Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire

Jeffrey Hill

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350069855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

Who was Learie Constantine? And what can he tell us about the politics of race and race relations in 20th-century Britain and the Empire? Through examining the life, times and opinions of this Trinidadian cricketer-turned-politician, Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire explores the centrality of race in British politics and society. Unlike conventional biographical studies of Constantine, this unique approach to his life, and the racially volatile context in which it was lived, moves away from the 'good man' narrative commonly attributed to his rise to pre-eminence as a spokesman against racial discrimination and as the first black peer in the House of Lords. Through detailing how Constantine's idea of 'assimilation' was criticized, then later rejected by successive activists in the politics of race, Jeff rey Hill off ers an alternative and more sophisticated analysis of Constantine's contributions to, and complex relationship with, the fight against racial inequalities inherent in British domestic and imperial society.

1

Constantine

This is a book about what was arguably the foremost social problem of the twentieth century, and which continues to challenge twenty-first-century minds: race and race relations. The focus of the book falls upon a man whose entire life was shaped by race, and who, in part because of his championing of race equality, achieved an eminence that few men or women of colour were able to experience during his time in history.

Learie Nicholas Constantine was born in colonial Trinidad in 1901.¹ He died in London in 1971. The contrast between these two dates is startling, in both personal and historical terms. Constantine was the first-born son of black parents who, though by no means well off, might just have been regarded as part of an indigenous lower middle class. His paternal great-grandfather, however, had been a slave, while Constantine’s mother, Anaise Pascall, was the daughter of slaves. By the time of his own death, their eldest son Learie was a highly respected member of the British establishment. The historian Anne Spry Rush has placed him as ‘upper middle-class’, a status that might flatter his financial position but suitably captures his social standing.² Having made his name as a cricketer, and been honoured as a Member of the British Empire (MBE) for his work as a British civil servant during the Second World War, by the early 1960s he had received a knighthood, and from 1969 sat in the House of Lords. He was a member of the Inns of Court and served on the Race Relations Board, the Sports Council and the Board of Governors of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In recognition of the part he fulfilled in the independence movement of the country of his birth, he had been appointed High Commissioner in London of Trinidad and Tobago. In addition he might even be regarded as a ‘public intellectual’, at least in matters of race and race relations. Alongside various pieces of journalism and broadcasting that Constantine had contributed over the years, there were nine books, mostly on cricket but in one case a publication that added significantly to the British post-war discourse on race – Colour Bar, published in 1954. All of this qualified him for that exclusive, if informal, club of ‘the great and the good’. He had acquired an international celebrity. If perhaps not a household name he was certainly very well known. In his lifetime Constantine bridged several worlds: colonial and metropolitan, local and national, working class and middle class, black and white. Constantine’s success in a climate of racial prejudice and hostility appears both exceptional and praiseworthy. In contrast to most black people of his era, some of them well-loved sportsmen, his is a history of impressive mobility, crossing geographical, social, cultural and racial boundaries.³

I

From the late 1940s onwards the migration of black people to Britain exercised what was probably the most profound effect on British identity of the later twentieth century. Those West Indians who arrived in the mother country just after the Second World War did not see themselves as ‘migrants’; they were simply British subjects, switching from one imperial territory to another. As the Trinidadian writer and broadcaster Trevor McDonald has pointed out, going to England was seen as ‘going to the centre.’⁴ Yet while the West Indies migrants with their British passports saw themselves as genuinely British subjects, the reception they experienced from white residents on arrival in Britain suggested something quite different. To many they were not welcome; they were not ‘British’. The newcomers were seen as ‘strangers’, their dark skins and supposed cultural otherness marking them out from what were assumed to be the norms of British life. These norms, it was thought, were to be found in a sense of Britain as a country distinguished essentially by its ‘whiteness’.⁵ Although the numbers of immigrants were not particularly high initially, around 2,000 from the Caribbean in 1953, they had quickly come to be seen as presenting a ‘problem’.⁶ Communities of black people had long existed in certain towns, notably Cardiff and Liverpool, but it was with the concentration of the post-war migrants in London, the capital city – in Brixton and Notting Hill especially – that the question of race really came into national prominence. From this emerged a new problematic: how to define and, if possible, cohere the ‘races’. Thus the idea of ‘race relations’ entered the vocabulary of public life and produced a succession of investigations into the problem.⁷

Learie Constantine was present at the birth of this enterprise. Relatively little attention had been directed in the past to scrutinizing the black communities. The perceived problems posed by the immigrant had been focused chiefly on Irish and Jewish groups, against both of which there was ample and deep-rooted animosity; but for both groups there had over time been a degree of assimilation with indigenous peoples. In his work as a welfare officer in Liverpool during the Second World War, Constantine became immersed in the experiences of a small contingent of West Indian voluntary workers, mostly Jamaican, who provided an almost laboratory case study of race relations in a large city. It was for Constantine a quite new experience of racial division, different in tone and situation from his colonial days. While in Liverpool, as in Trinidad, race relations were part of an existing class structure of rich and poor, in Liverpool race also figured far more actively within classes: that is to say, there was no equivalent in Trinidad to a working class divided between black and white. Although no detailed academic analysis of race relations on Merseyside appeared until Anthony Richmond’s study of 1954,⁸ Constantine had imbibed much from his own dealings with white people, and also from what he observed in the treatment of other people of colour in areas such as employment, housing and leisure. He was among the first to direct the public’s mind to the ‘colour bar’,⁹ the term he used as the title of the book he brought out in 1954.¹⁰ Its appearance was doubly remarkable. It was exceptional not only in its authorship – a former professional cricketer, and a black one at that, but also in making a statement, in a direct and readable form, about race problems in Britain and other parts of the world. Constantine did not hold back. Though the book had many failings, it did not shrink from delivering some harsh criticisms of contemporary attitudes and practices on race prejudice and discrimination. Unlike the academic studies of race that appeared around this time, Colour Bar had a populist tone that rendered it accessible to a general readership. It was well suited to expanding its readership and message through the serialization it underwent in sections of the tabloid press.

