Introduction To Race Relations

Barry Troyna, Ellis Cashmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135386900
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is the second edition of the textbook on race and ethnic relations, which has been adopted by academic and vocational courses and which is designed to be a straightforward introduction to this field of study. It retains all the original features, but reflects on events over the years since its original publication, incorporating accounts of developments in the UK and USA. Suggestions for further readings are revised in the light of the latest research.

1

Introduction to second edition

• Are race and nation inseparable?

• Why are ethnic minorities damned, whatever they do?

• What ‘core values’ are allegedly threatened by ethnic minorities?

• Is racism disappearing, or changing shape?

Nation of aliens

‘Newcomers’, or ‘slags’ as they are known in the racist argot of the Los Angeles Police Department, are extraterrestrials with human-looking bodies but bulbous piebald heads which make them instantly recognizable. Genetically engineered for hard labour, the newcomers descend on California in the early twenty-first century and are allowed to stay by an untypically generous immigration department. At first they make a useful contribution to the workforce, specializing in the manual work for which they were made. But, within a few decades, calumny arrives. Newcomers become equated with all that is frightening and unpleasant: they get drunk and aggressive after tippling sour milk; their females are prone to prostitution; the ‘second generation’ engage in habitual street crime.

Sounds familiar? It’s meant to: British director Graham Baker’s film Alien Nation (1989) was a cop thriller-cum-race relations fable. It’s main message was: that no matter where you come from, what you look like or what you do, if the situation demands it, others will slap a ‘them’ label on you and make sure ‘us’ keep as much distance as possible. In the movie, black and white humans are united in their prejudices against the newcomers. They are part of the ‘us’ that despises the newcomers, a few of whom have sneaked into positions of authority, but the majority of whom either toil or roam the streets, their unusual appearance seeming to radiate menace to humans.

ETHNICITY

A number of people who perceive themselves to be in some way united because of their sharing either a common background, present position or future—or a combination of these. The ethnic group is subjectively defined in that it is what the group members themselves feel to be important in defining them as a united people that marks them off, and not what others consider them to be. There is frequently a coincidence between what others feel to be a racial group and what the members themselves think of themselves. For example, whites may think of Asians as a racial group; Asians may think of themselves as united and therefore an ethnic group.

A second message seemed to be that, when faced with a problem that affects both humans and newcomers alike, differences that were once deemed unalterably large disappear and common interests transcend everything. In the story, a highly addictive and debilitating drug that affects only newcomers is synthesized and marketed on the LA streets. Human and newcomer cops become ‘buddies’ in their efforts to crush the underground operation.

Many observers of relations between various ethnic groups in modern society would argue that the two themes are basically accurate. Put groups with physically recognizable or even inferred differences together and create conditions in which they all seek similar, limited resources (money, prestige, authority, etc.) and you raise conflict. But when a new threat strikes at all groups indiscriminately, differences that were once unmistakeably important become invisible and irrelevant.

A good idea in theory and in speculative fiction; but does it stand up to reality? This is one of the key questions that has been thrown up in the six years since the original publication of Introduction to Race Relations. Is the conflict we described and analyzed in a process of dissolution as different ethnic groups combine to resist greater threats than the ones they pose for each other? Or, are nerves still so raw that the conflict and tension sustained by racism persists?

The Alien Nation subtext gets some of it right: divisions between groups are arbitrary and changeable. A hundred years ago, white Protestants in the UK and the USA were calling Irish Catholics a ‘race apart’ and attributing all manner of evil to them. Charles Kingsley described them as ‘white chimpanzees’; an American historian yearned: ‘If only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it’ (quoted in McLaughlin, 1988, p. 154). As anti-catholicism subsided and the Irish ceased to be recognized in racist terms, their position came to be occupied by blacks, as whites saw a new rising threat. Locked in slave chains, ‘negroes’ were controllable; out of them, they were a possible problem. The Plessy v Ferguson case of 1896 established the principle of segregation of blacks and whites in the USA. It wasn’t removed until 1954 when Brown v Board of Education, Topeka declared such arrangements unconstitutional. The case set in motion a coruscating civil rights movement that in turn sparked reactionary violence from racist whites. In the UK, racist violence erupted in 1948, when white seamen in Liverpool rioted in protest at the rising number of ‘coloured’ workers on ships; and again in 1958 when Notting Hill, London, and Nottingham, in the East Midlands, were scenes of largescale attacks on blacks and their property.

BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, TOPEKA

Until 1954 many blacks in the USA believed that the struggle for equality rested largely on the issue of integrated schooling. In the 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) had vigorously pursued this theme. In Topeka, Kansas, the NAACP argued the case of Oliver Brown whose daughter had been forced to travel by bus to an all-black school even though she lived in close proximity to an all-white school. The NAACP insisted that school segregation was unconstitutional and on Monday, 17 May 1954 the case reached the US Supreme Court where Chief Justice Warren resided. What needed answering, according to Warren, was this: ‘Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunites?’ His verdict? ‘We believe that it does…in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place.’ According to Harvard Sitkoff, the decision meant that: ‘Nothing in American race relations would be the same again.’

While there are no exact parallels, there is a suggestive similarity between these events and affairs elsewhere in the modern world. Indians have felt the weight of racist attentions in Fiji; African students in China have been systematically attacked; Chinese themselves have been victimized in Malaysia. In Soviet Central Asia, Uzbecks have turned violently against the Turkish Meskhetian minority to trigger bloody rioting. In Sri Lanka, it has been the minority Tamils who have responded violently to their exclusion from positions of influence, drawing severe reactions from the majority Sinhalese. In all cases, a certain portion of a population have been identified as in some way troublesome by another portion. Give it time and it’s possible that those portions will come together and identify another portion—or even a portion of a portion, the process is so arbitrary and capricious.

Of course racism isn’t quite as random as we suggest. Unlike a game of Russian roulette in which the fate of the player is decided by sheer chance, the victim of racism is selected and designated according to specific requirements. Why that selection takes place and how the designation gets done are questions that we confront in this book. The point is that there are no natural or self-evident answers. Groups aren’t targetted as ‘races’ and treated accordingly because they are. Alleged biological differences are either pretexts or justifications for other, often sinister reasons. Racial bullets can be fired at white groups as well as blacks.

MINORITY GROUPS

People who live in society where they are singled out for unequal treatment and are victims of a form of discrimination. Nearly always, but not necessarily, a numerical minority, the groups may be singled out because they are thought of as belonging to an inferior race and of possessing undesirable attributes of that race, though there are other criteria such as religion, politics, language, etc. that can be used to distinguish the minority group.

Migrants are, quite literally, newcomers and this virtually guarantees some suspicion and anxiety. Often the threats they seem to present are illusory. There’s an entire history of migrant groups all over the world which have been recognized as problems. After a while, this status may dissolve. Sometimes, it endures for several generations. Our second question is whether we have witnessed any significant dissolution in the West over the past six years. Have old divisions lost their meaning as new problems have emerged that supersede old antagonisms and exert a unifying force? This is an altogether more difficult question and one we will answer by examining events from 1981.

Our people

For Marxists, the so-called ‘new’ problems are not new at all. The capitalist state is a virtual fixture and one which prospers greatly from racialist conflict, as we will discover in Chapter 2. But, in Britain especially, the state has assumed a new power in the past eight or so years. New legislation affecting police powers in England, Scotland and Wales has accompanied substantial increases in the police budget and a quite deliberate attempt to reorganize the police force into a paramilitary unit with riot control a priority. New technologies, including the Police National Computer, have been used to store information on protesters, such as the women at Greenham Common. Official secrets and the ‘national interest’ have been invoked to quash the apparent threats offered by the likes of Sarah Tisdell, who sent xeroxes of official documents to a national newspaper, Peter Wright, who wrote the book Spycatcher, and the employees of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), who have been denied the right to belong to trade unions. There are other changes that reflect the state’s preoccupation with controlling the ‘enemies within’.

