When Racism Became Taboo: Intolerance, Anonymity and the Public Sphere in England, 1960-1990

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One of the most iconic images of multiculturalism in modern British history is a photograph of an Afro-Caribbean man in a suit striding in front of a graffitied wall in the late 1960s. The graffiti reads 'Powell for PM'. The photograph is striking in that it captures the act of living with intolerance, its pervasive presence inscribed on the very architecture of metropolitan life. Unsurprisingly, the words are anonymous and the striding man has no name. This contributes perhaps to the image's recurring currency. Yet, while oral history projects have done important work since the 1990s to capture Black British experiences of intolerance - approaching a collective memory of migration and settlement which may begin to approximate the perspective of the man in the photograph - it has been near impossible to capture the other side of the story. Few historical works have come close to unpacking everyday intolerant beliefs in England, 1960-1990. Instead, historians tend to analyse English racism through its most violent and extreme political forms, as a history reducible to the National Front or its equivalents. Ordinary acts of discrimination and expressions of intolerance between 1960 and 1990 - among the middle classes, in housing, in employment and across English vernacular cultures - remain largely hidden from view. Critically, it is precisely because racism was in transition at this time - increasingly a taboo and out of step with a growing anti-racist consensus in this period - that it has been so well hidden from historical memory. This historical transition deserves renewed scholarly attention. In 1965 and 1968, two Race Relations Acts made racial and ethnic discrimination a civil offence in English social and economic life and introduced anti-hate speech law. The birth of this equality legislation had profound, and as yet uncharted, consequences at the popular level in England. Alongside anti-racist activism, this legislation challenged and to an extent transformed the accepted locations of racism in England. By 1976, these statutory efforts to control discrimination had developed into a large bureaucratic machinery that has left behind an incredible paper trail. Remarkably, no historian has before now approached these vast archives as a window into everyday experiences and expressions of intolerance. This project is concerned with uncovering - through a bottom-up approach to these and other institutional archives and qualitative social surveys - a historical map of intolerance, moving beyond a history of its most extreme forms. The Fellow and RA will work closely with the first person accounts in these archives to unpack and deconstruct the shifting place of racism in hundreds of individuals' personal narratives. Critically, this project approaches the social history of racism and its control in light of contemporary debates about hate speech and abuse in online media. It will provide rich empirical material and analysis for those seeking to understand the relationship between expressions of hate, social taboos and anonymity. It will bring new historical perspective to contemporary debates about how best to control hate in the public sphere. It will be informed by the concerns of practitioners and activists working to defend anti-racism, political dissent and privacy. And, finally, it will challenge public audiences to move beyond a historical caricature of 'the racist', to recognise the pervasive presence of ordinary acts of discrimination in the past and present. 'When Racism Became Taboo' is on the one hand a large research project that is long overdue. On the other, it is a collaborative programme of academic and public events that will develop new ways of seeing both historical and contemporary efforts to live in a world free from surveillance and free from hate.