Why Are Black Brits So Immature?

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]You know you can make jerk barbecue sauce by mixing jerks like jerk seasoning and barbecue sauce together, right?

[00:00:08]Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Hello everybody. Welcome back to Black British Radicals. Today we are going to be speaking about well I'm going to be breaking down one of my essays which is Black Britain never ever ever ever wants to grow up. I think that's the right amount of evers. I don't know. When I was writing it I just kept writing.

[00:00:27]Today's uh video is basically going to be about black British culture, how black British culture is synonymous with youth culture and what that means for us as individuals who are trying to build a culture and a life here, especially one that, you know, spans past our own lifetimes. And instead of just talking at you today, I'm actually going to start off with an exercise. I want you to do something for me. I want you to close your eyes. I know. I want you to picture a black British elder, not a Caribbean one.

[00:00:57]not an African one. Somebody who is a black British elder. Someone whose authority comes specifically from a life that has been built here in Britain.

[00:01:10]Someone whose wisdom is shaped by this country, this soil, and this particular experience of being black in Britain.

[00:01:19]Somebody who embodies something generationally.

[00:01:22]You can take your time with the image if you want to. And it's okay if you find difficulty in it. The point of this conversation is the fact that it's difficult to think of.

[00:01:33]I want you to remember even if you can't think of that thing. If you are a black British person, that is going to be you one day. Do you understand? Don't feel like many people get it when I say that.

[00:01:44]If what came to your mind when you was doing this exercise was a Caribbean auntie or an African elder, then I completely get it. These are archetypes that are very real. They are very powerful and they are deeply felt. We see them all around us all the time. But they are also on some level respectfully imports.

[00:02:06]They were formed someone else by a different set of conditions. And what I'm asking about is something that is distinct. A black British elder.

[00:02:15]Someone who embodies not just blackness but the specific hard one knowledge of what it means to age here in this country on this godforsaken island.

[00:02:27]Most of us struggle to picture it clearly and I think that struggle is worth sitting with because it is not an accident. It is part of the condition.

[00:02:37]So black Britain is a culture with a celebrated birth a long adolescence and no visible old age. We know the birth by heart. We know the scratch of the sound system. We know the coded language of street style. We know the explosive creativity of a diaspora making a council flat feel like it's the center of the world. That youth is our most exportable product. Our global signature if you will. When the rest of the world thinks of Black Britain, they think of a very particular energy that's cool, that's edgy, you know, topboyesque, but it is youth culture. But if we look beyond the glow of that perpetual coming of age party, there's a question that emerges and it definitely haunts us.

[00:03:19]What happens when the sound system stops? What does black British adulthood actually look like? What does black British old age look like? What I don't want people to do is say, "Well, I've got an aunt who's black British and she's in her 60s and she's a Black British elder." Because that's not actually what I'm talking about. I'm not speaking about somebody who is simply older and here and black British, but the concept of elderhood in general. The honest answer is that we don't know. And the more that I've sat with this feeling, with this idea, I think it's one of the most important things um within the black British cultural development that very few people are actually talking about. And I don't say that lightly because, you know, whenever I'm scrolling online, people are like, "Why is nobody ever talking about this?"

[00:04:03]And it's something that everybody's [ __ ] talking about as long as you just search a couple keywords.

[00:04:08]The clearest evidence of what I'm saying starts with what I would like to call the auntie deficit. Although I don't know why I've kind of honed in on aunties there in the essay cuz it does extend out to like uncles too. But to me like aunties have played such a massive role in my development. So the idea that there's not enough aunties is a concern in the Caribbean African context. the auntie and also the uncle and the elder more broadly is not just a term of affection. It actually has a social and cultural and political function. It's recognized social authority. The auntie the auntie is a living archive. She holds all of our personal histories in her hands in her gaze in the way she moves. She knows who you are before your latest performance of yourself. And that's why when we bump into aunties or when we, you know, meet aunties as adults, they're like, "Oh my gosh, you got so big." And it's like, "Who is this woman? I actually don't know who she is." But she's holding part of your personal history because she remembers you before you even knew.

[00:05:07]She embodies a known cultural script.

[00:05:10]She embodies a set of codes and continuities that exist entirely outside of the logics of the state or how the state is governed, like capitalism, therefore the market.

