Color Crisis in Britain

...The statistics since have proved Gait-skell's contention that the only sharp increases in immigration follow reports from Britain that the door might soon be slammed shut...

...They believe in fair play, and eventually, if you have a case, you can prevail upon them...

...Immigrant unemployment has not yet become a significant problem...

...It is an utter and complete myth that there is the slightest danger or prospect of millions and millions of brown and black people coming into this country," he declared...

...Only one out of every twenty immigrants wears a white collar at work, while one in every four natives does...

...Immigrant leaders, while pessimistic about the immediate future, have not despaired...

...On thirty-eight out of sixty attempts, the West Indian was told the room had been taken while the other two testers were offered the same room...

...Then the government, pressured by an ethnocentric clamor from the public, began recasting and narrowing the definition of British citizenship...

...Rose and the other authors of Color and Citizenship...

...This is the source of the anxiety, this masquerade which encourages the average man to look for some scapegoat to blame for all these disturbing changes...

...As yet, they have shown little aptitude for learning from the experience of others...

...My children grew up here...

...families have been crowded into single rooms...

...Their ways are English, all they speak is English...

...Ministers don't like having to explain to the average voter why all these changes have occurred, why Britain is no longer a world power, and why Britain has to adopt a different sort of role in the world...

...Reinforcing white stereotypes that characterize immigrants as dirty and incompetent, as prolific breeders who overburden the social services, is a profound ignorance of the customs and numbers of the newcomers...

...At the gut level," one local board member said recently, "we know there is much more discrimination, but the difficulty is to prove it even under the most airtight legislation...

...In retail shops and other services involving intimate public contact, immigrants are often found in stockrooms but rarely at sales counters...

...Nundy blames government leaders for allowing the immigrant to become the butt of anxiety...

...Color and Citizenship reported that there had been no lessening in the concentration of immigrants in low-pay, low-status jobs between 1961 and 1967...

...Discrimination in promotion is as frequent a topic of complaint as initial hiring procedures...

...Two hundred of the pioneers spent their first night on British soil in an abandoned air raid shelter...

...The recent, highly acclaimed seven-year study of British race relations, Color and Citizenship, prepared by E.J.B...

...They're just colored Englishmen...

...Confident that they too were landing in a new world, 492 black Jamaicans were on board the Windrush when it docked at Tilbury on the Thames several weeks later...

...Gaitskell's ideals and arguments were buried with him when he died in 1963...

...Two centuries before the Windrush made its voyage, the architects of the Empire began rewarding those they ruled with the priceless and costless gift of British citizenship...

...For most Britons the cruder and more potent Nineteenth Century doctrines of racial superiority had superseded the sophisticated excuses for Empire favored by statesmen...

...Most immigrants, including many who have fully adapted to British life, still live in these decaying areas...

...While Britain's troubles seem slight measured against the American yardstick of racial discord, they may become as intractable as ours within a decade if white Britons refuse to accept the children of non-white immigrants as first-class citizens...

...The Daniels study, however, found that immigrants who had been raised in English-speaking homes were downgraded more drastically than those who had spoken no English at home...

...To date, Lucifer has had the pulpit to himself...

...In the process, Britons have discovered themselves no more able to reconcile liberal public ideals with bigoted private sentiments than Americans have proved capable of practicing both egalitarian democracy and racial segregation...

...Caribbectns and Asians have found their mutual status as underdogs an inadequate basis for collective action...

...Only one out of every four English natives falls into these categories...

...Ominous as the slide toward a segregated society has been, the consensus among English anti-racist activists, native and immigrant, is that there is still time to work out a multi-racial solution but not enough of it to permit thumb-twiddling...

...Powell, while publicly requesting his followers to behave, has himself been stumping the hustings insisting that a few more years of Labor government will result in a Black Britain...

...The contradiction arises between two cherished national self-definitions—in this case, that the British are a tolerant people and a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon race...

...Wherever home had been-—Pakistan, India, or the Caribbean—the first destination of the newcomer was the neighborhood where previous immigrants from his native village or island had settled...

...During the 1965 border war, for example, Indian and Pakistani communities were convulsed by frenzies of propaganda and fund raising...

...Apparently the suspicion that the game is fixed is beginning to spread...

...Few realized that 500 million individuals from Canada to Ceylon were as entitled as they to proclaim Civis Britannicus Sum...

...But the average Englishman hearing the word thought only of his Anglo-Saxon brethren in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who hung pictures of the royal family over their mantles just as he did...

...This voyage charted a course for a migration that has transformed Great Britain into Europe's first multi-racial society...

...Instead they maintain the pretense of world power while insisting mere economic survival requires everyone to sacrifice," he said...

...Common citizenship for colonists and colonized demonstrated this willingness to broaden the membership in the old and enviable British family...

