Colour and Citizenship: The Rose Report

Extract

The publication of Colour and Citizenship, the report on British race relations prepared by E. J. B. Rose, Nicholas Deakin and seven others, and published by the Institute of Race Relations, was registered by the Press as a major event. It was the first occurrence of a kind favourable to those who hope for the defeat of racialism to have been so registered by the mass media since the publication of the P.E.P. Report on Discrimination. Those who prepared the Rose Report did so with a sense of urgency. The Survey of Race Relations, which did the work on which the Rose Report is based, had originally intended a series of detailed studies, of which four, including Rex and Moore’s Race, Community and Conflict, have already appeared. But, as the situation so rapidly and palpably deteriorated, they saw this response as inadequate: what was needed was a single comprehensive study, to make an impact on public awareness and official policy, and not a library of volumes which only the ‘experts’ would read.

The initial response must have been encouraging to the authors. The Press, that very haphazard and often insensitive seismograph for measuring the importance of what occurs, recorded the publication of the Report as an event of the first magnitude. But already disappointment must have settled on those who worked at desperate speed to get the book out before it became pointless to publish such a book at all. The columns devoted in The Times and The Guardian to summarizing the book’s contents have initiated no debate, in the correspondence columns or elsewhere, on Britain’s racial policy; the speeches of politicians contain no reference to it, nor do they seem in any way altered in tone as a result of it.