ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the ways in which racial hostility deploys itself in the letters. Race is the foundation on which all the rest is predicated; it is the powerful nexus at the heart of a nativist “structure of feeling”, to quote Raymond Williams's phrase. In 1968, it was, as is well-known, the Race Relations Bill that was interpreted as “reverse discrimination” by those who feared its consequences on the British job or housing markets. In the late 1960s though, thousands of Powellites simply refused the reality or prospect of a “multiracial society”, at a time when the adjective “multicultural” was not used yet. The chapter explores the different ways in which anti-immigrant hostility is based on number. Ghassan Hage calls this category of racial stigmatization “numerological racism”, which may sometimes be expressed through tolerance or sympathy towards the targeted group but ends up being an exclusionary discourse.
