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

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

Spencer, 1997

• Britain has long been a multi-racial society, until almost a decade after WW2 the most substantial part of the settled Asian and Black population of Britain was occupationally related to the sea, the government attempted to limit this growth in numbers of Black seamen justified through inter-racial violence breaking out in 1919

• The making of multi-racial was an unintended outcome of government immigration policy since the 1940s leading to a rapid and unprecedented demographic and cultural transformation of British society 

• The huge number of Asian and Black communities in Britain are important in their number and influence, but also in challenges of discrimination, racism, equal opportunities, cultural identity and pluralism

• Migration began before, during and after WW2, this was made up of a series of broadly related migrations from culturally distinct and diverse communities of the Commonwealth not welcomed by the British government at any stage but it was unwilling and unable to prevent it 

• After WW2 one of the cherished illusions of the Empire was that all British citizens, irrespective of their place of residents, colour or religion enjoyed full and unimpeded rights to enter and settle in the United Kingdom; before 1948 Britain had never introduced a distinction between the citizenship and nationality of the monarch’s subjects resident in different parts of the Empire

Chakraborty, 2016

• The Komagata Maru sailing saw a collection of Sikh Indian migrants who were poor peasants, labourers and traders embark on a quest for better wages and a better living environment; however, the Government of Canada and imperial authorities formed anxiety about immigrants/aliens/foreigners entering their country 

• For the Government of Canada the Indians were divided into categories of loyal and disloyal, they were wary of the disloyal sections where they were politically active and suspected to be part of an international conspiracy against the colonial government; this developed into an obsession with control, deportation, border policing, surveillance and enforcement at odds with the policy of free movement that had facilitated the growth of the British Empire

• This suspicion and desire for state control led to the development of the Continuous Journey Act in 1907 to allow Canada to restrict Asian migration by refusing the arrival of the ship and forcing migrants to wait in the harbour to see border technologies and surveillance used to maintain a racial hierarchy within the Empire

• Eventually, the ship was forced to return and made a final landing at Budge Budge where the British police fired to form a massacre; this sees the Komagata Maru remembered as a symbol of racist and imperial injustice but also resistance as it sparked revolution in India

Banerjee, 2016

• In September 1914 the Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver in Canada carrying a large number of Indians and Sikh immigrants supporting British war efforts and seeking radical economic opportunities in Canada 

• They were denied entry and forced to return to their home port of Budge Budge where they continued to experience violence and tragedy through British policy firing and subsequent Indian state marginalisation; this is not a static event of racial inclusion but a living narrative that continues to shape debates on citizenship and the rights of migrants

English, 2006

• Empire Day was a ritual celebration of the British Empire introduced in Britain in 1904 and catching popular imagination so that it became a feature of the national calendar for over 50 years; it was representative of the prevailing sentiment of imperialism that excited adults and children with continual importance through WW1 

• The celebration of Empire Day was a plan to political indoctrinate children in the state school system through symbols, myths and rituals of British imperial culture; the Union Flag was the centrepiece and lessons of the Empire story and the geographical expansiveness of it were taught; children dressed up in patriotic clothes and sang patriotic songs to lead to an acceptance of Britain’s imperial role and foster a sense of racial superiority and pride

• The British general public and adults also celebrated Empire Day with some attending school celebrations voluntarily or reading popular newspapers, seeing Union Jacks displayed in important buildings and public spaces, military parades, patriotic concerns, church services and public lectures to form civic pride

• Although Empire Day survived through WW1, it began to be politicised during the interwar years with imperial resistance growing; as it disappeared and was contested this was symbolic of the beginnings of the gradual dislocation of Empire’s hegemony

Karatani, 2003

• The common code was formed in an attempt to consolidate the colonial effect to be more easily recognised throughout the Empire, this changed the method of maintaining British subjecthood to be upheld by the common code resulting from consultation and mutual agreement between the British and Dominion governments in colonial conferences

• This was upheld as a result of cooperation between the British and Dominion governments seeing imperial British subjecthood provide unity among British subjects in the Empire, this saw immigration control grow in an attempt to qualify which subject belonged to which government 

