In 1935, Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon published their antiracist tract We Europeans, a difficult book that attempted to repudiate the “scientific racism” and virulent anti-Semitism that flourished at the time in Nazi Germany. In so doing, it anticipated the important “race relations” literature of the 1950s, a literature that also attempted to shift the study of race from biology to culture and yet never wholly repudiated the lingering belief in racial hierarchies and essential racial differences. Huxley and Haddon's book frames Tony Kushner's discussion of the work of the Mass-Observation organization, race, and national identity in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Indeed, Kushner's book owes its title, although certainly not its approach, to this seminal 1930s text—along with an interest in the ways in which race was understood at a pivotal moment in British history. Kushner reminds his readers that Tom Harrison, one of the founders of Mass-Observation, presented the East End to the nation in 1939 in one of the first BBC television documentaries “as a proto-postmodernist celebration of difference and impermanence” (92), echoing a widespread interest in race and ethnicity that pervaded the work of the organization in the 1930s and 1940s. Based on a careful reading of material in the Mass-Observation archives, Kushner provides the first book-length study of the original Mass-Observation project and the first detailed history of ordinary people's “racial” attitudes as mapped by the organization.

At first, such a study might appear incongruous. After all, we normally associate Mass-Observation with its quasi-anthropological studies of quintessentially white, English, working-class culture documented in all its minutiae. Social historians have been especially guilty of furthering this image of the organization, viewing the Mass-Observation archive as little more than a treasure trove of working-class customs and habits, excavating an increasingly forgotten way of life in a wholly unproblematic manner. By contrast, Kushner forces us to think about the ways in which the documentary evidence in the archives constructs the very reality it purports to describe and did so at a time when “race” was ever present in those introspective imaginings of the nation that were penned for Mass-Observation. He insists that “constructing who ‘we’ were, or were not, in relation to ‘race’” was a theme that permeated the writing undertaken for and on behalf of the organization (247). Furthermore, Kushner uses the archival evidence to challenge those historians who stress the importance of the empire in British racial thinking. He insists that while the decline of empire and the phenomenon of postwar immigration have become central to the ways in which race has been understood in Britain, their effect on the shaping of national identity has been greatly exaggerated. Kushner argues that it was the reaction to the presence, real or imagined, of minority groups whose roots were outside the empire (Jews, for example, or Germans in the First World War and American soldiers or Italian prisoners of war in the Second) that was more significant for the reconfiguration of British national identities at this time.

Kushner draws on much hitherto unexamined material in the Mass-Observation archives to support his claims. In a chapter on the directives the organization sent to approximately 450 observers, asking them to report on various topical issues, he dissects the responses to a 1939 directive on attitudes toward “negroes/coloured people,” arguing that the “range of influences” that informed popular opinion “was much wider than has been assumed” (127). Kushner also explores the influence of the racialized categories central to Huxley and Haddon's 1935 study on the responses to the 1943 “Race” directive, written when there was considerable debate in Britain about the U.S. military's attempt to practice racial segregation on British soil. Four years earlier, in 1939, the Board of Deputies of British Jews helped fund a Mass-Observation study of anti-Semitism in Britain, resulting in an extensive archival record that Kushner also mines in his attempt to reconstruct British racial thinking at the time. Again he explores the problematic logic of a racial discourse that mapped what were presumed to be essential differences between the Jews and Cockneys of London's Stepney, without grasping that of the two hundred thousand people who lived there on the eve of the war, not only were half of them Jewish, but many of them had been born in London and were themselves Cockneys as well as Jews.

Kushner is at his best in the four chapters that focus on diary writing. While the first two chapters of his book are somewhat unwieldy and meandering—the first an introduction to Mass-Observation, the second a survey of race relations discourses in interwar Britain—the latter part of the book draws on and consolidates the ideas developed earlier. According to Kushner, some five hundred people kept diaries for the organization during the war. It was in such self-reflexive writing that they privately worked through many concepts of race, nationality, and ethnicity that were in circulation at the time, the diary representing a personal attempt “to construct and reconstruct personal identity through the writing process” (186). Kushner reads them carefully in order to make sense of the ways that prejudice was understood, experienced, and expressed. He also explores how individuals recounted their feelings about specific events, such as the anti-Italian riots of June 1940 and what would soon become known as the Holocaust. In so doing, Kushner is interested in “the tensions between what people felt they should be thinking and their own antipathies and prejudices,” all of which were “exposed through the act of writing” (198). There are a few too many places in his book where Kushner merely recounts what the diaries have to say about race and national identity, summarizing complex attitudes rather than grounding them carefully in the various discursive practices circulating at the time and consolidated in works like that by Huxley and Haddon. That said, We Europeans is an ambitious and important study that carefully illuminates popular racial attitudes and the sources of those attitudes in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s.