This book is a wonderful addition to the literature on race, respectability, and citizenship in the shifting terrains of postcolonial London. Written in an erudite style and deeply contextualized, Rob Waters’ book includes rich readings of several flashpoints in studies of postwar Britain and capably examines the professional, civil, and emotional lives of his main subjects: integrationists and the new Commonwealth migrants they attempted to help. He uses a number of previously unmined resources to explore the networks of voluntary associations, welfare bodies, and interracial clubs that attempted to promote intercultural harmony and avoid racial antagonisms from the Second World War to the mid-1960s. The author follows both black and white integrationists, as they responded to the 1958 riots in Notting Hill, attempted to end the color bars in housing and leisure, and tried to promote interracial interaction through social clubs, dances, home visits, and a generalized sense of hospitality and friendship.
Among the many trenchant arguments presented here, the author begins by discussing the British version of integration during this period as a political rationality and form of “racial liberalism” that extended colonial distinctions of civilized and savage, modern and native, reformed and unreformed, citizen and migrant (6). Integrationists adopted the position of colonial reformers and aimed to re-educate both racist native Britons and supposedly disconnected and unacculturated migrants of color. Integration projects, both voluntary and those led by the local government, wanted to build a multicultural city free of overt racism for the future. But their practices and ideas were underwritten by Victorian and colonial understandings of racial difference and modern citizenship and were complicated by racial violence on the streets and anti-immigration politics at the national level. Over the course of the book, we learn how integrationists imagined racism as a moral failing of their fellow Britons, but their practices and conceptual frameworks illustrated the persistence of racial otherness as central to their thinking.
The first two chapters situate integrationist projects within the nexus of race, class, and respectability in a shifting London landscape. Chapter 1 sets a foundation for how Londoners understood the intersections of race and class that informed their visions of integration: poverty and racial alterity were intimately intertwined. Migrants of color represented a threat to the shifting neighborhoods in a new postwar London, and many worried about their streets or homes losing value or respectable status because of black immigration. Waters taps into the high emotions involved in contesting spaces deemed rough or respectable, as those whites who could not flee to new suburbs expressed anxiety and fear about the shifting populations of their blocks. Chapter 2 applies the racialized and classed inflections of respectability to unveil how color bars operated both overtly and as “ad hoc programme[s] of discrimination” (57). Openly declaring a color bar was disreputable and “rough,” but lobbying for the protection of neighborhoods from purportedly loud, unclean, and disrespectable people of color was acceptable.
The next three chapters explore the projects and practices of civilizational reform carried out by integrationists for the supposed benefit of their neighbors. The central moment here is the 1958 riots, which debunked notions of a generalized liberal tolerance to a multicultural landscape. Chapter 3 offers a new rendering of the Teddy boy moral panic through scrutiny of integrationists’ reactions to white violence against black Britons. Because integrationists declared racism to be primitive, the solution was civility and a dose of civilization for racist whites (101). Respectable integrationists directed their efforts at civilizing the English poor as a “race apart” (87) and offered film showings and youth clubs to attempt to welcome working-class subcultures into spaces of conciliation and reform. Chapter 4 investigates efforts to make black Londoners into respectable citizens through the work of voluntary associations at the local level. Integrationists feared that without targeted intervention, civic disengagement would spread like a disease through West Indian communities, just as they feared racism would spread outward from Notting Hill. Though Waters’ previous work and that by other scholars has explored how black Britons championed their own rights as citizens, the chapter fleshes out how integrationists assumed that citizenship remained out of the reach of recent migrants. Mutual interaction—through home visits, on-the-ground welfare provision, social events, and discussion forums—would build a sense of neighborliness and civic responsibility among migrants of color. Chapter 5 interrogates the logic of friendship as an attempt to depoliticize race and practice multicultural peacemaking. In centering affective relations and the practical work of several organizations, Waters foregrounds integrationists’ sense of curiosity and failed attempts at sympathy.
Chapter 6, titled “Uplifters,” outlines the efforts of middle-class black integrationists to acculturate their working-class counterparts. A generation of young, motivated, and proud black men preached moral and cultural improvement and hoped that black workers would adopt a diasporic identity and respectability that appreciated both West Indian federation and British cultural standards. Chapter 7 reads through the integrationists’ archives to find moments of rupture, dissidence, and nonconformity. Waters elicits the voices of black Londoners who felt indifferent or hostile towards efforts to bring black voters into formal political structures and suggests that these resentments can constitute an alternative politics. In exploring the garrison mentality of some self-defense groups and the complicated legacy of Michael de Freitas, one learns of how vernacular political cultures emerged alongside discourses of participatory democracy in the postcolonial city. A final chapter explores more evidence of ad hoc and unplanned integration outcomes through examining social mingling in multicultural markets, interracial relationships, and sexual encounters.
Among the many erudite interventions Waters makes in the book, a few stand apart. First, rather than casting integrationists away as failures or doomed do-gooders, the study adeptly situates them as worthy subjects of study. Second, he forcefully advocates for framing their work as neither liberal or illiberal, racist or anti-racist, or good and bad. Instead, he historicizes them as actors and interrogates their political logics as central to understanding the ambivalence and liminality of many groups of actors in the multicultural metropolis. Finally, in seeing respectability, civility, and class as articulated to the organizing concept of race, he traces how colonial mentalities manifested in integration projects during this crucial period in the making of postcolonial Britain.
