Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

As Carrington points out, unlike Linford’s Lunchbox, Bruno’s ‘Uncle Tom’ breakdown went largely uncommented on by the mainstream media, perhaps because the British press at the time would not have had the political vocabulary and knowledge of history to even deal with the significance of the event. To deal with it would have meant many white journalists asking why their favourite son, a black heavyweight champion and presumably a multi-millionaire, still felt somewhat like a failure because he did not have the love of his own people. Frank was admitting with this breakdown that the money and the admiration of white Britain was not enough; that he knew in fact that it was not genuine and that he craved to be loved by black people in the way that other athletes and public figures had been. Tone deaf British journalists who have kept themselves functionally ignorant of Britain’s racial history simply could not grapple with all of this.