ABSTRACT
Racism is not confined to the beliefs of a few bigoted individuals who simply do not know any better. It is a set of interrelated ideologies and practices that have grave material effects, severely affecting black people’s life-chances and threatening their present and future wellbeing. 1 Racism is deeply rooted in British society’s unequal power structure and is perpetuated from day to day by the intended and unintended consequences of institutional policies and practices. Institutional racism is in turn sustained by the false representations of ‘common-sense’ racism and media stereotypes. Challenging racism, as this book seeks to do, therefore involves a range of complex and interacting issues. We should begin, though, as Kevin Brown argued in an earlier collection of essays on the social geography of ethnic segregation (Jackson & Smith 1981), by recognizing that:
White academics with an interest in race must relinquish their self-appointed role as the ‘translators’ of black cultures, in favour of analyses of white society, i.e. of racism. (Brown 1981, p. 198)
A positive response to Kevin Brown’s challenge involves a reappraisal of the academic and political significance of the concept of ‘race’ and of the ‘race relations’ industry in general. It suggests that geographers have paid too little attention to work in other branches of the social sciences, particularly concerning the radical critique of ‘race relations’ research. But, conversely, it suggests also that there are important territorial dimensions to the study of ‘race’ that make the geography of racism an important and relatively neglected field. In keeping with debates in other areas of human geography and social theory (e.g. Gregory & Urry 1985), this suggests that we need both to broaden our intellectual horizons to encompass a wider range of social-science perspectives while at the same time injecting a more adequately theorized conception of space and place into the general social-science literature on ‘race’ and racism.