A strong-armed state would seem to hold enough fear for everyone to make them put prejudices and racist beliefs on hold and jolt them into worrying about fundamental civil liberties, individual freedoms and the like. Core values seem to be under siege as the state pounds home its plans for restoring law and order. According to one scenario, this should have led to a widespread concern that overrides the comparatively petty disputes about race and ethnicity. People of all backgrounds and beliefs forget their differences and weld themselves together to form a stern resistance to the emergent threat of an authoritarian state. We would expect camaraderie to replace racialism, sociability to crush prejudice, unity to overcome divisions. But things haven’t materialized in this way. Instead, we have witnessed a very different series of developments. Racism and racial discrimination in the forms they were witnessed in the postwar period may look to have disappeared. In fact, they have transmuted: like baser metals turned to gold, racism and discrimination have become nationalism and cultural inviolability. We can still talk in terms of racism, but we need to stay alert to other warning signs: ‘our’ nation; ‘this’ culture. When these flash, we realize racist messages may not be far away. Issues involving nation and culture have peppered the 1980s, spicing debates about racism and ethnic responses to it.

In Britain, the appointment of Margaret Thatcher to Prime Minister in 1979 brought with it what Martin Barker has called ‘the new racism’, meaning that the subsequent political rhetoric and action of Conservative governments were keyed to the notion of ‘a way of life’ that was threatened by ‘outsiders’. This concept acted as a supporting structure for both political philosophies and actions and homespun day-to-day beliefs and practices. Conservative politician William (now Lord) Whitelaw had publicly introduced the notion and Barker quotes him: ‘We all know that the principles of the fair and tolerant society which we seek to uphold will be undermined if individual fears are allowed to grow’ (1981, p. 13). No reference to race or ethnic groups in this; but a masked warning about limits. ‘Many people, entirely free from any racial prejudice, want reassurance’, Whitelaw continued.

Barker’s thesis is that the idea that there were ‘genuine’ unprejudiced fears about losing a British way of life acted as a bridge between apparently neutral descriptions about what was happening and a vague theory of race. For example, possessing a way of life, seeing it as under attack, wanting to defend it; these sentiments contain no reference to racism, nor do they have anything to do with disliking foreigners, or ethnic minorities, or discriminating against them. The argument sounds so reasonable that its racism is obscured by a cloud of logic and plausibility. And what are its policy implications? Imposing boundaries around ‘us’, the insiders, which also serve to keep out ‘them’, the outsiders, or at least those outsiders who are not prepared to sacrifice their own ‘way of life’ and adopt ‘ours’.

COLONIALISM

The policy of subjecting territories or nations to another more powerful state and maintaining those areas and their inhabitants through the exploitation of land and labour.

Barker’s account was written before the Falklands war of 1982, which was an occasion for expounding the ‘way of life’ notion into a much grander affirmation of nationalism. ‘The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race’, Thatcher insisted. ‘Their way of life is British’. Whereas Barker would see this as further proof of the new racism (though he never defines the ‘old racism’) another writer, Robert Miles, prefers to see it as an extension of something altogether more continuous. Racism existed before the onset of the ‘New Right’ (that loosely-structured band of ultra-conservative politicians, journalists and academics, as described by Ruth Levitas, 1986); since the 1960s in fact ‘when expressions of British nationalism have increasingly come to contain a form of racism, although without explicit use of the idea of “race” in the case of the main political parties’ (Miles, 1987, p. 206).

Although Miles doesn’t cite him, Reginald Horsman provides an historical analysis of the complex, jumbled ‘hodgepodge of rampant, racial nationalism’ and shows how biological notions have underpinned nationalist tendencies that have no obvious connections with biology. Horsman quotes from the Edinburgh Review of January 1844: ‘Of the great influence of Race in the production of National Character, no reasonable enquirer can now doubt’ (1981, p. 60). Nationalism emerged as a coherent ideological package at around the same time as ‘scientific’ racism, as it was known: mid-nineteenth century.

