The British ‘Battle of the Name’

Michael Banton was one of the founders of the study of ethnic relations in Britain, including what might be called ‘the Bristol School of Ethnic Relations’. So, most my contemporaries would have encountered his work as students in the 1970s and 1980s. I came to this field of study—having in the 1970s and 1980s studied political philosophy or been out of academia altogether—in about 1987. One of the first things that got me interested in Michael Banton was when I read his statement: ‘In my view the lack of an agreed nomenclature is one of the most revealing features of racial and ethnic relations in Britain today’ (Banton, 1987, p. 175). That he could write this in 1987 must have meant that he felt that his arguments over many years resisting the inclusion of Asians under the category ‘Black’ (e.g., Banton, 1976) had not been in vain. In fact, they had been far from successful; indeed, it would be fair to say that in 1987, there was an agreed nomenclature in the public discourse of race. Those who believed that for reasons of tidiness as well as effective anti-racism, the way forward lay in establishing the hegemony of the term ‘Black’ seemed by that point to have won the day. The term was not quite so securely established that academic or policy document writers felt no need to justify the use of ‘Black’ to mean all non-white minorities. Where such a justification was felt necessary, even in the case of writers who were not wholly sympathetic to such reduction, it usually consisted of a footnote simply explaining that the usage of the all-inclusive Black was now an established fact (e.g., Nanton, 1989: note 1; Mullings, 1992: note 1; Saggar, 1992, p. xii; Smith, 1993, note 1). One can get some appreciation of the path towards this linguistic consensus that included the media, by looking briefly at British Parliamentary language. While in 1968, the favoured term was ‘coloured’, with ‘non-European’ and ‘non-white’ being considered patronising, and ‘black’ being ‘offensive and inaccurate’ (House of Commons, 1968-69, para. 15). The White Paper introducing the 1976 legislation speaks, however, of ‘black and brown’. When the matter of terminology was raised by the Home Affairs sub-committee in 1982, the then Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) informed it that despite the fact that the majority of Asians would not self-classify themselves as Black, this is ‘the conventional way now of regarding all those who suffer from the particular disadvantage related to colour’ (House of Commons, 1982, para 391).11 The then Chairman of the CRE, Sir Peter Newsam, has subsequently given some indication of the price that advocates of ‘Black’ were willing to pay: ‘I have seen south Asians walk out of CRE meetings because they have been labelled black’. (The Independent on Sunday, 25 April 1993:25). This understanding grew through the mid- to late-80s, as is reflected in virtually all CRE publications, local authorities' race discourse, academic texts, the ‘quality’ press, radio and television, as well as in most central government departments' and many large employers' documents. As Stuart Hall wrote, ‘[I]n this moment, politically speaking, “The Black experience”, as a singular and unifying framework based on the building up of identity across ethnic and cultural difference between the different communities, became “hegemonic” over other ethnic/racial identities’ (Hall, 1992, p. 242; cf Sudbury, 2001, pp. 34–35). And yet, by the early 1990s, Banton's words rang true. An incisive analysis of this contrast had been offered by Alastair Bonnett. He argues that the significant extent to which the inclusive political concept of Black had entered ‘non-political’ discourse in the 1980s marked quite a significant victory for anti-racism. Yet, its inability to maintain this victory was ultimately a result of the political failure, central to the practice of anti-racism, to root itself in the non-white, especially Asian, communities (Bonnett, 1989, pp. 8–9). I argued on a number of occasions that the concept of Black was rightly not accepted by Asian communities for it was incompatible with their sense of themselves and harmful to their interests (e.g., Modood, 1988 and 1994). I shall not return to that here but would like to explore the sources of Banton's objections to the race terminology that became hegemonic in the 1980s during the period of its rise. Banton's explicit discussion of the suitability of the new terminology of ‘black’ (where others thought the issue was not worth more than a prefatory footnote) and his unfashionable stand against it reflects a long-standing interest in what groups are called and what they call themselves. For he took issues of nomenclature and political vocabulary to not just be trivial arguments about words, but to be a fundamental indicator of social and political change and of how a particular race relations situation is developing. Hence, his historical and comparative interest in what language, fineness of distinction and mixing of different categories of status and of ideology have been in use in different times and places in the Atlantic world and beyond. This interest is clearly evident, first in his numerous studies of the classifications used in various censuses and the options that they allow or rule out (e.g., Banton, 1983, pp. 55–57); and secondly in his discussion of U.S. debates amongst those of Latin American origins on whether to be called by national origins (Cubans, Mexican-Americans) or by language (Spanish-speaking) or to be called Latinos, Chicanos or Hispanics, debates full of passion and politics that some commentators dubbed, ‘The Battle of the Name’ (Banton, 1988, p. 116). While some radicals have claimed (usually without consistency when they themselves police all language for political correctness) that focusing on group labels and self-definition is a distraction from the elimination of material inequalities, this was certainly not the view of the late 1960s U.S. black power radicals and other allied new left movements. Their view was given a retrospective importance in Omi and Winant's claim that ‘the forging of the new collective racial identities during the 1950s and 1960s has been the enduring legacy of the racial