• WW1 changed the relationship between Britain and the Dominions as anti-alien sentiment grew and by WW2 each Dominion had its own citizenship as well as the common code leading to a weakening of links to the British Empire

• The Canadian Citizenship Act 1946 eventually broke down the common code and signalled the shift from British subjecthood to Commonwealth citizenship

Karatani, 2003

• After WW2 the Empire was in tact but considerably weakened financially and militarily; the common status within the British Empire was also being challenged by calls for national self-determination from the Dominions to see solidarity crumble and governments pursue being their own individual political units and define their own citizenship

• The British Nationality Act 1948 was the response to growing calls for independence but did not create a citizenship of its own but instead Commonwealth citizenship in four subgroups that continued to confer citizenship on all Commonwealth citizens as the ‘Mother Country’ to continue a shared sense of identity under the Crown

• It was never the intention of the British Nationality Act 1948 to allow for mass non-white migration, combatting this led to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 as the first statutory attempt to restrict the free movement of Commonwealth citizens justified by the government as attempting to manage the strain of Black immigration on housing and resources and growing social tensions through requiring vouchers from the Ministry of Labour of student status

• The meaning and role of citizenship was confused in the 1960s and 70s with rights and obligations granted through the Commonwealth but conferred through immigration control, this prepared for the creation of British citizenship in 1981

Karatani, 2003

• In the absence of a British citizenship until 1981, immigration laws were enacted to confine who belonged to Britain with Commonwealth Immigration Acts narrowing this down until the Immigration Act 1971 transformed a focus to partiality in a manner that targeted racialised immigrants and resecuritised Britishness

• The Heath government introduced the Immigration Act 1971 to control immigration on a logical and definitive basis based on ancestral links to exclude Common Wealth citizens and ensure close connections in defining Britishness

• The British Nationality Act 1981 finally established a British citizenship as a logical result of racist policies since WW2 and a clarification of who belonged in British territory 

• This act abandoned jus soli as British citizenship was now only provided if a parent is a British citizen or is settled in the UK, meaning temporary or unsettled migrants could not secure British citizenship for their children in a new blood link; this effectively continued the same immigration practices as the Immigration Act 1971 but under a different name to continue to bound what it meant to be British

Whitfield, 2007

• Many migrants arrived to the UK with a perception of the ‘Mother Country’ that left them unprepared to deal with host community hostility and resentment stemming from their unprecedented, unplanned and generally unwelcome mass migration in the 1950s

• At the time the police force was a mix of pre-war seniors and junior ranks who shared prejudices of Indigenous populations, at the same time migrants of the colonies resented the police due to their strong arming of imperial power; the effects of racial stereotyping and rigidity from the police coupled with immigrants misunderstandings of the police’s role led to mistrust and confrontation

• Police reports on racial disturbances blamed Black and Asian people for their failure to integrate as a result of their ‘lack of education, social intercourse and cultural knowledge’ to overlook the social colour bar and lack of white tolerance; these migrants also encountered discrimination in employment, housing and access to goods and services 

• The police were unable and unwilling to understand alien cultures and often implemented counter-productive strategies as a result such as patrolling black areas and using police dogs to separate communities and reduce racial tension; they began to see the crimes of individuals as those of the Black community as a whole

• After racial disorder the police services refused community support from ethnic groups attempting to raise awareness of different rules as they believed their role was purely law enforcement and did not see the benefits of social work and community matters, when Race Relation training was eventually adopted in 1965 it was largely tokenistic and the police have done little to learn from failings leading to judgment on the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist in 1993

Baker, 2018

• In 2012 the dramatised arrival of the Empire Windrush proved a moving moment in the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games and symbolised Britain becoming inclusive enough to make black presence part of its national story 

• However, members of the generation are now losing jobs, being charged huge amounts for NHS care or refused it and detained awaiting deportation to countries they have not visited for over 50 years as a result of May’s hostile environment policy

