The main argument of this thesis is that racism exists in the National Health Service and that it is experienced by black people as consumers and as employees of that service. The concept 'racism' has been widely used since the early '70s as describing prejudice allied to the power to perpetuate and institutionalise such prejudice, and there is now a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of racism within British society. But that awareness is not reflected in the kinds of reasons given to explain the experiences of Black people in the National Health Service in particular or within British society in general. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate to what extent such explanations conceal the racism experienced by black people in the National Health Service. Our work has revealed that at the consumer level the cultural framework has been extensively employed to explain conditions such as rickets, infant mortality and mental illness among racial minorities. Such explanations coming, as they do, from professional experts claiming to base their pronouncements on scientific objectivity carry considerable weight and thus support racism. They look back from the present to the historical development (or un- or under-development) of peoples and justify what has sedimented to 'common-sense' which all white Britons have about black people in general. We have argued in this thesis that the cultural issue serves as a decoy away from the central issue of black health provision, namely racism. This racism is again reflected very starkly in the response of the NationalHealth Service to sickle cell disease, a specific condition virtually exclusive to black people. Using Liverpool as an area of reflection we have argued that although social, political and economic factors disadvantage working class communities in both incidence of illness and access to health services, black people are even more disadvantaged because of racism. In the field of employment the traditional image of black nurses as 'immigrants' has persisted and is reflected in cultural explanations for their lack of advancement within the profession. We have argued that such nonadvancement as seen in difficulty of access to qualification and poor chances of promotion has a great deal to do with the fact of being black in a racist institution which does not see blacks as having roles in positions of authority and power. Racism here, however, operates through hidden mechanisms which are used to perpetuate discrimination. Our aim in the . section dealing with this area has been to analyse the ways in which such mechanisms work. Our research has revealed that racism at this level remains for the most part covert, operating through the institutional power conferred on persons In positions of authority. Decisions taken by such persons are not subject to open scrutiny, thus black nurses can be disadvantaged through institutional devices which conceal information

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2008. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Sept. 14, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-99).

This DPhil dissertation aims to delineate an ambivalent construction of 'Britishness' in late British India by paying special attention to certain discourses and practices that regulated the lives of both colonial elites and of their impoverished and/or racially mixed kin. Peculiar racial self-anxieties of the colonial ruling classes, - namely those over hygienic / sexual degradation and cultural hybridisation, the increased presence of indigent and/or racially mixed white populations, and the undesired consequences of the last - are examined thorough a close and analytically coherent analysis of colonial representations and practices. An important feature of this research is to bring the internal-cum-class distinctions of metropolitan society to the fore in order to circumscribe a peculiarly class-specific constitution of British racial identity in the colonial context. Broadly speaking, in two related senses can the (re)production of white racial prestige in the British Raj be regarded as a class-conditioned phenomenon. First of all, colonial Britishness can be said to have been characterised by class because not all persons or groups of British descent living in the colony were recognised as 'European enough': only those from the upper or middle classes were considered as so 'European' as to be capable of ruling the 'subject races' of India. The remaining people of British racial origins, including the so-called 'poor whites', the 'domiciled Europeans' (those whites permanently settled in India), and the mixed-decent 'Eurasians', were not regarded as 'British enough' (although they were not seen as 'Indian', either). Especially, 'domiciled Europeans' and 'Eurasians', often collectively referred to as 'the domiciled class', were not treated as 'British' but only as 'Native' in socio-legal terms: the 'domiciled' differed from 'Indians' in terms of racial and cultural identification, but were supposed to be no higher than the latter by constitutional status and socio-economic standard. Secondly it was because of its recourse to 'bourgeois philanthropy' that the construction of Britishness in late British India may be said to have been bound by aspects of Victorian or Edwardian class culture. Although the British excluded their domiciled brethren from the sphere of their social and economic privileges, the former also 'included' the latter within limited frames of philanthropic and educational care. For, their exclusion from the elite white community notwithstanding, the domiciled were still regarded as one part of the European (as opposed to Indian) body politic. Thus the colonial authorities feared that an unregulated destitution of 'poor whites', domiciled Europeans, and Eurasians might present itself as a political menace to the prestige of the British race as a whole: in a sense, the authority of Britishness also depended on how 'European pauperism' could be solved before it had disorderly effects on the colonial hierarchies of race and class. It was in this context that the philanthropic management of pauperism emerged as a negative but no less unimportant measure for reproducing British prestige in the colonial context. And central to this was a specific, colonial application of a politics of class that the bourgeoisie played against the indigent and various 'unfit' populations in the metropole.

State violence, and policing in particular, continue to shape the black British experience, racialising geographical areas associated with African and African-Caribbean communities. The history of black struggles in the UK has often centred on spaces of racial violence and resistance to it. But black-led social movements of previous decades have, for the most part, seen a decline in both political mobilisations, and the militant anti-racist slogans and discourses that accompanied them. Neoliberalism, through securitisation, resource reallocation, privatisation of space and the de-racialising of language, has made radical black activism an increasingly difficult endeavour. But this does not mean that black struggle against policing has disappeared. What it does mean, however, is that there have been significant changes in how anti-racist activism against policing is articulated and carried out. Three high-profile black deaths at the hands of police in 2011 led to widespread protest and civil unrest. These movements of resistance were strengthened when the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States mobilised hundreds of young people in solidarity actions in England. In this thesis, I argue that, over time, racist metonyms used to describe places racialised as black (Handsworth, Brixton etc.) and people racialised as black (Stephen Lawrence, Mark Duggan etc.), have led to the rise of metonymic anti-racism. While metonymic anti-racism was used alongside more overt anti-racist language in the period between the 1950s and early 1990s, I argue that such overt anti-racist language is becoming rarer in the post-2011 period, particularly in radical black grassroots organisations that address policing. Intersecting with metonymic anti-racism are gender dynamics brought to the surface by female-led campaigns against police violence, and forms of resistance which target spaces of post-industrial consumer capitalism. Understanding how police racism, and resistance to it, are being reconceptualised through language, and reconfigured through different forms of activism, provides a fresh understanding of grassroots black struggle in Britain.