Racism in Britain Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Racism in Britain - Essay Example The British national self and race is constructed in relation to the other nations. Cultural differences are irreducible, and they revealed the ambivalence and hybrid nature of racism. Critics state that "The positing of ethnic origin raises the issue of the targets of racism being diverse and not restricted to groups defined in racial terms" (Anthias, Lloyd, 2002. p. 8). According to the nature of racism in Britain the great influx of immigrants had eroded homogeneous national identities, or rather the traditional, received instructive images and narratives of national homogeneity, and had thereby revealed the poor image of non-white race. Racism is akin to culture and religion rather than ideology in their depth and extent. The British nation is best seen as an imagined political community, at once sovereign and spatially finite-imagined. But once created, this imagined communion of the nation represents a powerful sociological reality as a community imagined to move in linear fashion through 'empty, homogeneous time. Critics and historians single out the following causes of racism in Britain. In Britain, racism can be explained as: "not just presence of physical differences between groups that creates races, but "the social recognition of such differences as socially significant or relevant" (Van the Berghe, 1967 cited Yassine, n.d.). The assumption that the root causes of these wars lay in antagonisms not only had its political and diplomatic uses therefore, but it also diverted attention from what really needed to be explained: how was it that these political elites were able to arouse people who had been living for generations in multi-ethnic, multilingual and multi-religious communities to such extremes of racism. Researchers suppose that "frustration-aggression" and "authoritarian personality" theories help to explain racism in Britain. A part of the explanation lies in the particular techniques and strategies which are deliberately employed by political leaders to turn these materials into a powerful resource for advancing nationalist claims. [They] "explain racism as a type of relief from "frustration", where a "scapegoat" may become the object of aggressive behaviour" (Yassine, n.d.). The failure, or refusal, of British public institutions to recognize the impact of political and economic change on the development of ethnic and national sentiment has made it easier for these British nation to ignore, or fail to give serious causal weight to, the role of racism in using ethnicity and religion to mobilize, polarize and radicalize larger target groups. Immigration is seen as another cause of racial ideas and prejudices existed in British society. "Immigrants from the 'New Commonwealth were not welcomed, or effectively woven into the fabric of a polyethnic, multicultural society" (Yassine, n.d.). For this reason, many British citizens do not respect other nations who come to their country looking for better life. In general, even if British society can be shown to have common values, they might be morally unacceptable. Inequality is a shared value in slave-owning, racist and caste-based societies, but historians would not wish to argue that it should therefore be cherished let alone enforced on their egalitarian minorities. Besides, the core values of any society