ABSTRACT
The perception that there is a problem of race relations occurs in different circumstances at different times in history. In the United States, for example, the problem in the 1930s used to be perceived as one of a dilemma between the high ideals enshrined in the constitution on the one hand and the actual practice of de facto disfranchisement and Jim Crow in the South and of segregation in the urban ghettoes of the North. In Britain, in the immediate post-war period, the problem was usually seen as that of the colour bar, recognized with varying degrees of moral clarity as a problem in the settler colonies in Africa, and to a small extent with regard to the housing and employment of coloured workers in Britain, or, alternatively, of the strangeness and inscrutability of the customs and ways of the inhabitants of the oriental empire. In Europe, on the other hand, the problem was a more diffuse one. The colonial powers which had black populations, e.g. France and Portugal, knew no colour bar as such, but all of the more advanced countries used immigrant labour operating under relatively unfree and restricted conditions, to supplement the native working class and to staff the societies' more menial jobs. Germany, during Hitler's rule, saw a violent extension of this form of labour, with the creation of concentration camps and the use of slave labour, the whole operation being justified in specifically racist terms.
