Few people watch sport for its politics. Yet what happens on the field of play often reflects the problems in our society. Such was the case in the eighties, when black footballers emerged from the dressing room to find bananas being hurled from the stands, and racially motivated attacks and police harassment were the norm. Today, things have improved. Crowds are less hostile and stars like Anthony Joshua and Sir Mohamed Farah are among our most revered sporting heroes. But for athletes of colour, success on the field seldom converts to power away from it. Prejudice and abuse may be less overt, but they remain – often in front of our eyes. The same can be said of British society: things are better, yet we continue to be in denial of racism. This book is a personal exploration of the complexities and biases implicit in being black in Britain, told through the prism of sport.

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Sabrina Pace-Humphreys is a 44-year-old mother of four and grandmother of two, an award-winning businesswoman, an ultrarunner, a social justice activist and a recovering alcoholic. She is a mixed-raced woman, the daughter of a white Scottish Roman Catholic woman and a Black Church of England man. When she was two, her parents separated and Sabrina, her mother and her white-presenting younger sister moved to a small market town where no-one looked like her. From as young as she can remember, she was the subject of verbal and physical racist abuse. In ‘Black Sheep’, Sabrina reveals how she got from there to here: about growing up in a home, a school and a town where no-one looked like her and her subsequent struggle to understand and find her identity.

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When Patience Ibrahim’s husband died, she feared that her life was over. She had prayed every night for a baby to complete her family, and suddenly she found herself a 19-year-old widow, alone in the world. But when she fell in love again, a happy future seemed possible. Patience married once more, and was overjoyed to discover that she was pregnant.

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A reckoning with the way we choose to see and define ourselves, ‘Self-Portrait in Black and White’ is the searching story of one American family’s multi-generational transformation from what is called black to what is assumed to be white. Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a ‘black’ father from the segregated South and a ‘white’ mother from the West, spent his whole life believing the dictum that a single drop of ‘black blood’ makes a person black. This was so fundamental to his self-conception that he’d never rigorously reflected on its foundations – but the shock of his experience as the black father of two extremely white-looking children led him to question these long-held convictions. It is not that he has come to believe that he is no longer black or that his daughter is white, Williams notes. It is that these categories cannot adequately capture either of them – or anyone else

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The children of the four Collins sisters – Cassandra, Lela, Suzette and Felice – have a complicated inheritance. It includes unbreakable rules for navigating society, contested stories about their grandparents’ early lives, capacious musical talents, and an opal necklace of uncertain origin. In this sparkling debut, Shannon Sanders brings us into the company of this majestically complicated multigenerational family as they meet, bicker, celebrate, worry, keep and reveal secrets, build lives and careers, and endure. With deceptive ease, Sanders captures the nuanced performances of the most intimate and most estranged family relationships.

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This beautifully illustrated volume educates and inspires as it relates true stories of black men in history. Illuminating text paired with irresistible full-colour art bring to life both iconic and lesser-known figures. Among these biographies, readers will find aviators and artists, politicians and pop culture icons. The men featured include writer James Baldwin, artist Aaron Douglas, photographer Gordon Parks, diplomat Kofi Annan, comic book author Dwayne McDuffie, and musician Prince.

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When did Africans first come to Britain? Who are the well-dressed black children in Georgian paintings? Why did the American Civil War disrupt the Industrial Revolution? These and many other questions are answered in this essential introduction to 1800 years of the Black British history: from the Roman Africans who guarded Hadrian’s Wall right up to the present day.

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Preston Black History Group; University of Central Lancashire. Research Centre for Migration, Diaspora and Exile; Institute of Black Atlantic Research. 

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