Accepting the ‘D’ word: discrimination in 1960s’ UK academic discourse

Introduction

Today, as we try to hold on to the important concept of institutional racism (formally established in the Macpherson report of 1999) it is hard to imagine now how reluctant the powers that be and academia in Britain were to accept the D word (that is discrimination) at all in their deliberations, some four decades earlier. A big question had been thrown up. How was the nation to conceptualise the relations between ‘races’ in the UK after the 1948 Nationality Act when there was unrestricted entry into Britain of New Commonwealth Citizens, satisfying worker shortages and reformulating Britain’s connections to newly independent Commonwealth countries?

Looking back now to the period between 1958, when the anti-black ‘riots’ in Notting Hill and Nottingham demanded attention be paid to domestic ‘race relations’, and 1967, when the first major study of discrimination was published, it is clear from the literature how reluctant the majority of commentators were to accept that the UK could be discriminating on the basis of colour. A whole range of ‘theories’ were assembled so as to avoid this conclusion which would put the UK, with its then supposedly ‘benevolent’ colonial record, on a par with South Africa then creating its Bantustans, Rhodesia declaring UDI and North America whose ‘black ghettos’ were going up in flames.

Significantly, the UK literature did not clearly distinguish between prejudice and discrimination; both terms seemed to be anathema as academics saw what was happening in vague and/or psycho-social terms such as ‘cultural misunderstanding’, ‘social distance’, natural ‘xenophobia’ and ‘racial tensions’. ‘Race’ was predominantly a concept that belonged either to cultural scrutiny (hence to anthropology) or to personality typology (hence to psychology). And, of course for the government, in the main, the issue was how to get ‘them’ – the colonial newcomers to assimilate – the notion being that if they dropped their customs and norms, they would be more like, and therefore acceptable to, the native British. And we would have harmony.

Towards the end of the 1960s, there was a kind of advance in thinking – to seeing ‘race relations’ as a ‘social problem’ – but this problem continues to be framed as ‘them’, and racism or discrimination are still not yet recognised as anything structural in society. Responsibility (or blame) if there be, was even-handed between the ‘host’ society and ‘them’. Hence Home Secretary Roy Jenkins defined integration in 1966 ‘not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’ (my emphasis). There was blame as it seemed on both sides. And in fact, the ‘equality of opportunity’ which he spoke of (that might have implied a belief in the existence of discrimination) never really got off the ground till much, much later. ¹

There was in the early postwar years no ‘race relations’ literature as such, though black people had been writing about their experiences for decades. ² In its early years, during the 1940s, the official literature was best defined as an anthropological field, observing the populations of different Commonwealth countries as a window into the cultures of the increasing number of ex-colonies. ³

Edinburgh-based anthropology professor Kenneth Little (a founding figure of the literature) through his attempts to ‘forge a new sociology of migration’ in the late 1940s functioning from within the early anthropological framework, declared in 1958 that the ‘race problem’ in Britain was not important to the field, as the purpose of the research was its application to the increasing number of colonies gaining their independence, rather than its ability to promote a domestic ‘racial harmony’. ⁴ Ironically, during the same year as Little’s statement, the ‘race riots’ in Notting Hill and Nottingham would take place, events recognised by scholars as a turning point.

The 1958 ‘race riots’, when white gangs, encouraged by fascist parties, went on the rampage in areas where New Commonwealth citizens had settled, were widely covered in both the national and international press, turning the focus of literature inwards towards the relationship between Commonwealth populations and the ‘native British’. ⁵ Jordana Bailkin, like other commentators, such as Stephen Small, Jenny Bourne, Michael Banton and Robert Miles, recognises the riots as a watershed moment in the field’s history. ⁶ This was the turning point at which the focus shifted from ‘race’ being seen as something that pertained to overseas, in colonies and soon to be former colonies, to Britain’s domestic situation.

