘forced’ into arranged marriages that they did not want.³⁹ Some South Asian girls directly challenged this stereotype by pointing out, like some African-Caribbean girls, that they were not interested in marriage and were focused on their careers. South Asian girls often used school instrumentally as a place where they might experience greater freedom than they did at home, and which could supply them with the qualifications they needed to achieve their goals. They became increasingly likely to stay on at school past the official leaving age between 1972 and 1991.⁴⁰

Amajit Kaur explored some of the tensions she experienced in ‘An Indian Girl Growing Up in England’, which was published in Multiracial School in 1973:

At fourteen I had decided that whatever happened I was not going to leave school and get a dead-end job … I wanted to separate myself emotionally from my parents, to find out what I wanted to be, and also to gain independence … I began to become jealous and bitter and wished I was English … The majority of my friends were rejecting school and they lived only for the weekends, while I lived for the school days.

Amajit was afraid that her Sikh parents would make her have an arranged marriage, and wished she could experience the ‘series of intense infatuations’ that her white friends were having, which she saw as one of the ‘necessary stages of adolescence’, employing developmental psychological language.⁴¹ Wilson argued that arranged marriages were particularly oppressive for Sikh or Muslim girls, suggesting that Hindu girls were more likely to be able to continue in education after marriage.⁴²

However, not all South Asian girls, religion notwithstanding, felt the same way as Amajit. Another way of challenging white British expectations was to point out that arranged marriages were no more oppressive than the emphasis placed on romantic love by teenage magazines, pop music and society, or the expectations of white British parents.⁴³ Parmar and Mirza argued in their Spare Rib article in 1981 that ‘nobody seems to question the fact that the marriages of [working-class] white girls are “arranged”, in that those who marry will do so with boys of a very similar class background, from the same area, and generally with their parents’ consent’. They quoted Pragna, who rejected the trappings of white teenage girlhood: ‘What is the freedom in going to a disco, frightened in case no boy fancies you, or no one asks you to dance?’⁴⁴ Fifteen-year-old Kamaljit, in contrast, ‘loved the discos and the parties’ but felt that, for her, familial love was more important than romantic love. She expected to organise her own marriage alongside her parents, as ‘all my sisters have married who they wanted to’, but understood that this would be a problem if the boy was not of her faith.

I think [my mum] would mind … she would tell me not to see him. Then it would be up to me to decide whether to see him or not. But I am the sort who can’t leave a family but can leave a boy.⁴⁵

Teenage South Asian girls were also keen to emphasise that this was a conversation that needed to be had within their communities rather than imposed upon them. In 1981, a group of sixteen- to eighteen-year-old Asian girls responded critically to a Conservative White Paper of 1979 which proposed restricting the immigration of Indian men who intended to marry women in Britain. Abida commented, ‘They are making too much out of arranged marriages and using it for their own purpose. We have to realise that’, whereas Daxa said, ‘It’s for us, the girls and our families, to work out our problems and issues of marriage.’⁴⁶ These young women emphasised that, even if they did not agree with everything their parents wanted for them, intergenerational solidarity was still important, as tension within South Asian communities would be exploited by outsiders for their own ends. This became crucial in how young people of colour understood their relationships with adults in their communities, as well as their own future adulthoods.

The ‘generation gap’

Popular narratives about postwar Britain often focus on the ‘generation gap’ that supposedly emerged between white British parents and their offspring from the 1950s onwards, with the rise of a sequence of youth subcultures emphasising the difference between teenagers and adults.⁴⁷ Later historical work has argued that this ‘generation gap’ has been over-emphasised.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, white British adolescents writing in this period found that the ‘generation gap’ was a useful rhetorical tool. White teenagers used the language of age and generation to criticise their parents’ attitudes to the nuclear bomb, for example, constructing adolescence and adulthood as categories that were in opposition to each other, and had no shared goals.⁴⁹ Youth-led activist organisations like the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) picked up on this language in the 1980s, arguing that young people’s idealism and energy was what was needed to combat the geopolitical crisis.⁵⁰