[00:05:20]This is something that's actually quite profound in how we form cultural and communal sovereignty, especially such a small community and as a community that is only just coming together and combining. We're only finding ourselves now and collectivizing. We need a sense of sovereignty. And I've spoken in my other videos about Black Britain's yearning for seeing um themselves represented on a global stage and being recognized, having their story, their struggle recognized by others.

[00:05:48]So, one of the things that I think that we're lacking in that is a sense of communal sovereignty. It's almost like we're not real or we're not really a community unless enough people or the right people acknowledge that we are and that we do have this collective identity and this collective history.

[00:06:04]The community's ability to define its own values is part of this um this communal or collective sovereignty that I'm talking about. The community's ability to hold its own members accountable to something greater than individual ambition or viral fame is also extremely important. The reason why we end up with so many people feeling depressed and lost and untethered is because they don't have that sense of a greater purpose. They don't know exactly where they're heading. And the thing is some of these things are built in for us, right? I'm a woman and I'm gonna age, which means at some point I'm gonna be an auntie. I'm gonna be an elder. And if at the very least I have that, then in the moments when I'm really struggling, I can hold on to that. And I actually do. There's times when I don't know what I'm what I'm going to do next or when I'm trying to make plans for myself in the future. But what I do know is that I need to be wise by the future because I'm going to be an elder. And there's going to be young people who are asking me for advice and for help.

[00:06:58]There's going to be there should be institutions on the other end of my entire lifespan that I've contributed to that I should be able to see myself in, but also be able to pass down all the things that I've learned growing up in Britain and also being raised by two black British individuals cuz both my parents are black British. But what I know is even though we have this concept of the Caribbean auntie and the African auntie, a distinct black British version of that has not yet materialized. Um, we feel the concept. There are some people who we might look around and be like, I think that's what it's going to be like.

[00:07:28]I think that's what it looks like. But we only understand this quite abstractly, but something specific to this experience rooted in this soil hasn't fully taken root yet. It hasn't fully formed. And when I ask why, we start to pull back on this thread that goes much deeper than simply community dynamics.

[00:07:49]We're looking at design. Now, what I think we have to be honest about in this entire thing is that this is not an oversight. You know, it's not a failure of individual communities to pass things down. We are actually very good as black people and especially as like black women of holding um identity, culture, and passing it down. It's in fact, we're carrying this this intergenerational stuff on our backs as women. So, it's definitely not an oversight. It's not a failure of individual communities to pass things down. It is a predictable outcome of a system that was specifically designed to prevent us from seeing ourselves as people who age in this place. And and for us to develop the maturity to be what I consider to be good elders, people who actually have something worth passing down. You know, there's sort of an idea that floats around the internet that some of these elders are just elders in age. They literally have no [ __ ] wisdom to pass down to us. And when I look at Black Britain, I look around us sometimes, I really wonder if we are going to struggle with that in the long term. I think if we start to look at the story in general, like a lot of the black British story, like the collectivized black British story, the postmodern black British story starts with the Windrush generation, which a lot of people know. And what's important to note about the Windrush generation is that many of those people arrived, but they did not intend to build permanent lives here. I was actually quite shocked to discover recently that my great-grandmother said the same thing for her. Cuz I always thought that she had actually come to stay, but she's like, "No, we were only supposed to be here for 5 years and to work and then to go home." But she said life caught up on them. They had children. Um they saw as well that the ways that children who were sent back to the Caribbean um when they were quite young struggled to adapt and because of that they were worried about their children struggling to adapt. So that would be my grandparents' generation, them struggling to adapt.

[00:09:39]Um, so something to keep in mind. But with the Windross generation arriving, many of them did not intend to build permanent lives here. And many of them carried this myth that a genuine plan encouraged by the state of coming, working, saving, sending money home, and eventually returning that this was some plan that would be honored. But that plan was not just a personal aspiration.

[00:09:59]It was also a political pressure valve.

[00:10:02]It relieved the British state of any responsibility to house, to integrate or care for a population it never intended to honestly um host and host permanently.

