Race, Citizenship and ‘race relations’ Research in late-Twentieth-century Britain

Abstract

This article reads late-twentieth-century race relations research projects from the perspectives of the black and brown Britons who were the targets of research. The analysis focuses on contestations around issues of epistemic authority and resource allocation in the relationship between black citizens and the state in the post-war decades, helping us to understand why so many black citizens saw the state and its programmes of social research not as enabling or providing but surveilling and disempowering them. Relative to the dominant reading among historians of late-twentieth-century Britain of the rise of social research as a democratic story, in which ‘ordinary’ voices were listened to and given weight in the development of social policy, the study of race relations research in this article reveals a far less consensual, less democratic relationship between state-sponsored research institutions and the black and brown people who became targets of race-relations research projects. It highlights the ubiquity of challenges or evasions to those research institutions and their claims to epistemic authority, and it shows how these researches were indicted as distractions, attempts at pacification, and misuses of funds. Reading the social encounters of ‘race relations’ research as moments in which state power and state-sanctioned racial knowledge were engaged and contested reveals the steady process by which the foundations of an unpopular and ineffective ‘race relations industry’ were cast into doubt, or consent for it refused.