There is a great deal of discrimination in Britain against immigrants, and it is essentially discrimination based on colour. Discrimination must not be confused with prejudice. Prejudice is an attitude of mind. Discrimination consists in giving expression to our prejudices by positive action; in this case by excluding one person from some benefit or opportunity, and not taking the same action against another person with the same qualifications.

I have always held that discrimination, from which the native- born coloured suffers as much as any coloured immigrant, was based on colour, and this has been confirmed by the P.E.P. report. In carrying out their survey P.E.P. used an English person, a West Indian, an Indian, a Pakistani, a Hungarian and a Cypriot. If you accept the reaction to the English person as the norm, the findings were quite clear. For example, on one occasion forty places were tested for jobs. The Englishman was offered thirty jobs, the Hungarian twenty-seven, and the West Indian three. This shows the extent to which discrimination is based on colour. It is a fallacy to think that, as most coloured people are newcomers, discrimination will cease, since after a generation or two they will be absorbed. It is much more likely that discrimination will have become greater and segregation will have begun to be confirmed. The P.E.P. report has disclosed that people who have skills which they obtained in this country suffer greater discrimination than others; in fact 70 per cent of the coloured people who have British qualifications suffer from discrimination.

Scientists have been the poets of modern society. The myths of our age have been the creation, through popular repetition, of the genuine oracles of scientific discoverers, misunderstood, misinterpreted and misapplied by lesser men. The facts behind Darwin’s theory have been of less importance than the altered view of humanity they came to imply, the higher beast rather than the lesser angel. The clinical work of Freud is a small affair beside the wholesale change in sex-conventions that he fathered. Einstein’s few pages on Relativity revolutionized not only Physics but the concept of Truth itself in other disciplines and in popular understanding.

Not least important of the myths we have grown up with has been the notion of Race. Already in the nineteenth century, some evolutionists applied the idea of competing and differing species to the apparently different groups of mankind, defined by general differences of physical appearance. The survival of the fittest came to be seen, in terms of Race, as the story of Nordic man’s superiority. The science of anthropology dealt in terms of ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’ peoples, with the assumption of European man’s advancement implicit. Now, modern biology and anthropology no longer deal in these terms. Race, as the term is popularly used, is not a biologically valid or respectable concept. The anthropologist has discovered and learnt to respect the sophisticated culture and technology of the rest of the world’s history. But the myth of Race remains solidly embedded in the intellectual apparatus of all educated people in Europe and North America.

In 1960 one person in ten in the United States was non-white. Today it is one in nine. By the end of the decade it will be one in eight. Of persons under fourteen today it is one in seven. Of persons under the age of one it is one in six.

The American race problem is too large to be swept under the carpet. In fact it is of such a size as to influence the whole course of world politics: for if one thing is clear in this turbulent world it is that the major source of conflict of the latter half of this century will be the race/poverty problem and that America will, in one way or another, be at the hub of it.

Already in America the situation is being polarized to the extent where it is becoming more and more rare for white and black people to do anything together. This was my conclusion after two years in the U.S.: first in the liberal, nearly all white, peaceful university town of Madison, Wisconsin, and secondly in the West Side ghetto of Chicago where no other white people lived and where the crime rate was one of the highest in the country. And since leaving America twelve months ago I have seen the process of polarization accelerate at an astonishing rate. All my white and Negro friends agree that they see no alternative in sight to an escalating number of major explosions that will make Newark and Detroit look like tea-parties.

Every man of sense who has had to fill up a form in which there is a space labelled ‘race’ must have been tempted to write down ‘human’. That ‘Caucasian’ (an echo of a long obsolete ethnological theory) or ‘Negro’ should be required answers has profound moral and political significance in our time. It represents the enchantment of the intellect by a myth comparable in its power and in its forbidding consequences to the myth of antisemitism. The follies and cruelties that go with this enchantment are well known and need not be listed. We may well suspect that the spell that binds so many cannot be broken by argument, that time spent in examining the sophistries of racialist theory (resting for the most part on a radical confusion of phenotype with genotype) is time wasted. But Christians at least have a duty to examine their consciences and their presuppositions, both in order to correct their attitudes and in order to know how to witness to the truth in the world of our day.

What we do in unavoidable ignorance of how things are may be excusable or perhaps meritorious, even in those cases where a knowledge of how things are would have prompted us to quite other courses.

The intention of this paper is to test the hunch that there must be some correlation between theory of language and theory of community. Why this seems worth doing should come out in the course of the paper. It should be said that it was meant to fit between a paper by Raymond Williams and one by David Cooper, in a symposium on the theoretical basis of a ‘common culture’.

Raymond Williams writes: ‘We live in almost overwhelming danger, at a peak of our apparent control. We react to the danger by attempting to take control, yet still we have to unlearn, as the price of survival, the inherent dominative mode’ (Culture and Society 1780-1950, Penguin edition, p. 322).

We have to unlearn the dominative mode in social relationship. That programme is part of a complex argument, the whole of which I have no intention of spelling out here, in my crude orthography. But the point of the case is that the line of writers and thinkers studied in Williams’ book, the tradition he presents there, from Burke and Cobbett down to George Orwell, is a tradition of criticism of, and protest against, the official ideology and the prevalent consciousness of our society: ‘The development of the idea of culture has, throughout, been a criticism of what has been called the bourgeois idea of society. The contributors to its meaning have started from widely different positions, and have reached widely various attachments and loyalties.