In the early to mid 1900’s England was moving day by day, living their daily lives, and doing daily ordinary things. In Chris Waters article, “Dark Strangers”, he genuinely portrays blacks as being strangers to the British culture. He talks about the severe anxiety that the British had due to the idea of blacks joining into their culture. Because British culture during this time was to be, “ordinary” and being ordinary was something that they had pride in. The national pride the British had during this time was high. And it had what they thought as a dark cloud looming forward: the amount of black people that were moving to England and becoming a part of their culture. The British feared that this would destabilized the normal culture that they had cultivated and they feared it would destruct the feminism that they had began to form for the health and safety of women. British Culture is often associated with their colonial legacy, and it was something that they were desperate to keep in place.
Both articles touch on the racial distaste that occurred in England in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In Wendy Webster’s article “There Will Always be England” immediately in the first page she discusses the racial differences caused by immigration from British colonies. Both of these articles reference the protection and the innocence the women in England portrayed compared to the black immigrants. Webster also discusses literature and film that were made during the colonial period/during this racial segregation. Most of these films focused on the homefront and women and romanticized the idea of going back home- back to England.
These ideas of race and racism are still very well versed in our world today, especially in America. There are a lot of people in our country who dislike and are now treating people how people were treated in the 1950’s in England and the 1960’s in the United States. Instead of it just being blacks there is racism across all lines and cultures towards lots of different people. Articles like this hopefully can and will open the eyes of the people to see the world differently.
Waters, Chris. ‘”Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1944-1963″. Journal of British Studies, Vol. 36, No. 20 (1997): 207-238.
Webster, Wendy. “There Will Always Be England.”
it certainly is interesting to see the parallels between England and American forms of racism. While many British today would call modern day Americans racist and intolerant, there are clear cases of the same treatment of minorities in Britain. I think the discomfort and anxiety created by the presence of the “dark stranger” in England is as you say, there was high levels of national pride after the war, and the British men who had fought wanted to return to a life of semi-normalcy. But with the influx of strangers from the far reaches of the planet it threw the social balance out of whack. While people from Kenya, India, and the Caribbean were all part of the British Commonwealth, they were not, in the minds of mainland Britons, part of Britain itself.
We never really talk about race relations abroad in history or in today’s culture. We always think that we;re the only ones with this problem. But you pointed out that that is not true at all! You had some great points and a good blog!