In an interview with Rosalind Bell, Phillips described his polemical, semi-autobiographical, travelogue, The European Tribe (1987), as a narrative that ‘deals with Europe from a point of view which Europe has never had to deal with’ - that is, from the barbarism contained within its version of civilization, its often unquestioned racist ideology and practice. Taking its cue from W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of ‘double consciousness’ described in The Philadelphia Negro (1897) and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which the black simultaneously sees him or herself ‘through the eyes of others’ as both an enslaved and/or exploited object, Phillips's text presents a sustained critique of the institutional and psychological racism inherent within European historiography, which Marx, a century earlier, had termed the ‘profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization’. While Fanon's critique of colonial ideology exposed the double standards of Western cultural thought and practice, most especially in terms of its racist humanism, Phillips's text extends Fanon's critique by highlighting the relationship between Western-driven global economics and the ideological bases of racist dynamics, while reaffirming the existence of a cultural consciousness within the black post-colonial diaspora: ‘I've seen what Europe can be, I have visited Auschwitz and Dachau…. The word ‘'tribe'’ upset some people. But if it's a word that's applicable to black people and red people and yellow people, it's applicable to white people too. If you deal me that card, I deal it back to you.’ While Phillips ‘redeals’ the racist card back to Europe, reversing the trend of racist epistemological thought and Western socioeconomic systems, his text focuses upon one of the oldest and most prominent centres of racist/colonial ideology - that is, Britain. Whereas much post-colonial discourse has centred upon anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Phillips's distinct focus upon Europe, and in particular, Britain, is innovative, as he demands that the historical centre of colonial practice examine its own atrocities and engage in its own selfcritique.