SOURCE: "Racial Undertones in European Attitudes," in The Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 79, No. 186, August 19, 1987, p. 22.

In the following review, Rubin determines that The European Tribe "is a significant book, but an uneven one."

"As a first-generation migrant, I came to Britain at the portable age of 12 weeks; I grew up riddled with the cultural confusions of being black and British," writes Caryl Phillips. Born in St. Kitts in the West Indies, Phillips spent his formative years in England, living in predominantly white, working-class neighborhoods while attending predominantly white, middle-class schools. Until meeting up with a defiantly black American fellow student at Oxford, so he tells us, he had little idea that a black person might become a writer or that blacks have a long history worthy of study.

In truth, it may be said, young Phillips had almost exactly the same uninformed view of black people as that...