From resistance to rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean struggles in Britain

Abstract

European powers, was desperate for labour, racialism operated on a free market basisadjusting itself to the ordinary laws of supply and demand. So that in the sphere of employment, where too many jobs were seeking too few workersas the state itself had acknowledged in the Nationality Act of 1948 -racialism did not debar black people from work per se. It operated instead to deskill them, to keep their wages down and to segregate them in the dirty, ill-paid jobs that white workers did not wantnot on the basis of an avowed racialism .but in the habit of an acceptable exploitation. In the sphere of housing, where too many people were seeking too few houses, racialism operated more directly to keep blacks out of the housing market and to herd them into bed-sitters in decaying inner city areas. And here the racialism was more overt and sanctioned by society. 'For the selection of tenants', wrote Ruth Glass scathingly, is regarded as being subject solely to the personal discretion of the landlord. It is understood that it is his privilege to bar Negroes, Sikhs, Jews, foreigners in general, cockneys, socialists, dogs or any other species which he wants to keep away. The recruitment of workers, however, in both state and private enterprises is a question of public policy -determined explicitly or implicitly by agreements between trade unions, employers' associations and government. As a landlord, Mr. Smith can practise discrimination openly; as an employer, he must at least disguise it. In the sphere of housing, tolerance is a matter of private initiative; in the sphere of employment, it is in some respects 'nationalised'.' I That same racialism operated under the twee name of colour bar in the pubs and clubs and bars and dance-halls to keep black people out. In schooling there were too few black children to cause a problem: the immigrants, predominantly male and single, had not come to settle. The message that was generally percolating through to the children of the mother country was that it was their labour that was wanted, not their presence. Racialism, it would appear, could reconcile that contradiction on its own -without state interference, laissez-faire, drawing on the traditions of Britain's slave and colonial centuries.The black response was halting at first. Both Afro-Caribbeans and Asians, each in their own way, found it difficult to come to terms with such primitive prejudice and to deal with such fine hypocrisy. The West Indians, who, by and large, came from a working-class at University of Manitoba Libraries on June 20, 2015 rac.sagepub.com Downloaded from There was another area, too, where such organisation was significant -and offered up a different unity: the area of anti-colonial struggle. There had always been overseas students' associations -African, Asian, Caribbean -but in the period before the First World War these were mostly in the nature of friendship councils, social clubs or debating unions. But after that war and with the 'race riots' of 1919 (in Liverpool, London, Cardiff, Hull and other por...

Unmaking citizens: passport removals, pre-emptive policing and the reimagining of colonial governmentalities

“…In earlier periods the politics of multicultural representation and struggles for "belonging" was complicated by the successful state estrangement between the institutions of "immigration" and "citizenship". If the interventions relating to post/colonial migrations in the latter half of the twentieth century could more easily point to the arbitrary nature of divisions between who constituted an "immigrant" and who, in legal terms at least, a "citizen" (Sivanandan 1981), the changing nature of empire and related global migrations in more recent times facilitated a conceptual disconnect. The disciplinary practices involved in the "deportation turn" (Gibney 2008) alongside the prolific rise in the detention of asylum seekers, for example, have not always been connected to the broader governmentalities of citizenship and its internal exclusions.…”

The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain

“…While some activists and scholars argued that research agendas should be shaped by wider political agendas and the struggle against racism (Bourne, 1980;Bridges, 1973;Sivanandan, 1981) others cautioned that there were dangers in seeing academic and scholarly research as either linked to the interests of policy-makers or community activists (Banton, 1973;Rex, 1973a). Writing about the pressures faced by researchers in the 1970s, John Rex summarised his own response to these pressures by arguing: I believe we can do more for the people of Notting Hill or Handsworth by setting their problem within a wider context of sociological theory than we can by ad hoc strategies which may involve mock heroics but which will be doomed to failure.…”

Self help and protest: the emergence of black supplementary schooling in England

“…At its foundation, 'blackness' attempted to incorporate struggles against racism in the African, Caribbean and Asian communities. Utilising existing, and building new, political alliances and community associations, collective experiences and critiques of racism brought men, women and young people from a range of migrant communities together in an asserted 'black' commonality (Hall 2006;Thomas 2005;Sivanandan 1981;de Tufo, Randle, and Ryan 1982;Henry 1991). The persistent and unifying experience of racism defined the cultural and political terrain within which black politics -and the BSS movementmade its mark: fascist attacks on black book stores, police violence and harassment of young people, and racist employment -and trade unionpractices, all unscored the urgency for a collective black response around a range of political issues and welfare concerns (see for e.g.…”