• The multicultural narrative growing from 1990 to 2012 saw the UK as tolerant and progressive, potential obscuring the struggles and institutional racism overcome to get to this moment; however, this was quickly overturned by the Home Office’s attack on the Windrush Generation by attempting to define who belongs and calling for Black Britons to be ‘sent home’ in an inhumane demand to show UK passports when many documents had been destroyed by Border Forces

• The threat to deport the Windrush Generation tears up and reverses the myth of multicultural Britain

Jackson, 2015

• In April 1981 the Brixton two day riot played out resulting in numerous injuries and widespread property damage in an economically struggling area; many politicians labelled the disorder as an example of lawlessness and poor parenting, but activists locate this within a history of institutional racism including the reintroduction of the Vagrancy Act in the mid-1970s

• To be ‘Black’ emerged in the 1970s as a multiracial category uniting those migrating from the former colonies of the British Empire, skin colour became a primary mode of identification of outsider status and constructed Black people as immigrants and problems to be contained; to be Black was a governmental project to divest people of colour from their rights as citizens 

• This category was reproduced in sites such as schools where Black British children were constructed as immigrants to be contained in contrast to white students seen as native and accepted into neighbourhood schools; the Vagrancy Act Section IV also showed this on the streets as it allowed the police to arrest people on suspicion of committing a crime, this was disproportionately used on the Black youth 

• The coordination of Black community activists to scrap the Vagrancy Act and change the nature of English policing led to repeated clashes between police officers that led to riots, this occurred in Brixton in 1981; reports cited this as parental failures and foreign cultures leading to their children’s delinquency but failed to implicate the police in straining community relations

• It appears Brixton is connected to a larger continuum of Black British experience as certain spaces such as city streets and neighbourhood schools were sites of competing definitions of national identity and citizenship rights that Black activists rejected

De Noronha, 2022

• The relationship between racism and borders see racism producing hierachies of citizenship as processes such as deportation reaffirms these social orders both at the physical edge of the country and within it based legal citizenship rights 

• Citizenship is also part of race-making at a global scale as it becomes a global regime for the international management of populations through a similar logic as Empire

• This produces racialised outsiders at the border based on layered processes of racilaised immigration controls, this is repdocued in legal and spatial exlcuion to work, housing, rights as well as the right to be policed and deported

• Institutional racism propels certain non-citzens towards deportation where their outsider statis is realised through the border as a politically differentiating space

Bernasconi, 2017

• Racism consists of prejudice against one or more racial groups manifesting in hostile behaviour towards members; here race is no longer a biological and scientific categorisation, but a political category that inspires cultural racism based on perceived threats of Commonwealth immigration

• Racial prejudice infects a population and takes up the working of institutions as a societal problem; this is expressed not only in direct harm but also in unfairness in unemployment, morality rates, wages, educational opportunities etc. to make and perpetuate racialised inequalities

• Racism is often disproportionately concentrated in powerful roles such as police and magistrates, as these jobs attract those who hold extremist views and desire control over state processes

• The perpetuation of institutional racism relies on the reproduction of racially prejudiced attitudes that reinforce negative stereotypes; this is often fueled by politicians and editors who concept deep seated racism assumptions behind language such as ‘normal people’

• Direct racism such as slurs and attacks are symptomatic of institutional racism which is rigorously enforced by politicians and writers hiding extreme racism behind words

Fevre, 2020

• In July 1948 Liverpool experienced three nights of racial violence; this was initiated by white rioters and was significant in terms of the relationship between the police and LIverpool’s black population 

• This episode led to a period of heightened political activity at local and national levels centred around policing; the Colonial Defence Committee was formed to organise legal defence for those wrongfully arrested

• The CDC is a hallmark of black political opposition to policing during the 1970s and 1980s; this represents black political resistance to policing in Britain to predate the ‘Windrush years’ of 1950s and 1960s

• Black resistance to policing has since developed over the C20th

Waters, 2014

• The articulation of Englishness against other nationalities in the UK shows that national identity is contingent and relational, a product of boundaries draw up to distinguish the collective self and the other