[00:10:14]So consider that the beginning part of the black British story as we know it comes with this inbuilt lack of long-term planning. And because that was something that was internalized by a lot of our elders, it relieved the state of its responsibility to ever think about what long-term black Britishness would look like and what responsibility the state had to protect this idea as black British people would inevitably be the British state's responsibility just like everybody else. So then on top of that we get the policies of the hostile environment. So this is a web of im immigration controls, surveillance, bureaucratic obstacles and data sharing practices designed to make life materially unlivable for those that the state deemed undesirable. This was not innovative. It is the modern iteration of a centuries old logic. And I think sometimes we have the tendency to speak about these things as if they were innovative or the British state had designed new ways to exclude us and to neglect us and to humiliate us. But it's not that at all. Instead, it's something that they've always deployed. Its lineage runs directly back to the transatlantic slave trade where the primary violence was not just the labor extraction but the deliberate severing of kinship ties, families separated, genealogies completely broken down, identity fractured to prevent the consolidation of collective um power. I think that we have a tendency as especially as like black people from the Americas to see our story as very separate and exceptional from what the African story is. But one of the things that I would encourage you to remember is that these black people were not taken from nowhere. They were taken from not just places but also from people.

[00:12:01]You know, every person who was put on a slave ship was somebody's daughter, somebody's brother or sister, um somebody's son, somebody's mother or father. And they were also important to their communities in other ways. So this was somebody's, you know, local farmer or their doctor or midwife. This is the person who helped with machinery and mechanisms um or tool making and therefore there was something lost with every single person that was taken and brought to the Americas for the purposes of enslavement and that's had a profound effect on the genealogies and familial relationships in Africa in West Africa in particular too. So we have this plantation practice of separating kin and it finds itself bureaucratically echoed in a modernday home office that separates citizens from their rights and from each other. And with the results being the same, you know, having a black community in Britain that remains a precarious entity, it means that we can be housed but without security. We can age but not with dignity. We can be generational, but we're never really built into being elders. One of the things that really drove this idea home for me was actually the death of Sheila Celawain. I think that's how her name's pronounced. I don't think it is actually. I've definitely butchered that, but it was an important story. Um, I'll put her name up on the screen. She was 58 years old and she was found alone in a peek flat. And yeah, this really crystallized this moment for me because she had been alone in that house for over a year um apparently and had nobody nobody noticed that she was gone. Nobody knows that she was dead. And people in her building repeatedly reported to the council that there was a strange smell coming from her flat, but nobody checked on her until it was long past too late.

[00:13:54]And it was just a really honestly something that really moved me because the amount of isolation that you have to be in in order to die in this way is very very devastating actually. I think the important thing to remember though is that her death was not an anomaly and it is also a logical conclusion to a logical end point to this system that we're currently living in which is one of isolation. Isolation is one of white supremacy's best tools to make us feel completely disconnected from our fellow man so that we will be we will invest in individual personal selfish pursuits wholly so Sheila dying in this flat without support of a community yeah it it's the logical conclusion but it's also something that should make us feel alarmed because generally speaking our cultures are not once of individuality or isolation in this way, not definitely not in this way. So the idea that there was nobody around or nobody noticed to, you know, check on her um is devastating. But what I want you to understand is that it's not just something that happened. It wasn't just an occurrence. It is state craft. The state's investment in keeping us young is not only about borders and benefits.

[00:15:08]There is a subtler mechanism that's at work and it operates largely through culture. So, I want you to think about the '9s, the cool Britannia era, the moment when urban youth culture, think garage, think grime, the aesthetics of ends, like think how many people were doing photo shoots with estates in the background, even though they're not from the state.

[00:15:32]These things, they started to be celebrated. They were mainstreamed and then eventually, you know, co-opted by national projects of rebranding. That embrace felt at the time like it was recognition, like there was a sense of arrival. Black Britain had arrived.

[00:15:52]It hadn't.

[00:15:55]The establishment's co-option of youth culture has never been an act of liberation. It's actually an act of containment. And it's something that states and establishments do all the time. I'm talking about co-opsy and youth culture or sometimes just other subcultures. You see, the British state needs a group of people who can rap about race and about class. A group of people who can create language and fashion and art that can be lent to the national story. You know, it's vibrant.

[00:16:25]It's rebellious. It's young people. But what you're not permitted to do is to mature into a sustained, organized, revolutionary political force that could actually threaten the foundations of the British state. The proof of this is in what the state considers to be evidence of, you know, progress. In the 2021 civil report, a government commission document on race and ethnic disparities, this report actually pointed to Dizzy Rascal performing at the 2012 Olympics as evidence that the UK is not institutionally racist. Dizzy Rascal guys at the Olympics. That was that was part of the evidence that Britain the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not institutionally racist. In fact, the report actually concluded that Britain therefore is not institutionally racist based on the things it said. And the thing is this report was actually brought into a lot of dis disrepute. Is that the word? I don't know. It was it was criticized. It was challenged a lot because people, especially people who were quoted or organizations and bodies that were quoted in it, they said they completely misqued us or miscontextualized whatever our findings were to put towards their findings. And listen, Tony Su, Tony Su is a word that I don't want to call him on the internet because he I don't know, something about him feels latigious.

