An Ethnography of Black, White and Brown Working Class Men

Lowkey - Long Live Palestine feat. Frankie Boyle, Maverick Sabre (Part 3) [Music Video] | GRM Daily

Before I begin proper, I feel the need to explain what Ethnography is. Simply stated, it is the study of people in their own environment through the use of methods such as participant observation and face-to-face interviewing. It's a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. (so says Wiki)

I call myself an ethnographer because I like to observe, talk to, become friends with, analyse, strip people bare and look into their souls. Sounds scary right? Well I don't think the results are and to be honest I can't help myself. It's the investigative journalist in me.

I've been doing it a long time, but never heard the word or knew what Ethnography was until 2018 when Professor Yasmin Gunaratnam and Dr. Hannah Jones tweeted this:

How working on a construction site taught me the truth about Brexit | Telegraph

..after I had written an article for the Telegraph, about working on a construction site in 2018, which started thus:

My background is very different to that of the average slinger or sparkie. But our national debate needs to take their suffering more seriously

Last year, at around this time, I was unemployed. Once, I had pursued an adventurous career as a journalist and documentary filmmaker in east Africa. Back in London I'd founded a scrappy, combative media website for emerging black and minority writers, a directory of black and minority experts for other journalists to access and a literary festival. I was going to bed dreaming of endless Twitter fights with columnists and random trolls. And I realised: it was all driving me crazy.

I was doing ethnography before and have been doing it since including with these wry observations in an essay I called ‘Memoir on Masculinity’ back in 2018.

I sent it to my book editor yesterday and said could this along with what I had said in a viral thead with over 370,000 views as of 9am on Sunday 19 Aug 2024 about Lowkey, Anthony Anaxagorou and Akala be the makings of my second book.. She replied with great advice saying: