Mixed Race Studies

Black People in Britain: Response and Reaction, 1945-62

History Today
Volume 36, Issue 1 (January 1986)

Paul B. Rich

Paul Rich argues that while the official response to post-war immigration was slow to develop, the tensions and white backlash of the late fifties marked its emergence as a national political issue.

The Settlers from the West Indies and South Asia who arrived in Britain from the late 1940s up to the 1960s found a society remarkably unprepared for their incorporation into its elaborate class and cultural networks. Almost from the very start of this post-war migration, when the SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in June 1948 with 492 passengers from the West Indies, there was a mixture in governmental circles of either panic and fear of impending racial conflict or a more detached dismissal of the whole issue as a storm in a teacup. One Home Office civil servant minuted for example that ‘sooner or later action must be taken to keep out the undesirable elements of our colonial population’, for otherwise their presence in Britain would present ‘a formidable problem’ to the various government departments concerned, such as the Home Office, the Colonial Office and the Ministry of Labour. Some government ministers, including the Prime Minister Clement Attlee, refused to take the ‘Jamaican party’ to the United Kingdom ‘too seriously’, though the worry in official circles continued to increase over the following years. It was pointed out, however, to the Colonial Secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, as early as 1948 that any attempt by legislation to restrict this immigration would have to come from Britain itself rather than in the Colonial context, since otherwise there would be massive opportunities for evasion. ‘In the case of Jamaica’, some ministerial notes pointed out, ‘the next country would be Cuba, and obviously we cannot control the Government of Cuba’…

…The local councils of social service up and down the country approached the area of black immigration with a very limited fund of experience. The ideal of ‘social service’ had quite a long tradition in British philanthropy and can be traced to the rise of a secularised Anglican conscience at the end of the nineteenth century centred around the notion of ‘duty’. The National Council of Social Service was established in 1919 and had developed the notion of ‘community service’ in the inter-war years in response to growing patterns of sub-urbanisation around housing estates. Local councils of social service had concerned themselves with local community centres, clubs for the unemployed and rural community councils in villages. They had not been concerned with ‘multi-racial” issues, which had been mainly confined to the seaport towns where, in Liverpool for example, the local university settlement had got involved in the issue in the late 1920s and 1930s through the Liverpool Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children. Other issues surrounding colour like the problems confronting black students in Britain, had been taken up either by activist bodies like the West African Students Union (WASU) in London, run by a Nigerian, Ladipo Solanke, or the various universities concerned. In addition, the Colonial Office had taken a welfare interest in students during the war years through fear of rising colonial nationalism, but by the early 1950s had devolved its responsibility in this sphere to the British Council. In the early 1950s, therefore, the councils of social service approached the issue of post-war black immigration with few clear guidelines and tended to resort to whatever ‘expert’ advice there was available – whether from missionaries with a colonial experience of race, a small number of interested social workers or social anthropologists and sociologists who were by this time becoming interested in the new subject area of ‘race relations’…

…This association of the black presence with moral decline became to some extent popularised through the popular media, such as the 1959 film Sapphire which still linked the mixed race ‘half-caste’ with prostitution and the underworld (though the film did contain many useful documentary aspects which pointed out the social diversity of the immigrants and the problems of white racism). The National Council of Social Service tried to defend the immigrants, especially the West Indians, from charges of ‘loose living’ in its circular, Nacoss News, but nevertheless admitted ‘of all the possible causes of difficulty and tension… differences of outlook and ways of living remain the most intractable’, and noted the charges of some whites of ‘the noisy social habits’ of some immigrants. ‘Race relations’ began to become a serious industry as growing ties were forged with the newly established Institute of Race Relations in London, which had hived off from the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1958 under the Directorship of Philip Mason and developed a British interest as well as a wider international one. The recognition, though, that social work and the easing of racial tensions in many inner cities required increasingly specialised expertise which the older generation of voluntary workers in the local councils of social service did not possess, encouraged a climate favouring immigration control in order that resources could be geared to coping with those immigrants who had already settled in Britain. There was, therefore, a concern about the ability of the social services to maintain an adequate level of social control in the inner city areas which enhanced the back-bench Conservative and constituency pressure by 1960 in favour of legislative restriction. After years of resisting these appeals through fear of antagonising opinion in the West Indies and India, the Conservative government finally decided to introduce a bill in the Autumn of 1961. Speaking in support of the measure, the Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, noted that the essence of the bill was ‘control’, for the voluntary sector could ‘deal with limited numbers only, and, if the numbers of new entrants are excessive, their assimilation into our society presents the gravest difficulty’.

