No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey through the American South (review)

In 1997, the British journalist Gary Younge took a trip through the American South that roughly followed the route taken by the Freedom Riders in the 1960s. Younge was, he admits, an outsider. But he was an outsider with a special perspective. Younge is black, the child of immigrants from Barbados. Born and bred in Great Britain, he was drawn as a boy to all manifestations of black culture and the black diaspora; and he was attracted, in particular, to the transnational connections linking him and his family to other peoples of African origin around the globe. He was, he tells us, especially and passionately interested in the black culture of the American South. To an extent, he was not alone among his and earlier generations of Britons, black and white, as far as this particular interest is concerned; the British popular music revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was, after all, fueled by the black music of the South. Younge's interest was, however, racially inflected, in that it was the racial problems of the region that also intrigued him: which is why he chose to take the journey he did.

No Place Like Home was originally published in Great Britain in 1999. It was written for a British audience in the first instance, and that shows. There is a great deal of introductory material concerning the civil rights movement, Confederate monuments, lynchings and other atrocities, and the burgeoning of a new South that an American audience is likely to find redundant. This is a story about a newcomer to the region; and, like all newcomers, Younge mixes the fresh perceptions of an innocent eye with observations that may seem new to him—or, at least, to the readers to whom this book was initially addressed—but are only too familiar to those already in or close to the scene. Younge is at his best when he comes down to the personal: his own story as a black Briton, his encounters with different forms of racism in his own country and in the United States, his meetings with some notable figures from the black community of the South, many of whom are survivors from the civil rights era. He is also particularly fascinating when he speculates about, say, how different his own life might have been if he had been born in the American South: how different and yet, in terms of daily injustices, prejudices, and slights, how disconcertingly the same.

"I was born and raised in the South," Younge begins his book, "—well, Stevenage in Hertfordshire, anyway" (1). That establishes the intimate, often confessional, and sometimes ironic voice that sustains this story, which is about a man confronting a history like his own, albeit in a different key. Stevenage, as Younge goes on to explain, was one of the new towns devised and built not far from London just after the Second World War. Conceived in a spirit of postwar optimism, as a "suburban Utopia" (1) just thirty miles from the capital, it could hardly be more different at first sight from the ghost-haunted American South that fired Younge's imagination while he was growing up. But Stevenage and Britain generally, Younge goes on to point out, suffered and still do from their own forms of racism and racial injustice, even though segregation was never enshrined in law. This is a story about the color line in the old world as well as in the new. To the American reader, in fact, what is most fascinating about this book, along with the different perspective cast on the South by an outsider and newcomer, is the refracted light it shines on some of the more obscured corners of British life and society: obscured because the British have always liked to keep their racism, like most things, relatively private.

No Place Like Home is a compelling hybrid, a mix of genres...