When your work is concerned with racial injustice and the law, you get a lot of feedback from everyone about how depressing it all is. “Why don’t you talk about the successes instead?” you get asked. “Why is everything about what is not working?” In a previous post, I explain why I think it is useful to sit with our despair about enduring racial injustice and deflect into triumphalism and empty hope. This post takes a slightly different approach to examine, through the lens of “progress” and the passing of a specific piece of legislation, why our celebration of the so-called triumphs of racial justice are, at the very best, muted and wary. With one eye on the next wave of racial vitriol to take us back.
As this post has ended up longer than intended, I am not going to include in this post suggestions for what we should do instead. However, Bharat Malkani’s book has some good ideas. In a recent article, I also made some suggestions that are directed towards academics. I will expand upon these in a follow-up post. In this one, my focus is on the question of celebration by examining the efficacy of the RRA 1965 as a tool for racial justice within the law.
The Race Relations Act 1965 received Royal Assent on November 8, 1965, and came into effect on December 8, 1965. The 1965 Act is lauded in the UK as the first UK legislation to address racial discrimination. The Act also created the Race Relations Board to handle complaints and established the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants. 60 years later, walking around Bristol in this summer of 2025, I have seen many buses and bus shelters celebrating both the passing of the Act as well as the Bristol Bus Boycott that precipitated it. Considering how much racial injustice the world is suffused in, from Gaza to American Gulags, this has got me thinking about how much energy and resources are dedicated to celebrating what amounts to limited progress that comes too late after more struggle than should really be necessary. It has also got me thinking about what and why we celebrate. In this guise, it is useful to think about the passing of the Act separately from the operation of the Act. Thus, we can ask if the operation of the Act justifies our celebration of the passing of the Act.
Background to the Passing of the Race Relations Act 1965
The Bristol Bus Boycott was led by members of a newly formed action group, the West Indian Development Council—Paul Stephenson, Roy Hackett, Prince Brown, and Owen Henry. One of the major action points for the group was responding to the refusal of the Bristol Omnibus Company to employ anyone who was not White. The action group began a boycott of the buses on 29th April 1963. Students at the University of Bristol joined the boycott, and after much media furore—a particularly British condition—the bus company began to employ non-white bus drivers in September of 1963. The passing of the 1965 Act is believed by many (historian Madge Dresser, for example) to be a direct result of the Bus Boycott. The focus of the Act was prohibiting racial discrimination in public places. A look at a few of the relevant provisions demonstrates the proposed means for achieving this:
Section 1(1) It shall be unlawful for any person, being the proprietor or manager of or employed for the purposes of any place to which this section applies, to practise discrimination on the ground of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins against persons seeking access to or facilities or services at that place).
Section 6(1) A person shall be guilty of an offence under this section if, with intent to stir up hatred against any section of the public in Great Britain distinguished by colour, race, or ethnic or national origins—
(a) he publishes or distributes written matter which is threatening, abusive or insulting; or
(b) he uses in any public place or at any public meeting words which are threatening, abusive or insulting, being matter or words likely to stir up hatred against that section on grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins.
The Act was a “triumph” in the sense that it put an official veneer on racial justice. However, as we can see from its provisions, its limited scope inadvertently permitted the continuation of racial discrimination in areas of public and private life that were not addressed by the Act. The Bristol Boycott had directly addressed discrimination in employment, and similar protests had condemned discrimination in housing. Yet the Act very weakly nodded to the latter and did not really touch the former. Furthermore, its enforcement mechanisms were limited, as the Race Relations Board did not have investigative powers. Finally, the wording and content of the Act did not really take into account the legal, political, social, and intellectual context within which it was passed. This demonstrates how limited the triumph of the Act was.
(Not) Defining Race and Racism: Racial justice is not the same as anti-discrimination.