[00:17:49]But when you do have this vibrant and rebellious youth culture that we've created, that we've contributed to, that we've put up, you know, given to the culture and establishment gods to judge us and deem us worthy of being cultural icons in the UK. What does that leave black British people with, especially black British youth? Because visibility without power, I don't know how valuable that is. It means that we get a place in the national story as the cool young ones so long as that presence remains stylistic, non-threatening, and more importantly commercially extractable.

[00:18:28]This is how a culture gets kept in its adolescence. It's not just by neglect, but actually by celebration. What I know is if a lot of these movements were actually threatening to the British establishment and how Black Britain is regarded and the dignity and respect that we've been robbed of um prior to arrival in the Imperial Corps up until our arrival up until now I guess if that was if it really meant anything they'd be scared of us. I'm not telling you to go out there and antagonize the British state. I don't want anybody to call my name when you are on the when when they're charging you with whatever.

[00:19:05]>> For what reason?

[00:19:06]>> What is the charge? Eating a meal. A succulent Chinese meal.

[00:19:11]>> Well, what it means is that we have this void, right? So, we've ended up with this void. The auntie's missing. The intergenerational transmission of authority, of accountability, of cultural scripts that exist outside of the market. It's all been systemically disrupted and something has moved into that space. I spoke about it in my first two videos. That is the algorithm. In the absence of elders, we've been given influences. And I want to be precise about what that substitution actually means because sometimes I really think that we underestimate what kind of ecosystem it is that we're operating in.

[00:19:43]Okay. An auntie's authority comes from time and it comes from proximity. It's earned um she earns the trust of people that she's held that she's held accountable and being held accountable by across many years. And those people are people that you know. She could tell you who you were before you before you did anything. And that's what I'm saying that like when they approach you, they're like, "Oh, I remember you from this time." You're like, "I don't know you, lady." She remembers. She holds memory. And that's really important for culture and for intergenerational transmission. She is allowed to enforce norms that exist entirely outside of the logic of clicks. And the logic of clicks is, you know, conflict and um outrage in order for us to engage so that somebody gets paid. But she enforces norms that existed long before then. She is the embodiment of intergenerational wisdom and transmission. I wouldn't know how to be a Caribbean woman if it wasn't for Caribbean aunties. That's the point I'm trying to make there. That's that's what this boils down to. The influencers authority comes from the algorithm.

[00:20:43]Their guidance is not wisdom. So, instead of these aunties, what we're left with is these influencers or people on the internet, CC Bouncer or whoever the [ __ ] The influencers authority though doesn't come from wisdom, okay?

[00:20:59]Cuz what they're making is content. So, it comes from the algorithm and the platform they operate on is not neutral infrastructure. I've already spoken to you guys about these technocrats and the um investment that they have in disrupting the intimacy that we might try to build with each other in order for us to sustain a community. No, instead these influencers, they get their um authority from a place that's engineered financially to re it rewards conflict. It rewards spectacle and it rewards the performance of dysfunction.

[00:21:29]Every trans transgression becomes a Twitter thread. Every community conflict becomes a political brand deal. Every value becomes negotiable in the marketplace of attention because this is an attention economy. We are being taught how to be adult by a machine that profits from our eternal childhood.

[00:21:45]There is a visible symptom of all this that I want to name because I think it often gets dismissed as vanity when it's actually diagnostic. We do not have a black British elder aesthetic. Our visual imagination of what it looks like to mature as a black British person is either borrowed, you know, the Caribbean church hats cuz our church aunties love them big hats. My nanny has sunny hats.

[00:22:06]Or the West African traditional attires.

[00:22:08]um the proverbs from elsewhere.