...Nearly fifty per cent of the country's housing facilities are allocated and operated by local authorities, but less than five per cent of the immigrant population has benefited from this form of accommodation...

...few will any longer want to declare Civis Bri-tannicus Sum...

...Asians already have the sense of cultural—if not national—identity that Black Power tries to synthesize, and West Indians still pride themselves on their English-ness...

...These anxieties, observers of British race relations insist, could have been and still could be mastered by leaders who confronted the anxiety instead of appeasing the anxious...

...Powell's admirers have drawn up a long list of moderate Tory incumbents whom they hope to replace...

...Immigrants may occasionally supervise other immigrants but rarely even the most unskilled white workers...

...As newcomers, immigrants must wait for those ahead to be served, and in some London boroughs an applicant may not qualify even to join the line until he has five years' residency...

...Prime Minister Wilson's efforts to square his country's international checkbook before accounting to the voters is finally showing results...

...Drawn, as white workers have been drawn, by plentiful jobs to London and the West Midlands, the immigrants have joined the scramble for living quarters in the very cities where the persistent postwar housing shortage has been most acute...

...Organizations seeking to patch over these rifts to form a united front have either collapsed in recriminations or limited their aims to the exchange of information...

...with one or two exceptions, white English residents outnumber colored immigrants even in areas with the highest concentration of newcomers...

...The second generation, the authors found, is remaining stationary or even falling back...

...The emphasis on the need for control helped to create the anxieties it was intended to calm," was the conclusion of E.J.B...

...Nevertheless, living conditions are far superior to those of Harlem today, or even of New York's lower East Side at the peak of Eastern European immigration three generations ago...

...Unless they get this treatment the Seeds of racial discord may be sown...

...After interviewing sixty retailers, the Daniels study reported that forty had no colored sales or counter staff...

...Skin color is the immigrant's first and primary handicap . . ." The Select Parliamentary Committee on Race Relations, summing up its study made last year, said that the "second generation may be less patient in surmounting the difficulties that confront them than their parents have been...

...crammed into decaying and overcrowded housing, they often live in unsanitary conditions...

...Housing priority goes to those who have been standing on queue the longest rather than to those with the greatest need...

...Those who did come, he added, would be easily absorbed into the British economy because of the correlation between the numbers of job vacancies and the immigration figures...

...On five other occasions the West Indian was offered the room but at a higher rent than that offered the others...

...This is exactly where our leaders have failed," Philip Mason told me...

...England simply isn't America," Mason added...

...that's why I am still hopeful about the future...

...I think women might object," one employer explained, "if they were served by a colored girl in corsetry...

...by the time Harold Wilson became Prime Minister, Labor's policy was indistinguishable from that of the Tories...

...A good angel and a bad angel are struggling over the souls of the British people," is the figurative description of the conflict offered to me by Dipak Nundy, director of the Runnymede Trust, an organization devoted to race relations education...

...only a few of the most daring have scaled the walls that hem immigrants into the initial reception neighborhoods...

...Figures from the 1966 census show that one out of every two male immigrants is either a semi-skilled or unskilled manual worker...

...Only three per cent of white English families live in furnished rooms...

...British statesmen using the word before audiences of Africans, Malays, Caribbeans, or Indians portrayed it as a synonym for a happy multi-racial brotherhood of mutual interests and common citizenship...

...Raised at the globe's cultural antipodes, they differ more from each other than they do from the people who touched them both with the imperial scepter...

...Under the new law, the insulting advertisements are gone but immigrants insist the discrimination continues...

...A Sikh factory hand is as unlikely to go pub-hopping with a Jamaican bus conductor, one Indian immigrant told me, as he is to go home to dinner with his English foreman...

...Poverty is not endemic among immigrants who live in these areas...

...Plow our colored teenagers fare in the next few years," a West Indian community relations worker in Wolverhampton recently predicted, "will determine the course of race relations in this country for the next hundred years...

...They will be the test of the British sense of fair play...

...By 1975, Britain will have 500 thousand colored school children under the age of sixteen—more than half of them born in Britain...

...Prior to 1962 some 550 thousand dark-skinned immigrants exercised their right as citizens to unrestricted entry...

...The identical blooper has been made by several parliamentary candidates in printing their campaign literature...

...Few immigrants would ever have left home had there not been more jobs than men to fill them in Britain's perpetually short-handed labor market...

...Marked by skin pigmentation as aliens to the only society they know, they will soon consider themselves permanent outsiders...

...As Philip Mason, director of the Institute of Race Relations, told me, the circumstances essential for Black Power tactics to be effective do not yet exist in Britain: Colored immigrants total only two per cent of the national population and are no more than a small fraction of the electorate in those parliamentary constituencies where they are most numerous...

...In Greater London one out of every two immigrant households must share a toilet with another family while only one of every six English families lacks a private toilet...