Bailkin suggests that the ‘race riots’ saw ‘the anthropological study of the indigene’ morph ‘into the sociological study of the migrant’ for the purpose of creating ‘racial harmony’ in British society. ⁷ Bourne believes that the riots elicited a wave of ‘moral outrage and disbelief’ that ‘racially motivated’ violence could occur ‘here’, being the first time in the memory of many that violence such as this had occurred. ⁸ This event led to studies researching immigrants in the ‘Mother Country’ springing ‘up like mushrooms’. ⁹ Echoing the idea of the riots’ significance, Panikos Panayi, writing in 2010, suggests that they were the first step in a series of ‘reality checks for anyone who may have had any illusions about the intolerant nature of British society’. ¹⁰ The impact of these riots, and the subsequent ‘reality checks’, cannot be underestimated. It appears they held a crucial role in the transition towards treating the presence of the ‘newcomers’ as a domestic concern from the previously external, anthropological perspective. ¹¹

By the start of the 1960s, then, and in light of the ‘race riots’, the field transitioned to becoming domestically focused, dedicating most of its attention towards the experience of migrant communities mainly within housing and employment. Initially (reflecting that earlier inbuilt anthropological bias), many academics would investigate these ethnic minority communities in the same way as ‘visitors to the zoo’, only observing for the purpose of empowering the governing class with knowledge to be able to deal with the ‘colour problem’ it was facing, rather than informing those communities of their own situations. ¹² While these early works recognised the clear inequalities between the white indigenous and ethnic minorities, they varied greatly in their explanations for its existence, and even more so in regards to their discussion of discrimination.

Recognising discrimination in the ‘Mother Country’, 1959–1964

Within the earlier half of the decade, much of the literature was still dedicated to gathering data and statistics on the situation of the ‘dark strangers’ who had moved into the country from what was once the edge of empire. But standing out, in 1960, Ruth Glass, a German-born sociologist, and key figure in ‘race relations’ research wrote the progressive work Newcomers: the West Indians in London assessing the demographic of Commonwealth settlers, with a specific focus on their experience, juxtaposing other researchers who investigated the newcomers for what appeared to be assessing what their presence meant for the British. ¹³ In her introduction she makes the reader aware that she is passionate about the subject, noting her belief that ‘discrimination because of race, colour, or religion is an intolerable insult to the dignity of an individual’. ¹⁴ Her passion on the topic likely emanated from her own experience as a Jewish refugee. ¹⁵ Glass possibly fits into Sheila Patterson’s category of ‘negrophile’ writers. ¹⁶ Patterson, one of the most prominent writers of the time, defined this category as those who expressed an ‘anti-white bias’, possibly writers with a more critical stance on discrimination against Commonwealth immigrants!

Glass’s work is unorthodox compared with the early period’s literature since a substantial proportion of the book takes aim at the discrimination experienced by the newcomers, the characteristic which would come to define the literature years later. While the earlier literature was varied in its understanding of discrimination, the number of writers who dedicated significant attention towards discrimination was fairly sparse. ¹⁷

Her stance on the existence of discrimination is exemplified by her statement that ‘the veneer of racial tolerance is a rather thin one’. ¹⁸ Glass distinguishes the experiences of ‘West Indians and other ethnic minorities in Britain from those of white immigrants’, recognising that while all immigrants face similar difficulties ‘coloured people meet these difficulties in an accentuated form. They are not simply migrants: they are coloured migrants’, implying discrimination. ¹⁹

The attention of Glass’s work towards the domestic existence of migrants within housing, schools and employment (dedicating a chapter to each), is distinguishable from the broader literature through her attention to discrimination. It is significant that it was an American commentator, James Houlton’s writing for Phylon, the US journal founded by Du Bois, on ‘The Status of the Colored in Britain’ (1961), who recognised that the issues that face ‘coloured people’ in regard to housing were, in large part, the result of ‘the unwillingness of many white landlords to rent to them’. By proposing the housing situation of migrant communities to be a direct result of discrimination, Houlton parallels Glass’s work in his attention to the reality of discrimination. ²⁰

The other area of discrimination which Houlton comments on (like Glass) is employment, pointing to the Institute of Race Relations’ recognition that ‘coloured workers are still generally unwelcome in offices and in some other categories they have been accepted only after overcoming an initial attitude of white hostility’. The areas of housing and employment are the subjects which received the most attention from ‘race relations’ writers across the 1960s, likely not unrelated to the housing crisis of the 1960s. ²¹