[00:22:11]>> Nobody can across it. It's only who understand it like a fisher man and a fisher human who can swim >> or it simply just doesn't exist. I do think there are some people who could potentially fall into what the aesthetic of a black British auntie or elder could look like somebody like Sandra from Gogglebox. But I'm also acutely aware that we know Sandra from Google through television, through one of these entertainment mediums, which is the point that I'm making. And even one of the things that is most beloved about her is not something that I I'm going to criticize her for cuz I don't think it's, you know, I need to. But it is that she represents this very jolly individual, which I know is very non-threatening to British people. So, it makes sense that they would love her and we would inevitably love her cuz she's [ __ ] amazing. She's hilarious.

[00:22:58]But if we do associate aging with the Caribbean aunties in the church with the big hats or with traditional um African attire, then to the average black British person, it's almost like aging feels like disappearing. The only people who are really given any airtime in our in and when I say in our country, in our culture, I'm speaking about British culture, in the British country, in the country of Britain that none of that felt right. is a cool and edgy version of us, the energetic version of us, the Stormy. Um, you know, standing on the stage in Glastonbury in the stab vest that was made by Banksy with pyro, is it called pyrochnics? Pyrochnics going off in the background and stuff like that.

[00:23:45]This this very spirited youth. So, I believe that we cling to it, not because we're shallow, but because there is nothing else in the frame. And in having nothing else in the frame, it means that we inevitably experience stagnation. You know, this aesthetic stagnation is both a symptom and a cause of a deeper political immaturity. A culture without elders thinks in news cycles, not in generations. Its political responses are reactive and trend-based, which is the domain of youth rather than the strategic and long-term, which is the domain of elders who are stewarding a future they may not live to see. In fact, they probably won't have disease.

[00:24:22]I mean, when I say this, I'm just really questioning whether or not black British people are capable of thinking in generations or if we only think for the time when we're likely to be here. Do I only move through Britain and think about what's happening in Britain for the next 50 years? Because I mean, I'm going to be 30 this year. So, it doesn't matter what happens then. How many black British people think beyond their own lifespan and think about what they're contributing to the culture and the idea of the culture long after they exist?

[00:24:50]And I don't mean in a doineering way like I'm going to own this thing like I'm going to own this company that everybody's going to buy from or I want to be an integral part of like controlling how um parts of the culture move. So you know embedding yourself in the rave space in a certain way so that no one can have a rave in this one area without having to consult you. That's about domination, about control, about ownership. I'm really speaking about full-blown like cultural contribution and culture building. How much are we invested in that beyond what is likely to be our own life lifespans? I think that black British people are really good at calling out. You know, we've neglected the harder work of building out and I'm speaking about building enduring institutions. We know how to say this thing is wrong and this this thing is very [ __ ] up. But we don't know how to move to prevent I don't know the disappearance or the ability for I had to think about this. We know how to say this thing is wrong. It's bothering us. It's racist. It's immoral.

[00:25:56]But I don't know how good we are at building out institutions that protect us from future harms when those things happen again. We feel very open, very susceptible to constant attacks, constant disruption. And I think that we need better systems, frameworks, and institutions in place so that honestly we can't be [ __ ] with like that. But I believe that this system was designed to produce exactly this result. So you might ask me Tiana, what's the alternative? Because the people cannot survive on diagnostics alone, can they?

[00:26:28]And it's interesting because I think that the choice comes down to two models and I want to name them specifically and clearly because I think we're at a crossroads with what kinds of choices we make about what we want Black Britain to be. So on the one side we have this concept of a cultural entrepreneur.

[00:26:43]You'll hear me criticize these people all the time. This is the figure the neoliberal era has perfected. So their logic is one of liquidation. You know, culture is a product to be packaged, be branded and sold for cloud, for capital, for mainstream acceptance, wherever it is. They believe that you should package it up like Lord Sugar, and you should sell it to whoever the [ __ ] is buying.

[00:27:03]They don't care that it's culture. They don't care that it's taken sometimes millennia to cultivate. They don't care that it's the only thing that you might inherit because most black British people are broke. Um, so the only thing that we are inheriting is culture.

[00:27:15]They're willing to sell that [ __ ] off because they need to get ahead. This is when your own heritage becomes an exit strategy. And I want you to think about reggae reggae sauce. And I say this with full affection for jerk barbecue sauce because it's elite.

[00:27:30]But it is the exact model that I'm I mean. You know, somebody puts jerk barbecue sauce in a bottle and calls it reggae reggae sauce.

[00:27:41]I can't do this.

[00:27:44]>> Two hours later.

[00:27:46]father.