• National wartime cohesion in Britain began to be eroded after 1945 and the new meaning of citizenship to include the multiethnic Commonwealth saw race become central to questions of National Belonging; the rapid increase of Commonwealth migration saw the characteristics of Black migrants in Britain mapped against white natives to divide notions of essential Britishness

• The national community excluded non-white minorities and racialised national belonging through discourses of inclusion and exclusion by attributing the Black population certain characteristics in order to categorise and differentiate it an an Other; the migrant was perceived as a ‘dark stranger’ to the customs and conventions of Britishness

• Race relations in books, articles and headlines consistently narrated the non-white migrant as a stranger and assumed norms of what it meant to be British, this framed the migrant experience through national fictions and attempted to reconfigure the imagined community of the nation

Gedalof, 2022

• The reproductive politics of Black and other minorities are key in historical UK migration; now current migration policy is driven by a sense of crisis created by the ‘reproductive excess’ to form the ‘hostile environment’ 2012 policy and Windrush Scandal’ where a new bordering infrastructure was erected to identify and remove illegal migrants but also criminalise a large section of Britain's long settled Black population

• Theresa May first used the phrase to form a ‘hostile environment for illegal migrants’ and this was extended to the reproductive sphere as family migration rules attempted to tighten regulation on foreign spouses and family dependency by forming new scrutinising bordering processes where families were to be recognised as authentic and worthy of inclusion to intervene in the private right to family life in the UK

• Austerity was shrinking the welfare state and this led to much fury directed at migrants due to their perceived strain on the public sector, the migrant family was constructed as making illegitimate demands on public services but the Immigration Act 2014 gave power to public services to demand fingerprints and passports to access the NHS or other services to problematise access to basic needs; landlords were also able to use their powers to conduct immigration checks on tenants after 2016

• The hostile environment moved the border inside to widen targets on migrants, limit access to the welfare state and individual reproductive activities such as housing, health and legitimate marriage

• The Windrush Scandal saw the Home Office target those who arrived as children from the Caribbean and children of the Windrush Generation as people who should by law have citizenship rights, in 2010 the Home Office destroyed original landing cards that would have provided evidence of lawful status and then demanded proof which was impossible to meet leading to people being forcibly detained and basic rights restricted

• This sees nostalgia for Empire and British exceptionalism continue to drive the dominant national imagination and lead to continued hostility towards migrants in the wake of enslavement, mistreatment and empire impinging on the status of Black subjects

Essex et al., 2022

• In 2012 May introduced a new set of policies known as the hostile environment to embed immigration control within a range of public and private sectors requiring landlords, employers and public servants to check immigration status before offering a house, job or healthcare; those that fail checks can face fines or criminal sanctions to criminalise everyday activities

• In the NHS, 2017 legal changes bought in upfront charging in hospitals, data sharing was also approved allowing for patient data to be used for immigration enforcement, tracing, detaining and deporting individuals

• This has caused ill health as care is often delayed and withheld, people are deterred from seeking treatment due to being fearful for being detained and deported; extra administrative work in charges and checks for doctors also takes away time from care 

• These policies have been met with resistance from the healthcare community and those impacted such as the ‘Patients Not Passports’ campaign

Crines et al., 2016

• In April 1968 as the Race Relations Bill was working its way through Parliament, Enoch Powell, addressed the Conservative Party with a speech using controversial language and violent imagery to strongly oppose mass immigration into Britain from the Commonwealth

• He raised the idea of the ‘race war’ and became a figurehead for opponents to immigration as he feared it would lead to societal collapse as Britain as being lost

• He was immediately sacked from the Shadow Cabinet and widely condemned by political elites but this did form ‘new racisms’ of sociological and social psychology through the use of rhetorical techniques of persuasion through his persona, the range of emotions evoked and evidences supporting the arguments to form an inflammatory impact

Holston & Caldeira, 1998

• Disjunctive citizenship shows how citizenship is unevenly accessible to groups, genders, races and classes

• This shows that citizenship plays out in heterogenous ways e.g. slums vs private housing

• This can be used to inspire insurgency, especially in the difference machine of the city