Constantine was, then, among the first in the field on the topic of race relations. Given his public status in the early 1950s, he might have risen to a position of some influence in this area, but for two things: shortly after the publication of Colour Bar he left England to work in Trinidad and was absent from British debate on race questions for some eight years; further, his early initiatives were overtaken by a cadre of academic sociologists and anthropologists who consolidated their position as experts on race questions during the 1950s. Anthony Richmond, Ruth Glass, Michael Banton, Sheila Patterson and especially Kenneth Little, who had spearheaded academic studies of race in Britain in the late 1940s, took the lead.¹¹ As Chris Waters has it, ‘these experts secured their status as an authoritative voice on matters of race in Britain, monopolizing control over a relatively new domain of knowledge.’¹²

What their monopoly resulted in was a discourse on race distinguished by a new methodology in which two notions stood out. First, in an attempt to understand race, analysts tended to work with a model of separate and fixed groups, indigenous (white) and newcomer (black) or as they were often described, ‘hosts and strangers’. It had the effect of ascribing singular characteristics to each group and of giving to the ‘hosts’ the normative standards from which the ‘strangers’ were deemed to depart. From this followed a second notion, with important implications for public policy: that of ‘assimilation’ – the absorption of the strangers into the lifestyle of the hosts. The more flexible ‘multiculturalism’ – which for all its practical flaws nonetheless moved away from the assumption that to assimilate meant becoming more like ‘us’ – was still some way in the future. But at least the race relations project of the 1950s was an attempt to seek answers to ‘race’ that were not confined simply to limiting immigration. Constantine himself was profoundly influenced at the time, and in the years to come, by this new science of race relations and its idea of assimilation. And it was not only Constantine who was influenced by it; assimilation for a while was the conceptual framework in which many people in Britain thought about race relations. Assimilation melted away from the 1970s onwards when challenged by new formulations of black identity and by the enduring power of whiteness.

Few of those who in the twenty-first century study race conceive of it any longer in biological terms. Some indeed have sought to dispense with the term ‘race’ altogether, although this is perhaps an unhelpful move to the extent that it loosens a grasp on identities and relationships that are actually perceived, rightly or wrongly, by many people.¹³ There is, as Karl Spracklen has pointed out, a ‘taken-for-grantedness’ about racial difference.¹⁴ Most commentators on race now apply the term to social and cultural constructions of identity, but this is not to say that the value of race as an explanatory tool in social analysis has been overtaken by ‘class’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘nation’ or whatever else. In the later work of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, we find race very much to the fore as a marker of identity, a ‘discursive construct’, a ‘sliding signifier’, ‘the centrepiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences’.¹⁵ Hall perceives a residual presence of race: ‘The physical or biological trace, having been shown out of the front door, tends to sidle around the edge of the verandah and climb back in through the pantry window!’¹⁶ One body of recent writings on race typifies this persistent presence very clearly. It is what I might call the ‘whiteness turn’ in race studies that has flourished in the United States, particularly since the 1990s. It does not, as the term whiteness might suggest, attempt to champion white supremacy, though it can deal with the sentiments and anxieties of those who do. The slogans articulated at Donald Trump rallies during the 2016 American presidential election campaign – the constant refrain of ‘Make America Great Again’ and the less noticed but more sinister ‘Make Race Great Again’ – are a vivid example of such thinking. They draw upon a still common American belief in white superiority, an ingrained collective refusal to acknowledge that the Civil War and subsequent campaigns to establish civil rights and to pass into a ‘post-racial age’ have erased the ‘fact’ of white supremacy.¹⁷ Whiteness studies encompass a variety of academic disciplines and seek to explain the phenomenon of whiteness as it is manifested in people’s thought and behaviour and even in the configuration of the built environment.

Whiteness is not an easy idea to grapple with and can become a rather slippery conceptual pathway. For this reason it has been criticized for what have been seen as methodological and definitional weaknesses inherent to the idea.¹⁸ But what it has importantly achieved is a switch of emphasis in race studies away from a focus on simply black or brown groups and opened up a wider spectrum of study, including the intriguing notion of degrees of whiteness. It therefore takes something that has previously seemed self-evident and makes it problematical. It dispenses with a plain black and white ‘racial’ opposition and delves into the issue of how at different times immigrants of various kinds – Jews, Irish, Italians, East Europeans, African Caribbeans – have come to be seen as worthy, or not, of white status.¹⁹ The central concern of whiteness studies appears to be the process by which ‘white’ has become established in many societies as the pre-eminent ideology. Katharine Tyler’s work on British Asians amplifies this point profoundly. She argues that British Asians are represented in the ‘white hegemonic imagination’ as ‘racialised immigrants’ standing betwixt and between, neither ‘us’ nor ‘them’.²⁰ Similarly, in his work on the American academic and black civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Anthony Appiah has remarked that, in the early twentieth century, Du Bois had never been in a place where what it meant to be black wasn’t defined by whites.²¹ While the concept of whiteness as it is presently articulated was unknown to Constantine, and to others in his time, the power to define and construct racial and ethnic inequality was not. His life history therefore helps to unravel some of that whiteness knot.

II

Constantine’s life also connects aptly with another new and burgeoning academic field – Atlantic Studies. It aims to plot the cross currents of ideas and movements that make up an Atlantic network. ‘Transatlantic history (re-)evaluates the flow and circulation of people, goods, ...