For African-Caribbean and South Asian adolescents, relationships between generations were markedly different, and this shaped their understandings of what it meant to be a ‘teenager’ or an ‘adult’. While not denying the presence of intergenerational conflict, teenagers of colour often emphasised what they shared with their parents, especially when they themselves had been born in Britain and did not have direct experience of their country of origin. In 1983, fifteen-year-old Farida, who was probably Indian-Caribbean, wrote in her ACER essay, ‘ “Education” Rather Than “Schooling” Is the Key to Liberation’: ‘Our parents and family life form a stable background which gives us the confidence to achieve … Our parents will offer comfort and reassurance and the strength to combat the racism of society as a whole.’⁵¹ A nineteen-year-old African-Caribbean boy suggested to ACER in 1984 that ‘parents should try and understand … that children of today, whatever race, colour or creed, face more pressures, temptations and responsibilities than they ever did … [but] children should understand the problems of their parents, especially in times of a depressing economic situation’.⁵²

As the titles offered to these young black writers by ACER suggest, they were guided towards a certain narrative about black identity and intergenerational solidarity, and the winning essays may reflect this agenda. However, a dissenting voice came from fifteen-year-old Debbie, in a 1983 essay entitled ‘What Carnival in Notting Hill Means to Me as a Young Black Person in Britain’:

I had an idea from the beginning the Carnival was for the older generation of black people, to me the Steelband seemed to be an old sort of music … A lot of my age group were just walking with the crowd and looking at older people dancing … Maybe it is because I was born in England and not in the West Indies, I don’t think the Carnival means a lot to me.⁵³

Debbie did not feel that this kind of event, or this kind of music, was central to her generation’s identity in the same way as it was for ‘the older generation’.

These narratives also emerged in other settings that were less controlled by adults and where young people may have felt more able to speak freely, suggesting that they weren’t simply an artefact of this essay competition. Step Forward Youth was a film produced by Menelik Shabazz in Brixton in 1977; at the time, Shabazz himself was only twenty-three. In one section of this film, a nineteen-year-old black Jamaican girl who had been born in Britain said that reggae music was important to her because ‘we’re here in England, we’re born here, OK, never having been to Jamaica … we’re having to eat school dinners because our parents are out all day, so we have to get used to English food OK, West Indian food is gone … there’s just music’.⁵⁴ This suggested that parents did not always provide the easy connections to one’s own heritage that might be expected, but that Jamaican culture was still vital to understanding her identity, and part of that culture was respecting the older generation so you might become an adult who was fully aware of their own inheritance.

While South Asian teenagers also acknowledged that family expectations could be restrictive, they were often acutely aware of the reasoning behind their family’s rules, and presented a complex picture of family relationships rather than a simplified narrative of intergenerational conflict. Harjinder was in her first year of secondary school when she wrote for ‘Scotland My New Country’, produced by the Glasgow branch of NAME in 1977. She felt that her family was slightly unusual: ‘My dad allows me to go to school discos and pictures alone, whereas other Asian parents probably would not let their children go out. I think this is the influence of my big brother Gurmeet, who is happily married to a Scottish girl.’ However, she recognised that the fears of other Asian families might be justified: ‘Also, because we have a restaurant, we meet a lot of Scottish people, and through this I think my dad is confident that I will not be attacked by somebody who is colour prejudiced.’⁵⁵

Colonial histories were another way that teenagers of colour connected with their parents, especially second-generation adolescents who relied on their parents’ experiences of living in colonised countries. Anwar, a second-generation teenager from Kashmir who had grown up in Bradford, remembered in the late 1970s

coming home one day after a history lesson at school and sharing the information with my father about what I’d just been taught that day and my father, sort of, corrected me, not because he was that educated in historical facts of India but – his own experiences. And I was taught in my history lesson how good the Empire was for India, and ‘we built the roads for the uncivilised people out there’ etc. When I came and shared that with my father, my father says, ‘well most of the roads were already there’, right, ‘some roads were built by the Raj, but they weren’t built for the benefit of the Indians, they were built so that they could get the stuff out of India a lot quicker and more conveniently, and as far as civilisation is concerned, we were running around in silks when this lot was still in animal skins!’⁵⁶

These kinds of narratives both strengthened intergenerational connections and challenged white colonial assumptions about the ‘backwardness’ of the countries they exploited, which were often related to ideas about the inherent childishness of the people they had colonised. Anwar’s conversation with his father emphasised that Indian people were not ‘uncivilised’, and subtly challenged the racist assumptions made by schools about the ‘immaturity’ of South Asian children.

