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How does a community make meaning of its past? How do people, separated from their ancestral homelands by centuries of violence and migration, navigate the present by historicizing themselves? For a generation of young Black Britons coming of age in the 1970s and 80s, these were not abstract questions. They were urgent, existential inquiries that would be answered through a powerful fusion of culture, politics, and a single, seismic television event. As the cultural historian Eddie Chambers documents in his essential book, Roots and Culture, this period saw a dramatic shift in how Black British youth related to their heritage. The relationship of…