As many reviews of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe have noted, the miniseries derives its somewhat unusual title from a West Indian proverb made popular in a Bob Marley song: “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe.” This pithy adage evokes, with a tone of striking confidence, the central theme of McQueen’s ambitious five-part anthology of stories—namely, the struggle of London’s West Indian community against the forces of institutional racism, state repression, and police violence.

Keep chipping away at these unjust structures of dominance for long enough, McQueen’s miniseries more than suggests, and eventually they’ll fall to the ground. But it would be easy to miss a key word embedded in that proverb, one which is central not only to the thematic basis of Small Axe, but to its very construction: “we.”

Composed of five self-contained films, each telling a distinct story about the joys and,...