British Race Relations in Perspective

Abstract

This essay started with a discussion of whether it is possible to demarcate an area, or identify some patterns of social and political life that may be properly, or at least acceptably, described as a field of race relations. In Chapter 1 we saw that the term itself is unacceptable to some writers who prefer to speak about racism and racialisation, and there are any number of books with titles to suggest that these concepts are becoming more widely preferred to the notion of race relations. When, however, we looked into the matter more closely it became difficult to avoid the concept where relations between groups of human beings who believe themselves or are believed by others to be different from other groups of human beings are concerned.