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of British anti-racism’: the idea that there is no native racism in Britain, it exists elsewhere and comes from elsewhere. 1 This perception is reinforced by a flattering comparison between the United Kingdom and the United States as well as Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa with their explicit systems of legal segregation and discrimination. It draws on long-running tropes positioning British liberalism against Afrikaner racism, dating back to the abolition of slavery in the Cape in the early nineteenth century. This contrast
This chapter explores the changing immigration discourse and policy in Hong Kong in the 1970s. It explains how public opinion and other factors, such as international publicity and Sino-British relations, affected Hong Kong’s immigration policy. Throughout the 1970s, the scale of illegal immigration from China strained the colony’s limited housing stock and its under-developed welfare and education system. The shifting international and popular discourse regrading immigration influenced how the colonial government managed this ‘problem of people’ through implementing a new immigration policy. The colonial government departed from its ‘local integration’ approach adopted in the 1950s and introduced the ‘Touch Base’ policy in 1974, repatriating all illegal immigrants who failed to reach Hong Kong’s urban areas. Hong Kong Chinese of all social classes and age groups were engaged in an issue that affected their daily lives. This exclusionist immigration policy facilitated increased discrimination towards and stereotypes of mainland Chinese. The shifting popular sentiment, along with the constraints in land and resources, imposed tremendous pressure on the colonial government, driving it to affirm the necessity of new immigration controls to London in 1980. The problem was that the Foreign Office prioritised its relationship with China. Policy changes had long-term effects. They reinforced the emerging ‘Hong Kong political identity’, influencing the colony’s political culture in the 1980s and 1990s. They also laid the foundation for the emergence of a political definition of ‘Hong Kong permanent resident’ in the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 and the Basic Law in 1990.
‘White British’, while the UK’s ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’ (BME) population doubled in size from 1991 to 8 million people (14 per cent) in 2011. 2 Legally, the Equality Act 2010 brought together all previous anti-discrimination laws on equal pay, sex discrimination and the Race Relations Act. It became the basic framework against direct and indirect discrimination and rested on
Coyne notes that ‘a study by the European Fundamental Rights agency found instances of racism in Ireland were often above the European average’. 4 The report further noted that in Ireland, Black Irish people are twice as likely as White Irish people to experience discrimination when seeking work and three times as likely to experience discrimination in the workplace. 5 Over the past few
from the United Kingdom to southern Africa in the immediate post-war years. Rather than leaving the grey, cold and austere United Kingdom for sunny southern Africa, migrants from the Caribbean made the reverse journey from sunshine to rain and fog. Black British service personnel, including famously the cricketer Learie Constantine, had faced racism and discrimination in wartime Britain and not only from white American GIs. 5 By contrast, while some British service personnel who spent time in South Africa mentioned
women represented 40 per cent of the total number of immigrants to Britain, and by the mid-1970s, approximately 40 per cent of the total Black population was born in Britain. 12 Many African Caribbean people faced structural discrimination in housing and employment, and, against the backdrop of increasingly racist rhetoric across the political spectrum (a context addressed
Drawing from this argument, I advance the idea that MacGregor's casteist reflection continues this trajectory of defining and fixing Indian-ness through caste discrimination. By performing caste discrimination in Mesopotamia, a ‘neutral’ ground, where he comes into ‘contact’ with Indians at the Indian R.A. depot, MacGregor demonstrates how well he has learnt the lessons on knowing the customs and practices of the colonised. For the colonial administrator, MacGregor is the ideal student, enacting both colonial difference and colonial knowledge, even when least expected
religious groups. Like Pakistan, in Bangladesh Islam is the religion of the state. Unlike these two countries, there is no constitutional discrimination against minorities in India. However, social differences and discrimination remain. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, majoritarian nationalism surged soon after the death of their founding leaderships in 1948 and 1975. In India, the political use of Hinduism by so-called secular political groups, such as the Indian National Congress, and the rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP
which those analyses are advanced. See Peggy McIntosh , ‘ White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack ’, in Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination , ed. by Scott Plous ( New York : McGraw-Hill Education , 2002 ), pp. 191 – 196 ; Nicholas Thomas , Colonialism’s Culture
that the legacy of Empire is not just ‘racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’ – which in any case existed long before colonialism – but the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization; the