Racial Citizenship References Revision

Paul, 1995

• The Commonwealth provided substance for Britain’s goals to become a world power equal to the US and Soviet Union, economically it provided a financial buffer against wartime debts and infrastructural damage; therefore, the preservation of the Commonwealth was a necessary step in domestic and foreign reconstruction 

• The British Empire was formed as a universal united institution, in theory this ensured equality, but in practice the principle was compromised along the axes of gender, class and skin colour; the system was compromised by discrimination and prejudice that produced white governors and black governed with access to wealth, education and privilege limited by social, economic, gender and racial status

• The formal policy was expansive and inclusive, but the informal national identity was narrow and exclusive, based on a racialised understanding of the world’s population that hierarchised British cultures and races as superior

• There was a racialised understanding of the Empire’s population where race was seen as more than a skin colour, but instead an unmodifiable genetic characteristic where colonials were viewed as ‘backward’; in this was Commonwealth citizenship was a political manoeuvre designed to ward off potential calls for colonial independence

K’Meyer, 1998

• Oral history takes much preparation, complex relationships, questioning and listening skills as well as the ability to understand oral evidence and use it in a wide variety of settings

• The main problems lie in conveying the complexity of the interviewing processand engaging in a deeper analysis of motifs, internal consistency, self-reflective language etc.

Lowe, 2018

• Bodies of poetic and fictional narratives on the Windrush problematise the dominant Windrush narrative and confirm the importance and significance of its arrival 

• Often stories of the Windrush use a male bias to describe the historical narrative; the ship is tied to the false promise of the ‘Mother Country’ which in reality is not welcoming and optimistic but instead led to a battery of racism that endured over decades

• The ship rose to fame around 50 years after it arrived due to an increase in appetite for history, a growing interest in the impact of Black arts, cultures and community groups; this differs from how it was reported at the time

• There is a need to include the global heterogenous nature of Black journeying and cultural exchange as the dominant Windrush narrative sees the ship only ever travel once and in one direction; the struggles faced by pioneers are now described as overcome in celebratory narratives when they likely still persist

• The arrival of the ship is often inaccurately reported as the first arrival of Black people in the UK, when these communities already existed, it omits details such as assuming all the passengers to be Jamaican men to exclude many migrants through the Jamaican-centric bias of Windrush narratives

Matera, 2015

• During the early C20th, the black population in London consisted largely of Black workers, a small number of Black professionals and artists born in Britain and the colonised

• A series of ‘race riots’ in 1919 targeted non-European and mixed-race working class communities in the UK’s cities; the response from the government was the Colored and Alien Seaman Order and the Special Certificate of Nationality and Identity 1932 that effectively institutionalised the colour bar in the British shipping industry leading African seamen stranded in Britain and unable to find work as state racism impacted Black workers in the shipping industry

Prabhat, 2018

• The process of applying for British citizenship affects the sense of belonging for those applying as they begin as strangers to Britain and then reside for a long period to become legally fulfilled citizens rather than transient visitors

• The citizenship process is a personal memory for many successful applicants but often the institutional memory is lost when the process ends, telling stories of these experiences bring in beliefs and emotions to the experience of belonging and citizenship that reported legal cases cannot achieve  

• In a legal sense, citizenship is a formal, legal status with special legal rights and obligations attached but it is also associated with emotions of belonging

• Citizenship appeared as a category in the 1948 Nationality Act as Britain responded to Canadian legislative changes that introduced Canadian citizenship as separate to British subjecthood; the change to a defined British citizenship was extensive and embraced much of the Commonwealth; this led to an influx of migrants from the British colonies due to lax immigration regulation as former colonial subjects were given full rights to travel to the UK, reside and work there

• Migration is an experience of immense emotion separate to the lifeless subject of legal citizenship; by connecting with emotions it is possible to expose the gaps between legal provisions and the implementation of these rights that instead led to challenges and hardships severing senses of belonging and attachment to a place

Tyler, 2010

• British citizenship had been designed to fail specific groups and populations, it was a biopolitics where a field of techniques and practices were used to control and fashion the population

• Foucault’s concept of state racism can be applied to the 1981 Nationality Act as a pivotal point in the design of British citizenship, it is this that formed violent lived realities of British citizenship that contradicted governmental accounts stressing cohesion, responsibility, rights and pride in national belonging

• The 1981 Nationality Act was an Immigration Act designed to define, limit and remove entitlements to citizenship, it formed a ‘citizenship gap’ for the former colonies where race and ethnicity were never directly named by the Act effectively defined citizenship to exclude black and Asian populations seeing the state become a judicial body projecting racist relations

• State racism is defined by Foucault as a means of classifying, distinguishing and opposing a population on the basis of appeals to essentialised categories of origin; this is linked to class divisions, ethnic hierarchies and civil unrest

• This act extended to home role, where the borders of Empire were being reproduced in the public sphere and the home though race riots and housing crises; this was legitimised by a need for security and the idea that non-citizens threatened to overwhelm the diminishing resources of the welfare state and stole the resources rightfully belonging to white, British citizens