As African-Caribbean, South Asian and African Asian activists increasingly worked together from the 1970s onwards, youth were often seen as the vanguard of radical change by both the white British media and within their own communities. Attention turned from the education system to the abuse of young black men by the police, with protests focusing on racist ‘stop and search’ laws from the late 1970s onwards, plus the targeting of youth clubs and dance halls by police raids. Waters has argued that publications like Race and Class, Race Today and Black Liberator increasingly focused on the revolutionary potential of black youth from the mid-1970s, arguing that their refusal of ‘shitwork’ was crucial for the undermining of capitalism. But, he suggests, black young people remembered a ‘weight of expectation’ that came from both the state and from within their own communities. These ideas also fed into stereotypes about teenagers as naturally rebellious and politically radical.⁵⁷

Young Asian people’s activism also became prominent from the 1970s onwards, as Anandi Ramamurthy has shown in her important history. Asian Youth Movements (AYMs) emerged across Britain, influenced by earlier activism among their parents’ generation, such as the Imperial Typewriters and Grunwick strikes. Direct action by Asian teenagers also challenged the stereotype that South Asians were meek and passive, as Ramamurthy argues. Race Today published an article called ‘Are Asian Youth Breaking the Mould?’ However, young Asian activists reframed this idea, arguing this was not about a generational rift. Mohsin Zulfiqar from Manchester said, ‘it was not a question of us breaking the mould, we had always said there have been two kinds of movements within the South Asian community in this country, one is revolutionary, one is compromising and moderate’.⁵⁸ Similarly, looking at black communities in Handsworth in the 1980s, Kieran Connell argues that divisions between older and younger generations over Rastafarianism ‘have been exaggerated’, given the older generation’s commitment to establishing Pan-Africanist organisations. Although family tensions emerged over religious commitment in Pentecostal households, ‘younger generations were able to move between the apparently contradictory worlds of church and sound system’.⁵⁹

Indeed, young people of colour argued, it might be the racist attitudes of older white adults that drove divisions within white families, rather than the activism of teenagers of colour driving divisions within their families. Fourteen-year-old African Caribbean Elaine made this argument in her ACER essay of 1984: ‘Some white youths (13–15) have become visibly different from the white society. In so doing they are taking an anti-adult and anti-racist stand against the groups like the National Front.’⁶⁰ Here, Elaine may have been referring to the activities of mixed-race groups like the National Union of School Students (NUSS) and School Kids Against the Nazis, which opposed the recruitment drive of the National Front in secondary schools. One anti-Youth National Front leaflet produced by NUSS in the late 1970s, for example, read: ‘Now these hate-peddlers are trying to bring their anti-black hysteria into our schools.’⁶¹ These generational tensions were also noted by white adolescents. Fifteen-year-old Sarah, from Middlesex, wrote in a Just Seventeen anthology in 1987 that ‘[racism] does not seem to be as severe among the youth as it does among the older generation … I notice more racist remarks being said by (especially) OAPs’.⁶² Many white adolescents were as culpable as their parents in upholding racism and white supremacy, but some believed that their different views on race contributed to a ‘generation gap’.

In her work on indigenous families and child removal in North America, Margaret D. Jacobs has argued that ‘Continuity across generations … became a form of resistance to settler colonial state policies’ so we should not ‘create binaries that connect youthful generational rebellion to radical change and intergenerational continuity to stasis’.⁶³ This reflects the intergenerational activism employed by communities of colour in late Cold War Britain, and their investment in challenging binary categories of childhood and adulthood. This is not to suggest that there was no intergenerational conflict within African-Caribbean and South Asian communities, but that it was negotiated differently than in white communities. Community activists recognised that a hostile media was keen to play into tropes of rebellious youth and rifts within families because this supported racist assumptions about the need for immigrant families to ‘adapt’ to British norms.

Conclusion

Normative ideals of both adolescence and adulthood were difficult for young people of colour to achieve in late Cold War Britain. They often rejected these dominant depictions of life stages, asserting that their families, their communities and they themselves were different. At school, African-Caribbean and South Asian adolescents were framed as childlike, but without the saving quality of malleable innocence possessed by ‘real’, white children; instead, they were seen as deviant and irredeemable. African-Caribbean and South Asian girls, in particular, struggled with expectations around marriage and motherhood. When African-Caribbean girls rejected early marriage, they travelled further from the life path that white female adolescents expected to follow. But if South Asian girls accepted arranged marriages, this was used to ‘confirm’ that they were helpless and passive, even when the girls themselves argued in their favour.

