The Genesis of Race Relations
How Radical Academics and Black Activists in the UK Transformed Race Relations to Black against White Agitation
By James Pew and Scott Miller, for the series The Great Illiberal Subversion: How Radical Activists Ru(i)n Western Democracies.
“Illiberal subversion, as it regards this series, refers to the “work” of radical activists and social agitators who force their will on society through a long on-going web of processes involving incremental efforts that chip away at the pillars of western democracies. Attacking and undermining public institutions as Gramsci had it - “a revolution from within” - through a drawn-out complex of affairs perhaps best viewed as death by a thousand cuts, the radical activists entrench in individual departments until they colonize an entire organization and effectively wield enough power to shape its directives. Once this happens to enough of the institutions (or pillars) of society (and it already has), the radical subverters effectively wield power over everyone, the power to shape social right and social wrong.” - The Ontology of the Great Illiberal Subversion
In the last piece - From Police Brutality to Race Relations - for our series The Great Illiberal Subversion, Scott Miller and I briefly introduced the foundational importance of Race Relations:
“In order to appreciate the importance of the UK context for race relations and education, we have to recognize that anti-racism ideology originated in the UK before spreading elsewhere. This is according to George Dei, the anti-racist most responsible for spreading the ideology in Canadian education.”
Today we delve deeper into the formation and ultimate subversion of Race Relations in the UK.
The Origins of Race Relations
The Institute of Race Relations centered in London, England stands as the quintessential example of a once virtuous and principled institution now irrevocable perverted. It was founded in 1952 by Harry Hodson who was not, by any stretch of the imagination, politically nor socially radical rather he was a newspaper editor and an economist who foresaw that race would become a hot button issue in the new postwar commonwealth and that there ought to be a professional and impartial research institute devoted to the study of these issues. His financial backers in creating this new institute were the chairmen of several large British owned mining companies in South Africa, chairmen whom he had convinced to take an interest in his research enterprise. So far, there is nothing especially radical or vaguely illiberal about the Institute for Race Relations — how did it go wrong? If you peruse the wiki entry which treats the Institute, you will read of a “transformation” of the institute which occurred in the early 1970s. The entry offers no intelligible explanation except to represent that part of the institute seems to have started accusing other parts of being racist, at which point resignations occurred. [1] However, according to Hodson’s autobiography, the institute which he had founded began to go “downhill toward disaster” in the hands of the institute directors who had succeeded him. He blamed then director Hugh Tinker who gave the institute over to the radical activists in 1972:
Tinker, “though an academic, lacked the strength, or perhaps the will, to withstand the very unacademically minded ‘activists,’ who had penetrated not only the Institute’s membership but also its staff. To them race relations meant the relations between white people and ‘blacks,’ primarily in Britain, and the Institute was failing if it did not get ‘involved’, which in effect meant promoting the causes of the UK blacks against the whites. Overboard went scientific detachment, and with it the whole concept of race relations as a global problem…” [2]
One of the instigators of the subversion of the Institute of Race Relations, Sri Lankan born race activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan, began his time with the institute as the institute librarian, and he managed to drum up racial unrest in this role as he himself describes finding as librarian that: “those ‘blacks’ who wrote about the black condition at all wrote it for the whites, and the researchers wrote it for their theses…the library collection showed quite clearly how Britain had moved from race relations to racism and from laissez-faire racism to institutional racism.”[3] Sivanandan would go on to become director of the institute for forty years. And, according to a memoire published by Sivanandan, the 1972 “transformation” of the institute was brought about by “staff, radical academics and black activists.” [4] In many cases, these three categories doubtlessly refer to the same persons (who were simultaneously staff, radical academics and black activists).
In March 1971 the UK’s The Sunday Times ran a comment on the infighting at the Institute for Race Relations in which they found it remarkable that “a Marxist sociologist” was “using capitalist money to undermine the institute for which he worked.”[5] Concordantly, we see in the dissertation of Chris Mullard (a black radical academic who would go on to become one of Britain’s leading anti-racist theorists) the best confirmation of this picture: the dissertation, which is a study of the transformation of the Institute of Race Relations, paints the same radical Marxist picture as the Sunday Times comment (except in a sympathetic light). According to Mullard, black activists of the 60s, 70s and 80s had come to see themselves as “resistance” activists of the Pan-Africanism sort, according to which blackness is the overriding consideration for blacks all across the planet, black identity is paramount to any other value, and belief in blackness is an “immutable belief that one's identity is somehow inextricably connected with one's actions.”[6] Further, for the black pan-African activists, the notion (exposed by leading pan-African Marxists such as Frantz Fanon) that capitalism is racist and must be replaced with something else —something black lead— is ubiquitous.[7] According to Mullard, the black “resistance” activists who subverted the Institute of Race Relations were of one mind with the pan-Africanists on the following bit of policy:
Resistance entails i) “the total rejection of the dominant social, political and economic order; ii) total rejection of the beliefs, values and institutions which underpinned the dominant order; iii) the possession of an alternative conception of a social, political and economic order; iv) the possession of an alternative institutional, value and belief system.” [8]
How might such a radical West-hating race obsessed movement pervert the values of a Western institution falling prey to its machinations? The fate of the Institute of Race Relations and its journal called “Race Today” stands as a good example, as Mullard (approvingly) recounted that the activist transformation of the institute “reflected in the full-scale launching of Race Today as a (black) political journal, the radicalization of all Institute work and research, the setting up of meetings and one day conferences organized by blacks for blacks, and the involvement of blacks in nearly all Institute activities.”[9]
Under the directorship of Sivanandan, the British Institute of Race Relations would take on a new charter, a new direction and purpose, namely, the production of public information pamphlets often intended for purchase by elementary school teachers for the purposes of “educating” the children. The themes in these pamphlets predictably attempt to radicalize their readership by presenting the Western liberal experiment as an evil enterprise which distinguishes itself solely by greed and by the invention of slavery and racism (which hadn’t existed before capitalist greed, or so they let on).
Our next article will delve even deeper into the UK’s Institute of Race Relations, Race Today (the Institutes journal), and the race activists responsible for transforming the race relations institute into race antagonism.
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Thanks for reading. Here is the next essay in the series - From Race Relations came Race Agitation - (substack.com)
For a complete index (with summaries) of The Great Illiberal Subversion series of essay’s, check out The Ontology of the Great Illiberal Subversion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Race_Relations
[2] Quote from chapter 13 of Harry Hodson’s autobiography, still available through the following wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20120205120832/http://www.athelstane.co.uk/hvhodson/hvhbiogr/index.htm
[3] Sivanandan 2008, 14. That Sivanandan himself held the role of institute librarian at this time is clarified at the following url: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/us-remembering-a-sivanandan-1923-2018/
[4] Sivanandan 2008, 1.
[5] Young and Humphrey 1971.
[6] Mullard 1980, 70–75.
[7] Mullard 1980, 73.
[8] Mullard 1980, 63.
[9] Mullard 1980, 42.
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People who are deconstructionists and hate the west and its institutions are nihilists. They better nothing, adding only disintegration and boiling resentment and race baiting.