It is instructive to note that the RRA 1965, like its successor Section 9 of the Equality Act 2010, defines race “in relation to ‘colour’, ‘nationality’ and ‘ethnic/national origins’ but makes no room for an understanding that race operates mostly as a social construction. ‘Race’ must be understood as artificially constructed and socio-politically and socio-legally produced and not merely a biological or objectively legitimate and neutral means of classification of humanity. The concept of race as we understand and use it today emerges from a particular history and usage of that which manufactures human hierarchies of race for the purpose of dispossession and dehumanisation. As Ta-Nehisi Coates notes in Between the World and Me:
race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the pre-eminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
This misunderstanding of the true quality of race and the true relationship between race and racism severely limits the scope of the legislation to bring an end to racial injustice. It is particularly instructive that, despite the amount of research that has been done into race and racism in the UK and the ROTW, the law’s understanding of these concepts remains firmly trapped in 1965 and maybe even way before that.
Zainab Batul Naqvi describes a 2006 case where the judge demonstrates a physiognomic understanding of racial classification.
In Diem v Crystal Services plc [2006] All ER (D) 84 (Feb), the claimant, Anita Ho, complained about the behaviour of the employment Tribunal Chairman during her original race discrimination claim hearing:
‘At the Employment Tribunal hearing, whilst I was giving my evidence, the Tribunal Chairman, Mr S M Duncan, questioned me at some length as to why I was claiming to be non-white. In this context, he said that my skin colour was ‘as white as the English’. Whilst he made this statement, he looked at me and used his finger to point at the skin of his other hand to stress the point. In fact, my complaint was not based on any claim that I was ‘non-white’, but on the fact that I am Vietnamese. The chairman’s comment and behaviour took me by surprise. When I did not answer, the chairman said to me: ‘Your skin looks whiter than mine.’ I felt pressurised to admit that my skin was white. (Diem v Crystal Services plc [2006] All ER (D) 84 (Feb), paras 4-6)
Not only does it seem that the law fails to appreciate the nuances of social construction, it is a real possibility that some judges have an understanding of race that seems positively antediluvian.
The Prosecutorial Record of Section 6
Another interesting point of note about the RRA of 1965 is its prosecutorial record of Section 6. As noted above, Section 6 prohibited incitement to racial violence. The table below shows that more people were convicted under it for promoting racial justice than for promoting racial injustice and hierarchy. This seeming confusion arises when the law does not recognise how structural racism relies on manufacturing a hierarchy of race and not cross-discrimination between naturally existing racial (skin colour) groups.
This information in this table was gleaned from an article by Gavin Schaffer. There, Schaffer notes that the racially minoritised individuals who were prosecuted under Section 6 are likely to have used very specific language to deliberately seek their own prosecution to highlight the double standards in the operation of the Act. This was especially important to them, living at a time when prominent White people like “Rivers of Blood” Enoch Powell were not subject to the same level of legal restriction on their language. Those leaders of movements for racial justice thus read together the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation happening simultaneously with deep anti-Black and people of colour racial hatred as well as the introduction of immigration restrictions for Black and Brown people as a pincer movement.
Contradictions: Immigration, Race Relations and Racial Justice
The connection between immigration controls and anti-discrimination legislation was explicitly articulated in the legislative houses leading up to the passing of the RRA 1965. In essence, intensified immigration controls were entangled with proposed equal treatment for Commonwealth immigrants who manage to enter Britain. The immigration controls were a concession to those who wanted to keep Black and Brown people out of Britain. At the same time, the antidiscrimination legislation responded to the equality demands of Black and Brown people already in the country. Thus, the 1965 Act was framed between two other immigration laws that had a racially disparate impact on non-white individuals in the UK: the Conservative government’s Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, and the Labour government’s Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968. The effect of both of those Acts was to severely limit the rights of racialised people to live and work in the metropole, irrespective of their historic ties to Britain. Therefore, the efficacy of the RRA and subsequent equality legislation cannot be considered in isolation from all the other legislation, policies, and societal atmosphere within which they operate. This is especially important where the mechanisms for ensuring racial equality have been consistently weaker and not as intellectually grounded as the mechanisms for keeping Black and Brown people out of the country. Or those who are in the country in a state of perpetual uncertainty and unease. What is the point of equality legislation within an increasingly and deliberately hostile environment? Many of the impacts of the formalised Hostile Environment produce racial inequality and injustice irrespective of immigration status and also suggest that immigration status is a reason for treating someone as if they were less than human. It is also important to note the constant outright and uncritical conflation between immigration and race. We must also look at the situation holistically in a temporal manner. What is the overall effect of the pincer movement? According to Nadine El Enany, immigration law also serves a wider purpose:
A spatial and temporal understanding of British immigration law enables us to see how it works to place land, resources, healthcare, welfare, security and opportunities, all of which can be understood as modern-day manifestations of stolen colonial possessions, out of reach of the vast majority of those with ancestral or geographical histories of colonisation.