Uncertainty within the field

But Houlton isn’t as steadfast in his beliefs about discrimination as Glass. His article opens by establishing the necessity of investigating the potential of discrimination in Britain. He then moves on to ask the reader if the calm that ‘has prevailed since the summer of 1958’ suggests that the riot was an anomaly, commenting that ‘it is certainly too early to offer a clear answer to these and other questions’. ²² This uncertainty surrounding the extent of prejudice and discrimination in Britain is to be expected from the literature, as the subject of discrimination was new and these new communities were being observed very much from the side-lines. As Glass suggests, by looking at ‘the situation of coloured people in Britain from “outside”’ making ‘casual observations in a few places and from a cursory review of public opinion’, researchers can wrongly conclude that there were no ‘grave or potential “white-colour problems”’. ²³ To see the true picture it is necessary to look far closer and make substantial contact with the people whom the literature aims to investigate.

Demonstrating the extent of uncertainty within the field, Michael Banton, originally a student at Edinburgh, who was to dominate the academic field via his 1967 book Race Relations and later The Idea of Race and head the first Social Science Research Council Unit on Ethnic Relations, made the controversial and somewhat paradoxical statement in 1959 that ‘however the term be defined – colour prejudice is not widespread in Great Britain. But the evidence of discrimination is undeniable’, directly contradicting Glass who reported a widespread belief about ‘the inferiority of foreigners’. ²⁴

Banton’s ambivalence touches on another debate in the early literature as to whether the tension perceived was evidence of the more explicit form of prejudice which had hitherto been only associated with South Africa and the US. And this was evidenced in the work of the Institute of Race Relations itself. Established in 1956 out of a department of Chatham House by ex-colonial civil servant Phillip Mason, ²⁵ there was a concern as to whether the race situation in the US was a portent for the UK. Thus, when Mason in 1963 raised monies from Nuffield for a national ‘Survey on Race Relations’, he stated that the Institute ‘had received evidence of “the seeds of segregation” in Britain’. ²⁶ More comforting, however, was the opinion that such prejudice was the result of ‘a mild and not vehement degree of antipathy to foreigners and outsiders’, suggested by Sheila Patterson to be the ‘the cultural norm in Britain’. ²⁷ Banton’s conclusion was the latter, to which he added that future researchers would need to explain the paradox of why ‘coloured people’ are ‘so often shabbily treated when the vast majority of individual Britons are favourably disposed towards them’. ²⁸ He suggests racial discrimination is best conceptualised not by aggressiveness, or dependent on ideas of superiority, but by avoidance and the desire for social distance.

Peter Wright researching workers in British industries supports Banton’s idea that discrimination does exist, but that it is only ‘a form of the avoidance of strangers that can be discerned in any society’. ²⁹

John Rex and Stephen Small, looking back at this period suggest that authors were being pulled in a variety of directions. Rex argues that they felt the demand for research to be carried out in service of policy (the explicit aim of IRR’s Survey); secondly, that it should be focused towards academic theorising; and lastly, that it should be action orientated towards improving the circumstances of Commonwealth newcomers. Stephen Small explained that some of these earlier works tended to render ‘specific problems associated with institutional and individual discrimination – by employers, housing agencies, trade unions and even local government, as well as by individuals (racist physical and verbal abuse and attacks)’ as secondary and even irrelevant. ³⁰

Questioning discrimination

And there were books and pamphlets which proved Small’s assessment as particularly accurate. One book, perhaps less well-known in the race literature, was Elspeth Huxley’s Back Streets New Worlds: a look at Immigrants in Britain published in 1964. ³¹ Huxley (a British colonial Kenyan Highlander for part of her life and best known for her novels on Africa) renders the concept of discrimination secondary to her discussion of the broader interaction between minority and majority communities, only discussing it briefly and in passing. She notes on the first page of her introduction the contradiction of British citizens marching ‘to protest against apartheid in South Africa’ while their neighbours ‘may be turning away a coloured lodger’. ³² So while Huxley acknowledges the potential for discrimination in Britain, she suggests that it is largely an exaggerated concept, an attitude which contrasts with the views of Glass and Banton. ³³ In this, she mirrors James Wickenden’s work (commissioned by the IRR immediately following the riots to do an evaluation) who concluded in Colour in Britain (1958) that the majority of West Indians are ‘living in amity’ with their neighbours, with only a small proportion of them experiencing discrimination. ³⁴