...There the initial trauma of culture shock was diminished by eating familiar foods, hearing recognized accents, and trading news about the people back home...

...Apprenticeships, a prerequisite for nearly all skilled manual occupations, are often a "whites only" preserve...

...Since 1962 an additional 200 thousand have arrived, usually permitted to enter only because they were the dependents of earlier immigrants...

...Black Power advocates have inspired even less enthusiasm in their attempts to coax immigrants into a harness of racial solidarity...

...Paradoxically, psychologist William Daniels' tests revealed that the more educated or culturally assimilated a colored immigrant is, the more likely he is to encounter blatant discrimination...

...The late Hugh Gaitskell, then leader of the Labor opposition, scornfully arraigned the Conservatives for abetting the racists and alarming the fearful...

...If these second generation immigrants, linguistically and educationally the equal of their white schoolmates, are imprisoned by the same patterns of residential segregation, and if they automatically inherit their fathers' unskilled jobs when they leave school, Britain's failure to pass the test will be obvious...

...Despite the immigrants' visible contribution to the labor-short health services, sixty per cent of the whites interviewed accused the immigrants of taking "more out of the country than they put into it" in terms of social services...

...Whatever the long-range prospects, the immediate outlook is bleak...

...Much depends upon how well white Britons, and particularly the leaders of the Labor Party, have learned the danger of equivocation by witnessing the American racial crisis over the last decade...

...Although lumped together in white stereotypes, Caribbeans and Asians have found their mutual status as underdogs an inadequate basis for collective action...

...One employer insists antagonisms between Barbadians and Jamaicans in his factory are so intense that he cannot assign them to the same work crew...

...Permitted only inferior jobs, they eventually become fit for nothing better...

...They will expect equal treatment with their white contemporaries...

...Ethnic accommodation and amalgamation had hardly been thought of, much less experienced...

...The ratio of persons to rooms is eighty-five per cent higher among immigrants than among whites...

...The prophecies of Enoch Powell, the right-wing Conservative spokesman for anti-colored sentiment, that "rivers of blood" will result from the occupation of "entire city centers by a foreign and alien population" are answered by cries of "shame" from Labor Party backbenchers instead of by detailed rebuttals from their government's ministers...

...Concessions to anti-immigrant forces began under the Tories with the first control act of 1962...

...The British dilemma, if posed in slightly altered language, is parallel to the one Gunnar Myrdal identified for America in 1942...

...Just as the poets of the Enlightenment borrowed their meters from Horace and Ovid, so the statesmen of the day took their justifications from the Caesars, rationalizing their rule over foreign and distant races as sharing the benefits of a superior civilization...

...Predestined by geography to be insular, the English had for generations snickered that Africa began at Calais...

...Capitalizing on all of these grievances, Enoch Powell's anti-immigrant appeal is strongest, according to opinion polls, among those with the most resentment—the middle aged and the elderly, the skilled blue collar and insecure white collar classes...

...But they also endorse the view of Color and Citizenship that "the next ten years will be decisive for the future course of race relations...

...Now police reports indicate a slow but perceptible rise...

...EDWARD W. KNAPPMAN recently spent three months in England and Ireland...

...This conviction will become an article of faith if awakened ambition and claims for acceptance are frustrated by a society intent on confining the second generation to their parents' class and station...

...Most importantly, poverty and race don't have an exact correlation the way they have in Harlem and Watts...

...Rose and others for the Institute of Race Relations, reported that two out of three whites exaggerated the numbers of immigrants by 200 to 500 per cent...

...Such resentful groups, Nundy believes, have "found a convenient scapegoat in the colored immigrant...

...Nobody will say, T don't like you because you're colored.' They'll say, 'The flat's been taken, you came just a bit too late.' " Testing the extent of discrimination two years ago, industrial psychologist William Daniels sent a West Indian immigrant, a Hungarian immigrant, and a native Englishman to apply for rooms advertised in the press without an explicit color bar...

...Since most immigrants are employed in marginal production, working night shifts and lacking seniority, they are sure to be the first casualties of an economic belt-tightening...

...Evidence from recent by-elections and Parliamentary attacks on the Race Relations Board indicates that the 1970 election campaign will be a vintage one for anti-immigrant emotions...

...For many Englishmen raised before the war, readjusting to these realities has been complicated by rapid changes at home: in the class structure, in technology, in population patterns, in manners and morals...

...The immigrants' misfortunes confirm and fulfill the white prejudices that have confined the colored man to rummaging for society's scraps...

...As wives and children joined breadwinners already in England, whole ". . . Caribbeans and Asians have found their mutual status as underdogs an inadequate basis for collective action...

...Some were especially recruited in their homelands for jobs, particularly in transport and health services, that had gone begging when offered to British workmen...

...Nundy predicts that "any severe recession will trigger a terrible working class backlash...