White adolescents, especially those involved in activist groups, often invested in the idea of a ‘generation gap’, which allowed them to depict adolescents and adults as having specific identities, and to argue for the virtues of the ‘idealism’ possessed by young activists in contrast to adult apathy. African-Caribbean and South Asian adolescents were much more likely to be involved in intergenerational activism and to argue for intergenerational solidarity. When conflicts emerged, they were handled differently, which changed understandings of what it meant to be a ‘teenager’ or an ‘adult’. Adult values were not necessarily seen as different from those of teenagers. Even when teenagers of colour did not share their parents’ values, understanding them was an important way of developing new visions of what it meant to be ‘mature’, especially when they knew they did not want to follow the white British path to adulthood that was both mandated, and withheld.

Notes

1. 1. The research for this chapter was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, grant number ECF-2017-369.

2. 2. Laura Tisdall, A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 74–5.

3. 3. See also Teri Chettiar, The Intimate State: How Emotional Life Became Political in Welfare-State Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

4. 4. Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 178–84.

5. 5. See Habiba Ibrahim, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2021).

6. 6. ‘Black’ was a contested term during this period, rendered both as ‘Black’ to indicate solidarity between all oppressed groups of colour and as ‘black’ to refer to those of African descent. Writers used the term in both ways. I use ‘Black’ in this chapter only when I mean ‘politically Black’ and ‘black’ only where I am referring to all people of African descent.

7. 7. Corinne T. Field, Tammy-Charelle Owens, Marcia Chatelain, Lakisha Simmons, Abosede George and Rhian Keyse, ‘The History of Black Girlhood: Recent Innovations and Future Directions’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 9, no. 3 (2016), 385–6.

8. 8. See also Tera Eva Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 2018).

9. 9. Satadru Sen, Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850–1945 (London: Anthem Press, 2005), 213.

10. 10. Radhika Natarajan, ‘The “Bogus Child” and the “Big Uncle”: The Impossible South Asian Family in Post-Imperial Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 34, no. 3 (2023), 440–66.

11. 11. Rob Waters, Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 142, 154.

12. 12. These umbrella terms cover a wide range of different racial, cultural and religious heritages. ‘African-Caribbean’ teenagers in Britain might primarily be from Jamaica, given the demographics of the ‘Windrush’ wave of immigration, but could also be from many other countries including Dominica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago; teenagers of ‘South Asian’ descent could be from India or Pakistan, or from African countries like Kenya or Uganda, and could be Sikh, Muslim or Hindu. Often, in primary sources, race is only recorded as ‘Black’, ‘West Indian’ or ‘South/Asian’, and religions, if any, are not recorded at all.

13. 13. Waters, Thinking Black, 152.

14. 14. I have identified these teenagers only by their first names when they are participants in studies or in anthologies. Last names are used when they have clearly published in their own right and through their own decisions, such as authoring articles or publishing scripts.

15. 15. Geraldine McGuigan, ‘Talking and Writing by Black Fifth Formers’, Multicultural Education, 4, no. 3 (1976), 3–4.

16. 16. Rob Waters, ‘Race, Citizenship and “Race Relations” Research in Late-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 34, no. 3 (2023), 504.

17. 17. Tisdall, Progressive Education?, 193–4.

18. 18. D.L. Edmondson, ‘Working in a Multicultural School: Some Early Impressions’, Multiracial School, 5, no. 3 (1977), 11.

19. 19. Bruce Carrington and Edward Wood, ‘Body Talk: Images of Sport in a Multiracial School’, Multiracial School, 11, no. 2 (1983), 31–2.

20. 20. Black Youth Annual Penmanship Awards: Winning Essays 1982 (London: ACER, 1982), 38.

21. 21. Black Youth Annual Penmanship Awards: Winning Essays 1981 (London: ACER, 1981), 9.

22. 22. Black Youth Annual Penmanship Awards: Winning Essays 1982, 13.

23. 23. Michael McMillan, The School Leaver (Brixton: Black Ink Collective, 1978), 11.

24. 24. McMillan, The School Leaver, 35.

25. 25. Jessica Gerrard, Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 157–8.

26. 26. Waters, Thinking Black, 166.

27. 27. Olivia Wyatt, ‘ “The Enemy in Our Midst”: Caribbean Women and the Protection of Community in Leeds in the 1970s’ in Hakim Adi ed., Many Struggles: New Histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2023), 303–304.

28. 28. Edmondson, ‘Working in a Multicultural School’, 10.

29. 29. Pratibha Parmar and Nadia Mirza, ‘Growing Angry, Growing Strong’ in Susan Hemmings ed., Girls Are Powerful: Young Women’s Writings from Spare Rib (London: Sheba Feminist Publishing, 1982), 146.

30. 30. Tahir Abbas, The Education of British South Asians: Ethnicity, Capital and Class Structure (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 30.