Miles believes one has covered the other virtually ever since. ‘Racism is in the lining of nationalism’, he writes (1987). Three episodes in the early 1980s seem to illustrate this; they also created a context for a whole series of events in the remainder of the decade. The first was the Falklands conflict itself, an occasion for buffing up anachronistic images of Britain as ‘the nation that had built an empire and ruled a quarter of the world,’ as Thatcher described it in her successful attempt to revive a belligerent patriotism (quoted in Barnett, 1982, p. 150). She recalled British colonial history as an august unfolding of predestined greatness. In contrast, this book presents it as a repugnant farce scripted according to the dictates of greed and idealism, in which 15 million Africans were enslaved, many million more South Asians indentured and dominated and populations of Australasia decimated. Such was the cost of ruling a ‘quarter of the world’. Yet, it was conveniently forgotten as the ‘Falklands factor’ exerted an influence on Thatcher’s re-election to office in 1983.

Twenty-five years after the Suez crisis and 45 years after the end of the Second World War, the ‘Falklands factor’ suggested to Anthony Sampson that ‘older British values and attitudes were still lurking close to the surface, as if the war and empire had happened only yesterday’ (1982, p. 431). This observation connects with the ones we make later in this book, particularly those relating to the colonial mentality, a mental outlook that, in many ways, resists rational argument and measured debate. The Falklands war abroad added fresh substance to the colonial mentality at home and, ultimately, the British sense of superiority was enhanced by a famous victory.

The year before the Falklands conflict saw the passing of the British Nationality Act, amidst protest from groups who envisaged the distress it would cause many families. We cover the clauses of the legislation in Chapter 3, but for now, merely wish to note that British citizenship rights, including the right of abode, fell to those with parents or grandparents born, adopted, naturalized and registered as citizens. A clear intention of the Act was to curb secondary migration to the UK; one implication was a breakup of families because some members could not fulfil citizenship requirements. Many spouses and fiances wishing to travel to Britain to reunite were denied citizenship rights. These two key events of the early 1980s are joined in Martin Stellman’s film For Queen and Country (1988) in which an Afro-Caribbean returns to London after military service in the Falklands (and, before that, Northern Ireland) to find that the Nationality Act has rendered him a British citizen no longer.

Not surprisingly, the Act lost the government a good deal of confidence among ethnic minorities with relations in New Commonwealth countries. As the ethnic vote was becoming increasingly important, the government mounted an advertising campaign in the run-up to the 1983 election which featured a poster depicting a young black man, arms folded, dressed in a business suit. The copy line read: ‘Labour says he’s black. Tories say he’s British’. Much the same message as in the 1981 Act was being driven home: national identity was all important; ethnic background, skin colour, culture, beliefs were no longer relevant. Zig Layton-Henry believed the import of the campaign to be that immigration from the New Commonwealth was now at an end, so the crucial issues concerned ‘the integration of the second and third generations and the need to forge new bases of loyalty and legitimacy to integrate black Britons’ (1984, p. xv).

Our disagreement with this is with the choice of terms. ‘Integration’ could perhaps be replaced more appropriately with assimilation since the underlying theme of the campaign was that ethnic minorities should discard their ethnic character, forget the culture of their parents and become an indistinguishable, upwardly mobile part of an homogeneous British nation. Being British, in this version, is instead of, not as well as, being an ethnic minority group member. It’s also one-way: acquisition involves loss. In reply to the campaign’s assertion that there are ‘no “blacks”, no “whites”, just people’, it could be argued that there manifestly are blacks and whites, who want to regard themselves and be regarded by others in those terms without necessarily inviting conflict.

These three moments in the early years of the 1980s were occasions to elevate a strong and robust conception of British nationalism. Nowhere was there a hint of diversity: nationalism was the force and all other interests were subordinate. Thatcher’s administration was finished with the endless debates over ethnic relations. What was the point? Sixteen yea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction to second edition
• 2 Race—power—prejudice
• 3 Laws—labour—migration
• 4 Work—class—inequality
• 5 Cities—space—politics
• 6 Education—culture—disadvantage
• 7 Ethnicity—youth—resistance
• 8 Massacres—conspiracies—fascists
• 9 Media—racism—reality
• 10 Conclusion
• References
• Name index
• Subject index
• Title index