Basically, we can argue that immigration law continues the work of colonial extraction, dispossession and dehumanisation and very severely limits the efficacy of contemporary equality law. As such, it is important to remember, as Koram notes in Uncommon Wealth, that colonialism was primarily a corporate endeavour, with private companies serving as makeshift state governments across the world. This knowledge is especially relevant to retain in a climate where there is no societal will to understand, analyse and bring an end to the racial injustice that is entangled in and a product of that history.
Where are we now?
In the summer of 2024, in response to horrific attacks on and killing of nursery school children in Southport on 29 July, approximately 29 riots broke out across the United Kingdom. Those riots were ultimately triggered by false claims that the Southport attacker had been a Muslim asylum seeker. The truth was that he was born in Cardiff to Christian parents. These riots targeted racialised people as well as immigration centres, asylum hotels, mosques, businesses owned by racialised people, and refugee support offices; people were subject to physical attacks, and buildings were damaged. The intelligentsia, including the media and political commentators, while mostly agreeing that the violence was regrettable, were generally unable to engage with (or in some cases even mention) the significant role racial injustice played in eventuating and underpinning the violence. In essence, the public and some of the intellectual analysis of that historical moment did not account for racial violence as the inevitable outcome of a history of fostering racism through structural projects. Furthermore, the analysis of the racial violence was often unable to step back from the presumption that racial categories are objective or scientific. Instead, the cause of the riots was often reduced to “legitimate concerns” about immigration. The law, when called upon to censure and punish the perpetrators of the racial violence, could only act in a minimal way and a personal way. The triumph of the RRA 1965 was lost in the noise of racist violence.
Overall, British society and its institutions failed to engage in a communal conversation with the capacity to address the root and structural causes of the racial injustice experienced in the summer of 2024. So, I ask again, what is there to celebrate 60 years after the passing of the Race Relations Act 1965? We are certainly in a better position than we were 60 years ago. I don’t doubt that. However, we should not be “celebrating” a gesture to racial justice that comes much later than it should and after so much pain and trauma. As I argue in a previous post, action and despair in hope is probably a better way to mark the events over-enthusiastically messaged as triumphs for racial justice. When we have to constantly fight to hold onto meagre gains for equality, then anti-discrimination legislation within the overwhelming sea of racial injustice feels like we are trying to use a toy chisel to dismantle Mt Everest. Nevertheless, in this, we consistently find people who are willing to fight together, to dream together, to build together. That is what I celebrate. That we stand on the shoulders of those who had dreams of an antiracist world. And did something about those dreams.
Bibliography
Bourne, Jenny. “The Race Relations Act 1965: Blessing or a Curse.” London: Institute of Race Relations (2015).
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Random House, 2025.
El-Enany, Nadine. (B) ordering Britain. Manchester University Press, 2020.
Koram, Kojo. Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire. John Murray, 2022.
Malkani, Bharat. Racial Justice and the Limits of Law, (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2024)
Naqvi, Zainab Batul. “Colourism and law in the UK: a story of colonial indifference?.” Frontiers in Sociology 10 (2025): 1510814.
Schaffer, Gavin. “Legislating against hatred: meaning and motive in section six of the Race Relations Act of 1965.” Twentieth Century British History 25, no. 2 (2014): 251-275.