31. 31. Sally Tomlinson, Race and Education: Policy and Politics in Britain (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), 35.

32. 32. Amrit Wilson, Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (London: Virago Press, 1978), 59, 63–5.

33. 33. Laura Tisdall, ‘ “What A Difference It Was to Be a Woman and Not a Teenager”: Adolescent Girls’ Conceptions of Adulthood in 1960s and 1970s Britain’, Gender and History, 34, no. 2 (2022), 495–513.

34. 34. Evelyn G. Christie, ‘Lissen Sisters’, Ahfiwe: Journal of the Ahfiwe School and Abeng, Issue 1 (1974), 8–9, BCA, WONG/2/1-2.

35. 35. Mary Fuller, ‘Black Girls in a London Comprehensive School’ in Rosemary Deem ed., Schooling for Women’s Work (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 52–65.

36. 36. Tisdall, ‘ What a Difference It Was to Be a Woman’.

37. 37. Kathryn Riley, ‘Black Girls Speak for Themselves’, Multiracial Education, 10, no. 3 (1982), 5–6.

38. 38. Paul McGilchrist ed., Black Voices: An Anthology of ACER’s Black Young Writers Competition (London: ACER, 1987), 226.

39. 39. Christine Griffin, Typical Girls? Young Women from School to the Job Market (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 54.

40. 40. Sue Sharpe, Just Like a Girl: How Girls Learn to Be Women – From the Seventies to the Nineties, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1994), 103.

41. 41. Amajit Kaur, ‘An Indian Girl Growing Up in England’, Multiracial School, 2, no. 2 (1973), 1–4.

42. 42. Wilson, Finding a Voice, 101.

43. 43. Angela McRobbie, ‘Jackie Magazine: Romantic Individualism and the Teenage Girl’ (1977) in Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 67–117.

44. 44. Parmar and Mirza, ‘Growing Angry, Growing Strong’, 149.

45. 45. Parmar and Mirza, ‘Growing Angry, Growing Strong’, 142.

46. 46. Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, ‘Resistances and Responses: The Experiences of Black Girls in Britain’ in Angela McRobbie and Trisha McCabe eds., Feminism for Girls: An Adventure Story (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 134.

47. 47. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Little, Brown, 2006).

48. 48. Selina Todd and Hilary Young, “ ‘Baby-Boomers’ to “Beanstalkers”: Making the Modern Teenager in Post-War Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 9, no. 3 (2012), 451–67; Gillian A.M. Mitchell, ‘Reassessing the “Generation Gap”: Bill Haley’s 1957 Tour of Britain, Inter-Generational Relations and Attitudes to Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Late 1950s’, Twentieth Century British History, 24, no. 4 (2013), 573–605.

49. 49. Laura Tisdall, ‘ “We Have Come to Be Destroyed”: The “Extraordinary” Child in Science Fiction Cinema in Early Cold War Britain’, History of the Human Sciences, 34, no. 5 (2021), 8–31.

50. 50. LSE Archives, YCND, ‘Tomorrow’s Conscience Today’, CND/1993 7/1, YCND Publications 1984–9.

51. 51. Black Youth Annual Penmanship Awards: Winning Essays 1983 (London: ACER, 1984), 2.

52. 52. McGilchrist ed., Black Voices, 224.

53. 53. Black Youth Annual Penmanship Awards: Winning Essays 1983, 1.

54. 54. Step Forward Youth, dir. Menelik Shabazz (1977), https://the-lcva.co.uk/videos/594bb2a60609e223a0d38a6b, accessed 17 August 2023.

55. 55. George Padmore Institute (GPI), AME/5/3/3/1-2, ‘Scotland My New Country’, 6.

56. 56. Quoted in Anandi Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 19.

57. 57. Waters, Thinking Black, 182–206.

58. 58. Ramamurthy, Black Star, 28.

59. 59. Kieran Connell, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2019), 117, 143.

60. 60. McGilchrist ed., Black Voices, 267.

61. 61. Martin Hoyles ed., Changing Childhood (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-Operative, 1979), 251, 254.

62. 62. Leonore Goodings ed., Bitter-Sweet Dreams: Girls’ and Young Women’s Own Stories (London: Virago, 1987), 194.

63. 63. Abosede George, Clive Glaser, Margaret D. Jacobs, Chitra Joshi, Emily Marker, Alexandra Walsham, Wang Zheng and Bernd Weisbrod, ‘AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations’, American Historical Review, 123, no. 5 (2018), 1528.

References