Britain and France have developed substantially different policies to manage racial tensions since the 1960s, in spite of having similar numbers of post-war ethnic minority immigrants. This book provides the first detailed historical exploration of race policy development in these two countries. In this path-breaking work, Bleich argues against common wisdom that attributes policy outcomes to the role of powerful interest groups or to the constraints of existing institutions, instead emphasizing the importance of frames as widely-held ideas that propelled policymaking in different directions. British policymakers' framing of race and racism principally in North American terms of color discrimination encouraged them to import many policies from across the Atlantic. For decades after WWII, by contrast, French policy leaders framed racism in terms influenced largely by their Vichy past, which encouraged policies designed primarily to counter hate speech while avoiding the recognition of race found across the English Channel.

Britain and France have developed substantially different policies to manage racial tensions since the 1960s, in spite of having similar numbers of post-war ethnic minority immigrants. This book provides the first detailed historical exploration of race policy development in these two countries. In this path-breaking work, Bleich argues against common wisdom that attributes policy outcomes to the role of powerful interest groups or to the constraints of existing institutions, instead emphasizing the importance of frames as widely-held ideas that propelled policymaking in different directions. British policymakers' framing of race and racism principally in North American terms of color discrimination encouraged them to import many policies from across the Atlantic. For decades after WWII, by contrast, French policy leaders framed racism in terms influenced largely by their Vichy past, which encouraged policies designed primarily to counter hate speech while avoiding the recognition of race found across the English Channel.

This book discusses British thought on race and racial differences in the latter phases of empire from the 1890s to the early 1960s. It focuses on the role of racial ideas in British society and politics and looks at the decline in Victorian ideas of white Anglo-Saxon racial solidarity. The impact of anthropology is shown to have had a major role in shifting the focus on race in British ruling class circles from a classical and humanistic imperialism towards a more objective study of ethnic and cultural groups by the 1930s and 1940s. As the empire turned into a commonwealth, liberal ideas on race relations helped shape the post-war rise of 'race relations' sociology. Drawing on extensive government documents, private papers, newspapers, magazines and interviews this book breaks new ground in the analysis of racial discourse in twentieth-century British politics and the changing conception of race amongst anthropologists, sociologists and the professional intelligentsia.

Shaping Race Policy investigates one of the most serious policy challenges facing the United States today: the stubborn persistence of racial inequality in the post-civil rights era. Unlike other books on the topic, it is comparative, examining American developments alongside parallel histories of race policy in Great Britain and France. Focusing on on two key policy areas, welfare and employment, the book asks why America has had such uneven success at incorporating African Americans and other minorities into the full benefits of citizenship. Robert Lieberman explores the historical roots of racial incorporation in these policy areas over the course of the twentieth century and explains both the relative success of antidiscrimination policy and the failure of the American welfare state to address racial inequality. He chronicles the rise and resilience of affirmative action, including commentary on the recent University of Michigan affirmative action cases decided by the Supreme Court. He also shows how nominally color-blind policies can have racially biased effects, and challenges the common wisdom that color-blind policies are morally and politically superior and that race-conscious policies are merely second best. Shaping Race Policy has two innovative features that distinguish it from other works in the area. First, it is comparative, examining American developments alongside parallel histories of race policy in Great Britain and France. Second, its argument merges ideas and institutions, which are usually considered separate and competing factors, into a comprehensive and integrated explanatory approach. The book highlights the importance of two factors--America's distinctive political institutions and the characteristic American tension between race consciousness and color blindness--in accounting for the curious pattern of success and failure in American race policy.