[00:27:48]>> Three hours later >> and calls it reggae reggae sauce and sells it to the masses. And I want to know how many white British people have that [ __ ] in their cupboards. I want TO KNOW HOW MANY black British people have that [ __ ] in their cupboards. You know, you can make jerk barbecue sauce by mixing jerk like jerk seasoning and barbecue sauce together, RIGHT?

[00:28:14]BUT IF Levi roots likes it, I love it.

[00:28:18]Don't know what to say. But reggae reggae sauce is a good example for the thing that I'm talking about. Right? So you take something that's living, something that's rooted in a really specific cultural practice and turning it into something that's a consumable product for the mainstream market that requires its dilution. And I'm not saying dilution in the sense like it's not as spicy or whatever. But I think even naming it rea is part of the cultural flattening that I experienced as a British Caribbean person and I'm sure many Caribbean people in this country also experience. The cultural entrepreneurs success is measured by external validation. And that validation in this country almost always demands that the culture is made more palatable, less specific and less threatening. And then on the other side, what we end up with in in comparison to the cultural entrepreneur is the cultural guardian.

[00:29:07]The guardian's logic is not extraction.

[00:29:09]It's to protect. Their authority does not come from monthly impressions or follow accounts. It doesn't come from investment from the dragons on dragon's den. It comes from the deep earned trust of the people they have served consistently over time.

[00:29:26]They understand culture not as a product but as a sovereign resource, a living inheritance held in trust for the people who were not yet born. Where the entrepreneur asks what can they get from the culture, the guardian asks what they must preserve for it. Do you understand?

[00:29:42]I need you guys to lock the [ __ ] in. I'm not even joking. So, here's the part that I think is the most counterintuitive and possibly the most important. Building an elder class requires us to relearn how to be good followers. I know that's not what anybody wants to hear. We live in a culture amplified enormously by social media that prizes the individual, the founder, the creator, the one at the front. Believe me, I've fallen into this trap before. I promise you guys, it's almost [ __ ] up my life. I understand why people have this urge, especially black people who have historically been denied credit, denied leadership, and denied visibility. And especially when you add in this colonial aspect of things. Um, often when we did experience power under the colonial rule of Britain, it was in service to Britain.

[00:30:27]But the culture of individuality is also, and you know, this is kind of the uncomfortable part of the conversation.

[00:30:33]It's a technique. It's one of the tools that white supremacy has historically deployed to black communities to keep us as fractured as possible. And that's why I mention the colonial era. What this has done is it's made collective leadership feel threatening rather than necessary. It's made us in particular distrustful of seeding authority to anyone even each other a functional community you know a real village it requires not just leaders but followers supporters nurturers the people who prepare the food who manage the logistics who hold the space who show up consistently even when they're not seen sometimes not acknowledged I wish it wasn't that way but that's that's sometimes what the work looks like you know and some might call this shadow work it's the unglamorous, unseen labor of sustaining something over time. And it's in that work, not in the spotlight, but in the shadows that wisdom is cultivated and that wisdom can be passed down. That respect is actually earned.

[00:31:36]That's when elders emerge and that's what we need. Okay, this is the shift from a culture of spotlight seeking to a culture of shadow work and it is the first revolutionary step toward taking towards creating the conditions in which real elders can organically form. The stakes that I'm talking about here, they're not just cultural, they are political and they are larger than Britain. A people who are stuck in adolescence can't lead. They can protest but they cannot propose. They can critique but they cannot build alternative worlds. And black British people are whether we whether we act like it or not, the most politically posit the most politically positioned black community in Europe. Whether you guys know this or not or even care about this, we are the most politically visible. God, there was just a moment there where my brain just we are the most visible black people in Europe and therefore we should be the most, you know, useful to the political reality of black people across the continent. Of course, we have other barriers like language barrier, but even in them, you know, we are experiencing things very differently from our peers, from our brethren, and we are the most politically powerful of our brothers and sisters across the the European continent. And I'd like to see a world in the future where we can use that political power, that visibility to help them because, bro, you go to certain countries in Europe and the way black people are treated in Italy actually churns my [ __ ] stomach. We should be able to help them, to advocate for them, to funnel resources, but the fact is we can't even help ourselves. And it's because we're perpetually stuck in this adolescence. We think we're kids when we're not. You know, I saw a Tik Tok not that long ago where someone was saying that like I have to actually remind myself I'm not a kid. I'm an adult. I've got to deal with this like an adult. And yeah, it's it's true. It's true. That's what we are. We're grown. The history that we have in this country, the diaspora networks that we sit at the center of and the institutional access that some of us have, these are not small things. They're actually things that create a lot of political power. If only we could see them. You know, we have connections to the Caribbean, to everywhere in Africa as far as I'm concerned, as well as being people quite literally physically positioned in Europe. We should be some of the most useful black individuals in the world.