...The Race Relations Board, charged with enforcing anti-discrimination laws, reports that complaints about job problems are twice as numerous as those about housing...

...Whether the college-educated West Indian gave his occupation as hospital administrator or bus conductor, the frequency of discrimination was the same...

...Those who began a job hunt when they arrived were quickly signed on wherever the work was underpaid and unpopular...

...In effect, the immigrants became Britian's coolies, doing the jobs whites won't do in a labor-short economy...

...Generally, these immigrant settlements were in the dreary belts of crumbling houses that encircle the centers of British cities...

...Whistle-stop tours by Malcolm X in 1965 and Stokely Car-michael in 1967 produced little more than a score of soap-box imitators on Hyde Park speakers' corner...

...Until recently, crime rates among the immigrants have been even lower than among the generally law-abiding English natives...

...Daniels concluded from the experiment that color rather than foreign-ness or class status had been the sole criterion used by the landlords to rate the potential tenants...

...Moreover, rising unemployment will stiffen competition for scarce jobs between natives and immigrants...

...Although editorialists and political leaders have given more attention to the housing issue, the immigrants themselves regard job discrimination as their biggest problem...

...More likely to apply for jobs that would put him over whites and more likely to seek acceptance in white society, he meets the prejudice his more isolated brethren rarely face...

...When the Empire began to creak and groan with the strains of nationalist and home rule demands, the British jettisoned direct rule but salvaged the family myth by creating the Commonwealth, an institution and word as pliant as the tongues of those who coined it...

...Immigration formalities were minimal since each of the passengers was a "citizen of the United Kingdom and colonies...

...Gill, an Indian town councillor in Southall just outside London, told me, "This is one of the best societies in the world and the British people have some of the best qualities in the world...

...Commodious public housing is one of the British welfare state's best and most available bargains, if you qualify...

...He is the personification of all the residual obligations of Empire and Commonwealth...

...a mere seven per cent of those who held professional, administrative, or clerical jobs in their home countries perform equivalent tasks in Britain...

...Instead of moving outwards, they are encountering barriers and behind these barriers pressures are building up...

...Formerly he was an editor for Facts on File, an international news reference service...

...Employers often justify their failure to promote skilled colored workers by stating that while they are not prejudiced themselves, white employees, clients, or customers would cause trouble...

...Half of all immigrant families in Britain live in cramped, furnished rooms, often the only housing available in many of these neighborhoods...

...Even well-intentioned Britons have made little effort to learn about their new countrymen...

...But the prestigious National Institute of Economic and Social Research predicts that the price of a $2 billion balance of payments surplus in 1970 will be a rise in unemployment over the 700 thousand mark to near-recession levels...

...White Britons often contend that such downgrading results from poor language skills...

...their treatment will justify or negate Councillor Gill's faith...

...There he was shown the ropes of British life, told where to find a job, and rented a room or at least a bed...

...Before the 1968 law prohibiting housing discrimination was enacted, a government study of London accommodations revealed that only eleven per cent of advertised vacancies did not specifically state, "No Coloreds," "Europeans Only," or a similar restriction...

...During the past twenty-five years, the Empire, and with it Britain's big-power status, have crumbled away...

...Labor's potential Gabriels have hesitated to lead the right-ous for fear of offending the wicked...

...The convenience of "staying with your own kind," extensive discrimination by private landlords, and the queuing system for public housing have constricted the immigrants to the over-crowded and under-serviced core areas of the cities...

...Racial prejudice in Britain, unlike in the United States, is a symptom rather than a source of anxiety...

...Militants and moderates agree that the Kerner Commission's searing description of the United States as a country cleft by race into two societies, one rich and one poor, does not yet apply to the United Kingdom...

...Objectively, the evidence to date is depressing...

...Skin color is the immigrant's first and primary handicap in this competition...

...The British are such good diplomats," one Pakistani commented...

...One represents that famous British sense of fair play and the other the nationalistic desire for racial purity...

...they can't remember India...

...Common effort by immigrants born only a few hundred miles away are obstructed by the rivalries and loyalties of the Old Country...

...Almost every immigrant experienced a sharp drop in status when he came to Britain...

...Youth Employment Officers report that placing colored school dropouts in jobs equal to their talents requires five times as many interviews as it does for whites who have left school...

...Color Crisis in Britain by EDWARD W. KNAPPMAN Tn June 1948 the Empire Wind-rush, a rusting former cruise liner and wartime troop transport, called at Kingston harbor after ferrying several hundred European refugees to new opportunities in Latin America...

...At considerable expense, one national employers' association translated and printed a safety pamphlet in Urdu without realizing that Urdu is a literary language as incomprehensible to eighty per cent of Pakistani workmen as it is to boardroom directors...

...Despite the volume of complaints, the Board has taken positive action in only a small fraction of the nearly 1,000 employment cases submitted during its first year of operation...

...This country is their only past and only future...