This open access book examines the question of collecting and disseminating data on ethnicity and race in order to describe characteristics of ethnic and racial groups, identify factors of social and economic integration and implement policies to redress discrimination. It offers a global perspective on the issue by looking at race and ethnicity in a wide variety of historical, country-specific contexts, including Asia, Latin America, Europe, Oceania and North America. In addition, the book also includes analysis on the indigenous populations of the Americas. The book first offers comparative accounts of ethnic statistics. It compares and empirically tests two perspectives for understanding national ethnic enumeration practices in a global context based on national census questionnaires and population registration forms for over 200 countries between 1990 to 2006. Next, the book explores enumeration and identity politics with chapters that cover the debate on ethnic and racial statistics in France, ethnic and linguistic categories in Québec, Brazilian ethnoracial classification and affirmative action policies and the Hispanic/Latino identity and the United States census. The third, and final, part of the book examines measurement issues and competing claims. It explores such issues as the complexity of measuring diversity using Malaysia as an example, social inequalities and indigenous populations in Mexico and the demographic explosion of aboriginal populations in Canada from 1986 to 2006. Overall, the book sheds light on four main questions: should ethnic groups be counted, how should they be counted, who is and who is not counted and what are the political and economic incentives for counting. It will be of interest to all students of race, ethnicity, identity, and immigration. In addition, researchers as well as policymakers will find useful discussions and insights for a better understanding of the complexity of categorization and related political and policy challenges.

Across the nineteenth century, scholars in Britain, France and the German lands sought to understand their earliest ancestors: the Germanic and Celtic tribes known from classical antiquity, and the newly discovered peoples of prehistory. New fields – philology, archeology and anthropology – interacted, breaking down languages, unearthing artifacts, measuring skulls and recording the customs of "savage" analogues. This was a decidedly national process: disciplines institutionalized on national levels, and their findings seen to have deep implications for the origins of the nation and its "racial composition." However, this operated within broader currents. The wide spread of material and novelty of the methods meant that these approaches formed connections across Europe and beyond, even while national rivalries threatened to tear these networks apart. Race, Science and the Nation follows this tension, offering a simultaneously comparative, cross-national and multi-disciplinary history of the scholarly reconstruction of European prehistory. As well as showing how interaction between disciplines was key to their formation, it makes arguments of keen relevance to studies of racial thought and nationalism. It shows these researches often worked against attempts to present the chaotic multi-layered ancient eras as times of mythic origin. Instead, they argued that the modern nations of Europe were not only diverse, but were products of long processes of social development and "racial" fusion. This book therefore brings to light a formerly unstudied motif of nineteenth-century national consciousness, showing how intellectuals in the era of nation-building themselves drove an idea of their nations being "constructed" from a useable past.

As austerity measures continue throughout Europe, its effects are felt differently by different groups of citizens. This book looks at how minority women in France and Britain have coped with austerity. Crucially, it casts them not as passive victims, but as active agents finding ways to survive, using their race, class, gender, and legal status as resources for collective action at a moment when left-wing politics and non-governmental organizations have failed them. Making use of in-depth case studies, Minority Women and Austerity offers an unprecedented look at the changing relationship among the state, the market, and civil society, and the opportunities and dilemmas that creates for minority women.

An ethnographic analysis of the racial consciousness of white transracial women who have established families and had children with black men of African Caribbean heritage in the United Kingdom.

This classic book is a powerful indictment of contemporary attitudes to race. By accusing British intellectuals and politicians on both sides of the political divide of refusing to take race seriously, Paul Gilroy caused immediate uproar when this book was first published in 1987. A brilliant and explosive exploration of racial discourses, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack provided a powerful new direction for race relations in Britain. Still dynamite today and as relevant as ever, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new introduction by the author.

Reflecting current debates in the intersecting fields of African American Studies and African Diaspora, these critical essays and case studies explore the articulation between the fluctuating concepts of ‘race’ and Diaspora and the negotiations of identities across differences. They examine in turn the developments of diasporic black (inter)nationalism, new discourses on ‘postraciality’ and ‘postblackness’, race consciousness among African American soldiers, expatriation and re-diasporization. The acknowledgement of a rejection of Africanness in societies such as the Emirates, Morocco or the Dominican Republic dialogues with examinations of artwork through the lenses of a diasporic consciousness and analyses of literary texts that celebrate internationalism or subvert the notion of ‘race’. James Baldwin thus converses with Percival Everett.