The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act thus reflected an important new government determination to intervene in the area of Commonwealth immigration and initiate a measure of restriction on the numbers of black immigrants. There had been previous measures before the First World War to control alien immigration through the 1905 and 1914 Alien Acts, and in 1925 the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order had been passed to restrict the entry of black ‘alien’ seamen, some of whom claimed British citizenship but were unable to produce the necessary documentation. But there had traditionally been powerful political pressures inhibiting the restriction of Commonwealth immigrants, and it was this concern for the Commonwealth connection which the 1962 Act overrode. Initiating a new pattern of restriction of immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia, the legislation in some respects brought Britain, as the former imperial mother country, into line with her more racially conscious colonial daughters. Restriction of black immigration had first been initiated in Australia and New Zealand in 1901 to exclude Asian and Chinese immigrants and prevent competition with white labour. Based on an education test developed in Natal, these restrictions had been initiated in a militant climate of racial Anglo-Saxonism and belief in the inherent superiority of white racial stocks. The supporters of the 1962 legislation (apart from an extreme right-wing fringe) desisted from justifying it in such terms, but the measure did nevertheless echo some of the previous patterns of restriction in the white dominions, even though the criterion of admittance was through a voucher system gearing the numbers of likely ‘newcomers’ to the likely number of jobs available for them…

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Philanthropic racism in Britain: The Liverpool university settlement, the anti-slavery society and the issue of ‘half-caste’ children, 1919-51

Immigrants & Minorities
Volume 3, Issue 1 (1984)
Pages 69-88
DOI: 10.1080/02619288.1984.9974570

Paul B. Rich

The history of racial ideology in Britain has focused mainly on extreme groups of the political right. Less attention has been paid to more ‘respectable’ forms of racism. This paper attempts to redress the balance. It concentrates upon two groups, the Anti-Slavery Society and the Settlement Movement and, with particular reference to Liverpool and Cardiff between 1919 and 1951, examines their attitudes towards Britain’s ‘half-caste’ population.

The history of racial ideology in Britain has tended mostly to focus upongroups on the extreme right-wing fringe to the exclusion of what may be termed ‘middle opinion’. This rather narrow range of analysis, centred around the yardstick of fascism and its political variants, can lead to the downplaying in certain aspects of British racial attitudes which can be seen to represent a continuation, in a somewhat different guise, of Victorian racial ideas. It was Hugh Tinker who originally suggested this possible linkage between more modern British race attitudes and what he termed ‘neo-Victorianism’, though the thesis has been given no substantial institutional anchorage. This article, therefore, proposes to look at one particular set of institutional links between the Victorian era and the more modern arena of race relations in the 1920s and 1930s by looking at the role of the Anti-Slavery Society and the Settlement Movement in the debate on ‘half-castes’ in the seaport towns of Liverpool, and to a lesser degree Cardiff, between the wars.

This issue is of importance to students of race in Britain for a number of reasons. Both the Anti-Slavery Society and the Settlement Movement had roots in the Victorian philanthropic concern with the lower social orders and the less privileged. Though the anti-slavery movement had its heyday during the middle of the nineteenth century before and after the American Civil War of 1861-5, it left a strong legacy in middle-class liberal thought in Britain which was to enjoy a renewed upsurge on the issue of ‘forced labour’ in the Belgian Congo during the Edwardian years through the campaign of E.D. Morel and the Congo Reform Association. Similarly, the university settlement movement was a product of middle-class concern with the lower class—especially in London—in the 1880s as rising class consciousness and residential separation between classes made older and more paternalistic methods of social control increasingly ineffective. Both these Victorian movements carried on in…

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Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters

Stanford University Press
2009
312 pages
11 tables, 15 figures, 16 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780804759984
Paper ISBN: 9780804759991
E-book ISBN: 9780804770996

Edited by:

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Professor of Asian American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Shades of Difference addresses the widespread but little studied phenomenon of colorism—the preference for lighter skin and the ranking of individual worth according to skin tone. Examining the social and cultural significance of skin color in a broad range of societies and historical periods, this insightful collection looks at how skin color affects people’s opportunities in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America.

Is skin color bias distinct from racial bias? How does skin color preference relate to gender, given the association of lightness with desirability and beauty in women? The authors of this volume explore these and other questions as they take a closer look at the role Western-dominated culture and media have played in disseminating the ideal of light skin globally. With its comparative, international focus, this enlightening book will provide innovative insights and expand the dialogue around race and gender in the social sciences, ethnic studies, African American studies, and gender and women’s studies.

