ABSTRACT
The settlement in Britain of new population groups from outside Europe (principally from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa) made manifest certain kinds of racisms in Britain, and anti-discrimination laws and policies began to be put into place from the 1960s. For several decades these laws and policies, initially influenced by contemporary thinking and practice in relation to antiblack racism in the US, assumed that the dominant post-immigration issue was ‘colour-racism’ (Rex and Moore, 1967; CCCS, 1982; Sivanandan, 1985; Gilroy, 1987). This perspective was epigramatically expressed by the writer Salman Rushdie: ‘Britain is now two entirely different worlds and the one you inherit is determined by the colour of your skin’ (1982). An alternative view would be that the new populations are best understood as a racialised ethno-religious diversity, though this has only become apparent as the settlements have matured and the minorities have become political actors. The accounting of this perspectival change, and the understanding of ethno-religious minority politics today, requires a review of the breaking-up of the assumptions of the earlier period.
