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Integration or Black Power?
Author(s) -
Waters Rob
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the political quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.373
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1467-923X
pISSN - 0032-3179
DOI - 10.1111/1467-923x.12543
Subject(s) - politics , black power , power (physics) , race (biology) , political economy , political science , intervention (counseling) , sociology , economic history , gender studies , history , law , psychology , physics , quantum mechanics , psychiatry
Integration politics experienced a postcolonial crisis in the late 1960s. This was a crisis driven by the simultaneous and inter‐related eruption of Powellism and Black Power. This article uses the crisis of integration politics to show the Powellite conjuncture from its other side, as it played out in the reconstitution of black British politics. It shows how black activists responded to the rise of Powellism by demanding that the politics of integration be either abandoned or reframed, to more fully shake out the colonial inheritances that lurked within it. The integration proposed by the postwar project of race relations was problematic from its inception; Black Power used Powell's intervention to expose these problems and demand change.