Britain’s Institute of Race Relations has just produced an 800-page report dealing with the country’s race problem. Many of the 1.1 million immigrant families have never seen Jamaica, Nigeria, Pakistan, or any other part of the empire over which the Union Jack used to fly supreme—and whose peoples, conversely, could enter the motherland unhindered.
Many of their children, now with educational qualifications parallel to the whites’, are seeking posts hitherto restricted to Britons, ostensibly for other than color reasons, thus raising problems for trade unions and employers alike. Colored folk are becoming impatient also of a housing situation which, while it features no ghettoes, is prominent for a subtler kind of discrimination.
The report, which is the most comprehensive ever attempted, concludes: “The dominant question of our century is whether men of all races and colours whom advances in science and technology have made near neighbours, can live together in harmony.” It is a word to be pondered on both sides of the Atlantic.