minority movements’ (Omi & Winant, 1986, p. 91). Yet, while Banton places an emphasis on labels and identity options in a way not characteristic of British sociology of race, he places an entirely different evaluation than Omi and Winant on the movements they refer to. For Banton's interest in formal and informal classifications and how they change was informed by a concern to avoid the emergence or persistence of situations with hard group boundaries, where each individual must be in one or another group, and where in most or all social contexts status and life-chances are determined by reference to the group into which one has been classified. The most severe case is where all individuals in a society are classified in one of two discrete groups, white and black, and where one is absolutely subordinate to the other, usually by on-going coercion and use of state power. Both in historical and contemporary terms, Banton repeatedly identified the American Deep South as the worst case of this racial dualism (Banton, 1983, pp. 28–29). He seems to have had two main objections to hard group boundaries, whether as legacies of domination or as strategies for equality. The first is that they lead, even if motivated by worthy goals, to social divisions, where individuals have few opportunities for social mobility and relate to each other not as individuals but as members of groups, and political reform takes the form of polarised confrontation and (avoidable) conflict. The second is that soft boundaries, overlappingness, movement of individuals between groups or identification with one group in some contexts and with another in another context, increase options for individuals, especially those individuals who do not neatly fall into one group or another; it is therefore more compatible with the promotion of individual freedom and self expression (Banton, 1983, pp. 396–97). It is interesting here to see a before-its-time ‘post modernist’ emphasis on multiple identities and boundary-crossing hybridity of the kind evoked by those such as Hall, who came to speak lyrically of ‘new ethnicities’ and against ‘ethnic absolutism’ and yet, a few years earlier had embraced an absolutist racial dualism (cf. CCCS, 1982 with Hall, 1992). The historical case that is commonly used to illustrate variation in race relations, and especially to contrast with the Deep South, is Brazil. In the Deep South, a person's status depended first and foremost on whether they were deemed white or black, so that regardless of intelligence, education, occupation, income, social behaviour, personal rectitude and so on, a black must always be inferior in status to a white and liable to certain disabilities, exclusion etc. In Brazil, on the other hand, a dark skin colour and non-European ancestry did and does count against an individual's status but only as one of a number of factors of the kind listed in the previous sentence, such that a black lawyer can enjoy a higher social status than a white clerk (Banton, 1988, pp. 32–38). As a result, while many British sociologists and political reformers have looked to the race relations scene in America as an explanatory and normative guide, indeed as a source of prediction for British race relations (“What happens in American inner cities today, will happen in English inner cities in X years time”), Banton argued that Britain, which is probably an intermediate case between Latin America and the United States, can be guided also by the experience of the former (Banton, 1988, p. 132). Banton particularly stressed that we ought not to overlook the advantages of softening and overcoming racial divisions by avoiding the formation of polarised racial groups, and of weakening the prejudice against a dark skin by allowing other measures of individual status to come into play. This would reduce the likelihood and salience of the formation of racially exclusive classes and underclasses and prevent colour from becoming caste-like. He challenged therefore the American arrogance on the subject, suggesting that Americans too can learn from others, including Britain, and argued that the views of eminent American social scientists such as Talcott Parsons and Carl N Degler that racial dualism is a precondition of anti-racism, is a form of American ethnocentrism (Banton, 1983, pp. 67–71). He could also have added that the malign effects of the hegemony of the dualistic approach are not just felt in its influence outside the United States but also within it. Clara Rodriguez's argument about the difficulties that Puerto Ricans have faced in America because they find it difficult to locate themselves in the American black-white, ‘race-over-culture racial classification system’ and as a result, they predominantly define themselves as ‘other’ in the Census and in response to survey questionnaires (Rodriguez, 1991). The same problem of self-classification applies to other communities from the Spanish-speaking world and to those from the Pacific and Asia. It is worth noting that while it is possible that a length of continuous residence in the United States makes Puerto Ricans more likely to try to fit into a black-white classification, there is an ambiguity as to which of these colours they are; the overwhelming majority of those who choose either, choose white, even though most of them are aware that others, especially whites, may not classify them as white. Indeed, Rodriguez's claim that through the Puerto Ricans ‘we [witnessed] the strongest challenge ever to the US bifurcation of race’ (Rodriguez, 1991, p. 108), makes much more sense by considering the new large presence in that country of people whose point of departure was neither Europe nor Africa, and the political emphasis on ‘diversity’ that the new demography has given rise to. The political movement for racial equality in the first half of the twentieth century organised around an attack on mistaken racial beliefs and their use to justify racial inequalities. The idea that people could be meaningfully divided into racial categories and that they should be treated according to their category membership rather than their individual merits, was vigorously denied. The categories should be dissolved ( Banton, 1988: p. 85).

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