Huxley and Wickenden’s conceptualisation of discrimination as a marginal issue is replicated in Sheila Patterson’s highly influential and far-reaching Dark Strangers (1963) which investigated ‘immigrant–host relations’. ³⁵ In doing so, Patterson references events and experiences of migrants from the Caribbean, which some authors would readily label discrimination. She, however, regards the use of the term as ‘inadequate’, suggesting the subject of ‘race relations’ to be one best explained as a social and cultural clash that is ‘complicated by the factor of colour’ echoing the cultural understanding of ‘race relations’ which Banton subscribed to. However, unlike Banton, Patterson uses this to distance herself from the concept. ³⁶ Consequently, the work is dedicated to assessing ‘the various factors involved in absorption’ with discrimination regarded as irrelevant in comparison, leading her to leave ‘the study of prejudice attitudes and behaviour’, found only ‘among a small minority of individuals’ to ‘the psychologists’. ³⁷ In this way Patterson’s work demonstrates her perception that discrimination was a peripheral, abnormal issue to the topic of ‘race relations’ and as such it implies the low importance she assigned to it and the emphasis she placed on the role and responsibilities of the ‘dark strangers’.

A changing understanding of discrimination: 1965–1969

The ‘race relations’ literature published towards the end of the 1960s was radically different from that at the start of the decade. The field’s nature shifted, with the extent of discrimination against ethnic minorities, and its relevance to the scholarship being discussed in a far more overt and homogenous manner than before. This shift was not without contradictions and its own tensions. Though the IRR did produce some ‘progressive’ studies during the latter half of the 1960s, as discussed below, it still maintained in its domestic research an overall paternalist thrust. Criticism of the policy-oriented ‘line’ of Colour and Citizenship (1969) started the rebellion within the Institute of Race Relations (IRR: the organisation responsible for commissioning the vast majority of literature on ‘race’ during the period), due to its members and majority of staff wanting the institute to direct its focus at the black experience of discrimination rather than studying the supposed problems posed to white society by the presence of Commonwealth settlers.

The ‘racialization of England’ which Mica Nava characterises as prominent in the 1970s and 1980s had its foundations laid during the 1960s. ³⁸ 1964 witnessed the blatant exploitation of racist sentiments in electioneering. During the general election campaign in Smethwick (West Midlands) in which Tory Peter Griffiths displaced Labour in a traditional seat, the slogan went, ‘If you want a N****r for a neighbour, vote Labour’. In 1965 the first race relations act was passed outlawing discrimination in public places and setting up a Race Relations Board and the quasi-governmental National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants (NCCI) (which would, over the following decades, morph into the CRC, then CRE and lastly become incorporated into the Equality and Human Rights Commission). At the same time, Labour passed the 1965 White Paper which continued the Tory policy of controlling immigration – leading to the ‘numbers game’ on race. The notion that the number of immigrants was a threat to the British way of life was of course epitomised by Enoch Powell’s intervention from 1968 via the ‘Rivers of Blood’ and other speeches. All these proceedings took place over three years, painting a picture of how prominent ‘race’ had become within both public and political consciousness, becoming well-established by the end of the decade. ³⁹ And, in this climate, ‘race relations’ literature necessarily became increasingly concerned with discrimination.

The transformation of the literature: 1965–1968

The situation of migrants within housing, when discussing discrimination, is one of the defining features of the literature throughout the 1960s. ⁴⁰ Elizabeth Burney in her IRR Survey-commissioned study, Housing on Trial: a study of immigrants and local government (1967) recognised discrimination as the biggest factor in preventing newcomers from accessing housing. ‘It is beyond doubt that racial prejudice rules out to coloured immigrants a substantial slice of whatever rented accommodation is going.’ ⁴¹ The book investigates a variety of different factors contributing towards the inequality facing immigrants in housing, concluding in the chapter aptly named ‘Action Needed’, that more laws against racial discrimination are one of the most effective ways to deal with this inequality, making clear the importance she places on the subject, its role in inequality and the structural basis of it. ⁴² In so doing Burney frames discrimination as an issue much closer to the contemporary understanding of institutional racism than it was framed by earlier writers. Another Survey-commissioned piece of research to be published was Race, Community and Conflict (1967) by John Rex and Robert Moore, examining housing in Birmingham’s Sparkbrook in terms of ‘housing class’. This was to attract much media attention and would stand the test of time as a popular but also academic contribution to the debate about racism in housing. ⁴³