[00:34:02]And also, we have the privilege of speaking the English language. I don't know if you guys will consider it a privilege, but it is, you know, a global lingua franker. And that means that advocacy is not a barrier that we have for ourselves. We open our mouths. We speak the English language. And there are plenty of people across the world who do understand and we have this ability. I just don't want to see us squander this opportunity. So like I'm saying the history of this country, the history of our stories in this country, our diaspora networks that we sit at the center of the institutional access that we that some of us have. These are not small things. They are a foundation as long as we choose to build on them and we consciously and ethically choose to build on them. But you can't build a generational political vision from a culture that thinks only in news cycles or that can only think in the cycle of a single generation. You cannot forge continental leadership from a community that has outsourced leadership and outsourced its values to algorithms that are run by technocrats. The maturation of is that how you pronounce it? Is it matur maturation or maturation? I don't know. The m maturation of black British culture is not a soft cultural project.

[00:35:11]It is the prerequisite for anything larger. And that anything larger is anything you guys want it to be. You actually do have those kinds of resources that you just simply embody.

[00:35:21]The institutions that point toward this future already exist. The supper clubs that function as modernday hearths. The community land trust securing a physical foothold. I know of a project in the Midlands where there is a community land trust, you know, an attempt to get a community land trust for black British individuals. It's all the archiving projects that are building the soil of intergenerational memory, making sure that we remember who we are. This is not glamorous work. This is a lot of this is like paperwork and [ __ ] like that. But they're not trends and that's why they're not attractive to a lot of black British people. And I feel like that's where we're failing. But they are living laboratories where a new black British elderhood is being forged. And this is not being forged by proclamation, but through the daily practice of reciprocity and care. So considering that those projects do exist and there are small groups of people who are working on them, I suppose the question you have to ask yourselves as black British individuals is how close are you to any of these projects and therefore are you developing as a black British elder? Are you developing to be part of the black British elderass that we so desperately need? The task of thinking about this is not to mourn what was taken from us, what we've lost through our migration stories, though this loss is very real and I will acknowledge that. And I I mean I can't not acknowledge it. I feel the loss even though my grandparents and great great grandparents and great great grandfather was here. Um and even I still feel that absence. That theft has been extremely deliberate. It's to rob us of something as black people. The task though, the task ahead though is to parent ourselves into the adulthood that this country never intended for us to achieve, for us to never even have the opportunity to see. It's for us to build our own tables, our own cultural scripts, our own institutions. And this is not because we were denied a seat at theirs, but because we should by now understand clearly that we will never be granted a legitimate one, not without forging it ourselves. This is the shift from a politic of grievance to the politics of generations. I think a lot of this begins off camera. ironic that I'm recording this and saying this, but I mean that when we're having discussions about who we are, and I mean discussions, so like think back chat.

[00:37:37]You you guys know I [ __ ] hate that [ __ ] Turn the cameras off during our conflict in spaces that are built for us to have intimate conversation. You need to understand that cameras can often function as a predatory gaze. It's all of this stuff can be achieved in the shadow work as long as you guys are actually willing to do it. We have always known how to be young in this country. Black British youth is spirited. It's beautiful. It's joyous.

[00:38:04]It's creative. It's innovative. It's mechanical. It's logical. It's it's everything. If you can't tell, that's that's definitely how I feel about it.

[00:38:14]We've done so many different things and we've done them brilliantly. We've done them loudly. We've done them with pride.

[00:38:18]And now we need to learn how to age with those things. It's really important that black British people are capable of developing some sense of collective maturity. You know, without that, we will continue to rely on things like secondary school power dynamics, um, always hoping to dominate others and our peers, being wholly attached to our neighborhoods as expressions of our character rather than our character itself. And I have so many hopes for the health of black British culture, but I know that's only possible if we are capable of thinking in generations. And Black Britain hopefully with enough support and encouragement, we will also we will be an enduring generational institution.

[00:39:10]Okay. Love you guys.