Contents

Contributors
• Introduction: Economies of Color—Angela P. Harris
• Part I The Significance of Skin Color: Transnational Divergences and Convergences
  • 1. The Social Consequences of Skin Color in Brazil—Edward Telles
  • 2. A Colorstruck World: Skin Tone, Achievement, and Self-Esteem Among African American Women—Verna M. Keith
  • 3. The Latin Americanization of U.S. Race Relations: A New Pigmentocracy—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David R. Dietrich
• Part II Meanings of Skin Color: Race, Gender, Ethnic Class, and National Identity
  • 4. Filipinos and the Color Complex: Ideal Asian Beauty—Joanne L. Rondilla
  • 5. The Color of an Ideal Negro Beauty Queen: Miss Bronze 1961-1968—Maxine Leeds Craig
  • 6. Caucasian, Coolie, Black, or White? Color and Race in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora—Aisha Khan
  • 7. Ihe Dynamics of Color: Mestizaje, Racism, and Blackness in Veracruz, Mexico—Christina A. Sue
• Part III Consuming Lightness: Modernity, Transnationalism, and Commodification
  • 8. Skin Tone and the Persistence of Biological Race in Egg Donation for Assisted Reproduction—Charis Thompson
  • 9. Fair Enough? Color and the Commodification of Self in Indian Matrimonials—Jyotsna Vaid
  • 10. Consuming Lightness: Segmented Markets and Global Capital in the Skin-Whitening Trade—Evelyn Nakano Glenn
  • 11. Skin Lighteners in South Africa: Transnational Entanglements and Technologies of the Self—Lynn M. Thomas
• Part IV Countering Colorism: Legal Approaches
  • 12. Multilayered Racism: Courts’ Continued Resistance to Colorism Claims—Taunya Lovell Banks
  • 13. The Case for Legal Recognition of Colorism Claims—Trina Jones
  • 14. Latinos at Work: When Color Discrimination Involves More Than Color—Tanya Katerí Hernandez
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

Read the Introduction here.

Mandy Oxendine

University of Illinois Press
September 1997
136 pages
ISBN-10: 0252063473
ISBN-13: 9780252063473

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Foreword by

William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In a novel rejected by a major publisher in the 19th century as too shocking for its time, writer Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) challenges the notion that race, class, education, and gender must define one’s “rightful” place in society. Both a romance and a mystery, Mandy Oxendine tells the compelling story of two fair-skinned, racially mixed lovers who chose to live on opposite sides of the color line.

Foreword

Mandy Oxedine is Charles W. Chesnutt’s first novel, though it has had to wait one hundred years to find a publisher. The leading African American fiction writer at the turn of the century, Chesnutt apparently began Mandy Oxendine a few years after he made his initial literary success as a short story writer for the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. Failing to interest his publisher in Mandy Oxendine, Chesnutt decided to focus his energies on making a book of short fiction, an effort that was doubly rewarded in 1899 with the publication of The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. Mandy Oxendine returned to its creator’s file of unpublished manuscripts; evidently Chesnutt never placed it in circulation again.

The effect of Mandy Oxendine on the long evolution of The House behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt s first published novel, was significant, for in both stories the central issue is the dilemmas a fair-skinned African American woman must confront in passing for white. When compared with Mandy Oxendine, The House behind the Cedars has reater narrative density and is more sure-handed in its development of secondary characters and plots. On the other hand, with regard to the depiction of the mixed-race woman, the central figure in both stories, the earlier unpublished novel is more resistant to popular notions of femininity and less willing to accommodate itself to the protocols of “tragic mulatta” fiction than is The House behind the Cedars. Perhaps the fate of Mandy Oxendine helped convince Chesnutt that to get his version of the novel of passing into print, he would have to tone down and conventionalize some of the qualities that make Mandy Oxendine remarkable. Certainly next to Rena Walden, the pathetic ingenue who plays the victimized heroine in The House behind the Cedars, Mandy Oxendine seems almost italicized by her bold self-assertiveness and her canny sense of how a woman of color must operate if she is to protect and advance her interests in the post-Reconstruction South. Through her plainspoken southern vernacular, Mandy Oxendine articulates a tough-minded assessment of her racial, gendered, and class-bound condition, which sheds a good deal of light on her creator’s firsthand experience of life along the color line in a region of North Carolina very much like Mandy’s own milieu.

Whether Chesnutt agrees with Mandy s solution to her situation or whether he favors the strategy espoused by her eventual husband, Tom Lowrey, is left deliberately vague in Mandy Oxendine. In the later published novels, Chesnutt usually states or strongly implies his moral perspective on social issues, but in Mandy Oxendine he seems more reticent, as though testing the waters. He may have been trying to determine for himself just how far a writer in his position should go in representing forthrightly and objectively the complex web of personal desire, racial obligation, and socioeconomic ambition that held the mixed-blood in social suspension in the post-Civil War South. Is Mandy Oxendine to be condemned for having spun her own web of deceit, or has she always been caught in a cage designed by the new southern social order to restrain those who might challenge its official deceptions about color and class? However a reader responds to these questions, one suspects that the social and gender issues that probably caused Mandy Oxendine to seem beyond the pale one hundred years ago are likely to make the novel of more than passing interest today, for Mandy Oxendine is a prototype of a new brand of African American literary realism in the early twentieth century.