[1] An analysis of the Black British experience of racism in Britain, it featured contributions by Colin Prescod, Darcus Howe, Jessica Huntley, Gus John, Claudia Jones, Courtney Hay, the Manchester community worker Ron Phillips, Tony Sealy and Steel Pulse.
[2] Lawrence O’Keeffe, deputy director of the British Information Service (BIS) in New York, played a critical role in the suppression of Blacks Britannica.
After reviewing the film, O’Keeffe described it as “dangerous” due to its depiction of Britain as a state steeped in systemic racism and plagued by violent social unrest.
[4] This intervention underscored how state-aligned institutions sought to control Britain’s international image by silencing media that exposed racial injustice and depicted Black political resistance as a legitimate response to state violence.
The critic Peter Biskind saw Blacks Britannica as approaching "British racism from an uncompromising Marxist perspective, showing how it is used to create a permanent underclass and to set the working class at war with itself".
Joel Dreyfuss, writing for Jump Cut in November 1979, called the film "a relentless and engrossing indictment of racism toward black immigrants to England, told from an obvious Marxist perspective.