Were Black people possibly walking around traumatised without support in the 1970's?

To provide a brief context, by the mid-1970's two out of every five black people in Britain were born here. In the key areas of employment, housing, and education, those born in Britain faced substantial and significant unfair discrimination. The government plank was moving from one of 'Assimilation' to that of 'Multiculturalism' but for this 'Second Generation', immigrant group was anything getting better or had the die been cast?

In Peter Fryers 1884 book Staying Power; The History of Black People in Britain, Sivanandan writes;

West Indian Children were consistently and right through the schooling system treated

as uneducable and as having 'unrealistic aspirations' together with a low IQ.

Consequently, they were 'banded' into classes for backward children or dumped in ESN

(educationally subnormal) schools and forgotten. (p.396).

According to Michael Marland, the chief problem that black children in British schools during this period was not hostility, open or hidden, on the part of those who teach them, but 'a well-meaning low expectation';

At its worst this approach can be summed up in the 'steel bands and basketball'

approach of some teachers to their black children of West Indian origin, expecting little

by way of learning, but passing such failures off as inevitable for children who 'have got

so much rhythm'!

Were young black people in the 1970's directly or indirectly traumatised by not only the levels of racism they faced on a daily basis but also by those media that gave them images of truths that we suspected but did not have access to seeing or learning about? i.e. Roots.

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