Within this context black settler communities (through groups like the Indian Workers’ Association, the Pakistani Workers’ Association, the West Indian Standing Conference, NICCI, the Birmingham-based Coordinating Committee Against Racial Discrimination (1961) and the national Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD, established in 1964 as a kind of civil right organisation following Martin Luther King’s visit to the UK)) were generating their own statements, bodies of evidence and ad hoc publications, out of community needs, resources and concerns, relating, for example, to wider black and anti-colonial politics, or, to more local issues. See, for example, S. Hall, ‘The Young Englanders’ NICCI, 1967; the book by West Indian Gazette contributor, Donald Hinds, Journey to an illusion, London Heinemann, 1966; and West Indian Standing Conference, ‘The Unsquare Deal: London’s bus colour-bar’, WISC, 1967.

Most controversial amongst the ‘indigenous’ literature was the West Indian Standing Conference’s publication of Joe Hunte’s ‘Nigger Hunting in England?’ – which reaches the unambiguous conclusion that ‘sergeants and constables do leave stations with the express purpose of going “nigger hunting”’, citing numerous instances in which white individuals have been treated more favourably to ethnic minorities, and pointing out that many minorities felt suspicious of the police. ⁴⁴

It has to be noted that at this time there was no ‘race relations’ field of study in universities. Research was being commissioned by the IRR (which had a publishing arrangement with Oxford University Press and its own ‘Special Series’) and later by NCCI which, with the Race Relations Board, was to ask Political and Economic Planning (PEP) to conduct a crucial landmark survey in 1966 into racial discrimination, discussed below.

The works of Burney and Hunte alone tackle the existence of discrimination with drastically more vehemence than any of the earlier works. W. W. Daniel tackled the idea even more obviously in Racial Discrimination in England (1968) drawn from and giving far wider circulation (as a Penguin paperback) to the PEP research commissioned to examine areas not covered by that first weak race relations act. This research carried out 974 interviews into housing, employment and service usage across the country, concluding that ‘without any doubt’ there was ‘substantial discrimination in Britain against coloured immigrants in employment, in housing and in the provision of certain services’ and that this discrimination ‘is largely based on colour’. ⁴⁵ It took on either directly or indirectly the positions adopted by previous writers; for example, Huxley, who explained the overcrowding facing ethnic minorities as ‘just what they were used to back at home and what many of them like’, proposing their rejection from British society as a more likely explanation. The report also believed that the notion that ‘time would reduce discrimination; familiarity would reduce hostility and make immigrants more acceptable’ was incorrect, and that, in fact, the opposite was true, with discrimination increasing as the newcomers became more adjusted to ‘English ways of life’, signifying that intolerance was far more deeply embedded than was thought by the earlier writers. ⁴⁶ John Rex supported this view, suggesting that ‘any attempt to explain the structure and dynamics of race-relations situations in terms of the strangeness of the newcomer, of culture shock, or in terms of immigrant and host, is inadequate’. ⁴⁷

Daniel made no bones about it: discrimination in Britain was extensive with ‘no doubt that the major component in the discrimination is colour’. ⁴⁸ Daniel established not only the extent of discrimination within Britain, but also its consequences, suggesting that it ran the risk of creating ‘alienated groups of second-class citizens’. ⁴⁹

As Rose was to put it in Colour and Citizenship (1969), ‘The PEP report did not provide new information. The existence of discrimination on grounds of colour had been known to many groups of people.’ And, he reminds readers that the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) had, in the summer of 1966, conducted its own tests of discrimination against second-generation school-leavers – getting much media coverage. But the report’s significance lay in the way it took the debate away from whether the problem was ‘their’ foreignness or ‘our’ hostility. It established that ‘discrimination in Britain varied in extent “from the massive to the substantial” [which] would have been anticipated only by very few people’. ⁵⁰

By the end of the 1960s the concept of discrimination not only increased in its prominence within the literature, but came to define it, as Jenny Bourne states in her description of the fight which was ultimately to shake the IRR to its foundations in 1972: ‘It was not black people who should be examined, but white society; it was not a question of educating blacks and whites for integration, but of fighting institutional racism; it was not race relations that was the field for study, but racism.’ ⁵¹