“Free at Last?” by Clifford Hill, Wilberforce Publications, paperback, available from Christian bookshops and Issachar Ministries, tel 01767 641006
Review by Wanda Norris
A SUPERB READ. Clifford Hill manages to seamlessly fuse personal experience with well researched secondary material to give the reader an informed and objective analysis of the impact of the slave trade on the lives of young West Indians today.
He shows us how the slave trade’s mentality has left a legacy of prejudice and institutional racism that has become ingrained in society almost without question. In showing us the parallel exploitation of the working class ‘white slaves’ during the Industrial Revolution and subsequent ‘them and us’ attitudes of the continuing class system is Britain, he offers a thought-provoking explanation of the
Tottenham Riots.
The author sees signs of hope for the future in the important role that the black-majority churches, West Indian and African-led, are already playing in inner-city areas. He pleads for greater recognition of their significance and outlines a policy that could lead to the transformation of inner-city communities.
This is a book that should be high on the reading list of any social historian, sociologist or indeed anyone who wants to improve the social conditions for our inner city youth. It covers all the A level sociology themes of family breakdown, secularisation, relative deprivation, strain theory, ethnicity, hegemony and structuralism but in a way that no text book could, bringing theory to life and
encouraging all who read it to change their mind set and aim for a better future.
_
Secondary school teacher Wanda Norris has taught humanities, including A level Sociology, for 30 years