Maddrell, 1996

• The state school curriculum, especially the teaching of Geography played a role in encouraging emigration to the colonised as an explicit topic covered in the curriculum

• Emigration was promoted to young people as an ‘honourable enterprise’ with the settler dominions over tropical colonises valorised and portrayed as a good citizens choice for emigration; this was partnered by direct intervention supporting out-migration from Britain

Rose et al., 2006

• Governmentality was introduced by Foucault in the 1970s as a technique for directing human behaviour in terms of children, souls, households, the state and oneself; the state was able to intervene and manage the habits and activities of subjects to achieve certain strategic ends

• Governmentality are the conditions of formation, principles of knowledge that are generated, practices and how they are carried out in alliance with other arts of governing

Perry, 1979

• When the Empire Windrush arrived in 1948 the arrival of male travelers from the Caribbean gardner media attention, the travellers explained being overcome with a ‘wonderful feeling’ of coming to the ‘Mother Country’ with an optimistic expectancy about life in Britain with Aldwyn Roberts composing ‘London is the Place for Me’

• Around 500 unemployed Jamaican men arrived full of hope in securing jobs in Britain, they made claims of belonging and sought to expose anti-Black racism by challenging the state to acknowledge and guarantee their rights as British citizens

• The politics of race at work in Britain effectively impeded Caribbean migrants from fully realising their rights to belong in Britain as citizens with race and anti-Black sentiment fueling discrimination in housing, employment and access to public resources through state-sponsored efforts to restrict Afro-Caribbean migration and disenfranchise Commonwealth migrants 

• Although the British Nationality Act 1948 formally established a universal British Commonwealth citizenship, policymakers had no intention that this nationality law would facilitate unprecedented non-White migration from the Commonwealth leading to a ‘colour problem in Britain’ being discussed by the Pan-African Congress as there was racial violence, a lack of employment opportunities, orphaned children, poor housing conditions and unjust treatment by police occurring in Britain was a result of the ‘colour bar’

• The news documented stories and images of the ‘colour problem’ and formalised a racialised discourse about immigrants; even though Afro-Caribbean migrants entered Britain in their prime working years with a vast repertoire of experience, skills, education, knowledge and personal ambition they were often classified at a lower occupational rank than in their homeland  with the politics of race obstructing their attempts to realise upward mobility 

• In Britain, Blackness was a rigid and impermeable category associated with deficiency and inferiority; in the labour market there was much hostility around Black workers who were stereotyped as slow, lazy and irresponsible and this was used to justify overlooking them for supervisory positions; this was also gendered as Black women were viewed as particularly unable to adapt labour skills and meet the demands of the British labour market

• A ‘split-labour phenomenon’ developed where workers were stratified on the basis of race in a clear contradiction of the egalitarianism of the Nationality Law; instead there was exclusion and challenges to definitions of what it meant to be British and belong in British society

Perry, 1979

• During the summer of 1958 race riots in Nottingham and London dominated headlines with violence primarily aimed at those of African descent, this fractured the mystique of British anti-racism

• In West London there were attacks planned on Black people in the streets, this was seen as part of the ‘colour problem’ and played into White Briton’s hostility towards Commonwealth migration

• This provides a deeper awareness of the experiences of Caribbean migrants and provides an entry point for examining how race shaped perceptions of what it meant to be British at home and abroad in the postwar era

Paul, 1964

• The arrival of the Empire Windrush in June 1948 was regarded as the opening of a new chapter in immigration to Britain; however, Attlee and the Labour government saw this as a threat and sought to refine concepts of Britishness and national identity based on a racialised understanding of the population where ‘coloured colonials’ were viewed as interior to the interests of British society 

• The Ministry of Labour had a negative attitude towards colonial migrants seeing them as ‘far more trouble than they are worth’, they were viewed as unsuitable workers proven to be useless and unwilling as well as illiterate 

• Ministry officials attempted to justify this exclusion on wider grounds based on the general conviction that the moral standards of the colonised were different to those in the UK, here Black skin was assigned behavioural and mental traits that became regarded as genetic, fixed and immutable

• Colonial migrants were assigned stereotypical characteristics associated with Blackness presuming them to be quarrelsome, suspicious, violent and in need of discipline with their skin now denoting their limited mental and physical capabilities; this inferiority stretched to all spheres with racialisation becoming a form of commonsense 

• A binary was formed where migrants were classed as Black and UK residents as White, in this was the colonials could not be British and were instead seen as a threat to the unity of the British people; this did not only play out in isolated acts of racism but as part of a general climate of hostility towards colonial migration

Riley & Harvey, 2007

• Oral history is a complex and politicised endeavour in which the historian plays an active role in the reconstitution of the past, narrating histories and writing culture

• This gives a voice to those who have been hidden, it demonstrates unique insights into the history of places, narratives and relationships in ways that are often not provided by other methods

• There are problems with a one-dimensional and unproblematized approach, reliability and subjectivity

Andrews et al., 2006

• Often studies of older people are concerned with aging in relation to residential and caring environments but there should be more attention paid to these people’s past lives, when they were younger and past social lives

• Older people are located in local histories and the making of places; they have unique perspectives that can provide new directions on existing debates