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Race & Class | 1966
Philip Mason
There are half-a-dozen offices of the Peruvian Government in Lima today where you may hear something on these lines: ’Of course there is no racial discrimination in Peru. We do not think in racial terms. But there is a deep split in our country-a cultural split. Only four million out of eleven million of our people are in the money economy. Most of those outside it are peasants in the sierras; they are subsistence farmers, scratching the soil ine~ciently, making a miserable living, just enough to keep them alive. They are mostly of Indian descent and most of them speak Quechua in the home. They engage in a variety of magical practices and they think in terms of the extended family, or at most
Race & Class | 1968
Philip Mason; Adrian Sinfield
House by Mr. H. V. Hodson, later editor of the Sunday Times and now Provost of Ditchley; he suggested that race relations would be the great problem of the second part of the twentieth century and that there ought to be a centre for study and information on the subject. A budget of £5,000 a year for three years was provided by several business undertakings; the idea of starting a separate Institute was postponed on their advice, on the grounds that it would be a saving of overheads, time and money if we began under the wing of Chatham House.
Race & Class | 1964
Philip Mason
PHILIP MASON is Director of the Institute of Race Relations, London. It is thought likely that the judgment of the International Court at the Hague in respect of South West Africa will be handed down in the early months of 1965. If the judgment goes against South Africa, there is the further probability of strong pressure in the United Nations for some form of action analogous to the execution of a decree resulting from a suit in a national court. This will confront the
Race & Class | 1970
Philip Mason
It is with pleasurable anticipation that I take up a book by an acknowledged expert in at least two subjects who has the courage to venture into several others and give us an account of all human history. I am wholly on the side of Professor Darlington when he writes that ’the history of man, being the most complex of all enquiries, demands the use of all the methods at our disposal, not just one tidy professional package’ (p. 673). It would be both petty and ungenerous to cavil because, in the course of this stupendous task, he expresses,
Race & Class | 1969
Philip Mason
PHILIP MASON is Director of the Institute of Race Relations, The English have traditionally been accused of hypocrisy. And it is true that we have often succceded in finding a moral justification for following our own interests. Like most other nations, we continue this tradition in international affairs, paying tribute frequently in our public statements to principles that are broadly egalitarian and humane and indeed sometimes allowing them to influence our policy. But in statements for domestic consumption, there is a growing trend towards a kind of reversed hypocrisy-hypocrisy against the devil, in lago’s phrase. Our leaders seek to justify to the electorate an action justifiable
Race & Class | 1968
Philip Mason
PHILIP MASON is Director of the Institute of Race Relations. This paper was delivered as the opening address at a Conference held at Vail, Colorado in July 1967, on Racial Problems and American Foreign Policy, by the Graduate School of International Studies and the Social Science Foundation, University of Denver. What I have to say is a summary of an argument which really demands much more space and will, I hope, eventually appear as a book, with several supporting books as evidence. I hope it will not seem too bare a skeleton in its present form. Relations between races present perhaps the supreme example of the immense effect which confused thought can have on human lives and happiness. A modern society can be divided into many different groups; there will be trade unionists and employers, liberals and conservatives, men and women, materialists and idealists, young and old-groups united by profession, by religious belief, by economic interest. These are groups between whom there is a common link which has some meaning for their lives. But in Britain at the moment there are people who speak of ’the blacks’, linking together under this one irrelevant heading not only Pakistanis, Indians, Somalis and Jamaicans, but factory-workers and university professors; Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians; the latest arrival and those born in the country. It is as meaningless a category as can be devised, worse even than those with bald heads. It is about the diversity of human groups that I wish to speak, about the irrelevancy of false categories, the inequalities between groups, about social injustice and about the dangers to thc future of humanity that social inequality presents when it is perceived and resented. These are matters we need to think about deeply if something more than rhetoric and vague goodwill is to emerge from Human Rights Year. What do we really
Race & Class | 1965
Philip Mason
to our knowledge of the individuals of the humanitarian movement and the campaign itself. The economic factors behind abolition and the struggle, partly for economic reasons, against the foreign slave trade were outside his province. If such editions are to be made, however, would it not be more useful to correct some of the minor errors (for instance, ’Dr. Sweatman’ for Smeathman, p. 83) and bring the ’Note on Books’ which has nothing later than 1933 up to date ? COLIN NEWBURY
Race & Class | 1964
Philip Mason
life with its historical background of place and time. In the one task, he has to peel away, lay bare, let his subject speak; in the other, he has a much more positive, constructive part to play. If he is to do both well, he should have clearly distinct in his mind two sets of value judgments, those of the age about which he is writing, and those which he believes will be found more durable in the perspective of history. No better example could be found of the historian’s need for these two distinct sets of values than the life of Huggins of Rhodesia, later Lord Malvern. Though he is still vigorous in retirement it is now eight years since he retired as Prime Minister, and it is possible to judge his political life as a complete whole. He was a man reared in the traditions of Victorian England who lived on into an age when these
Race & Class | 1963
Philip Mason
bungling old Coalition Party leader, Mr. Harry Portcullis, suddenly finds himself in command of an independent Natal. (The Coalition Party is the old United Party; by this time they have given up trying to have a policy, they just exist in the hope that someone will form a coalition with them.) Once the intoxication of draping everything possible in Union Jacks has passed, Mr. Portcullis finds he has serious problems. For one thing, his dreams of re-entering the Commonwealth as a Dominion are quickly shattered; his Government is still a long way from multi-racial. The British Ambassador hesitatingly offers Protectorate status, and lends him a constitutional expert with a vast experience of devising fancily-loaded franchises. Mr. Portcullis is also harassed by a visiting Labour M.P. who specialises in newly independent countries, a task force from Christian Action, a crazy English professor who wants to cure everyone of their South African accents, and Eustace Finkel, an infant prodigy of thirty-five who was ’the first man to practise the banal politics of emergent Africa as an art form’. (A very malicious and very funny portrait, this.) In the end the Durban English have to be rescued from rioters by the Zulus, who have by this time declared themselves independent of Natal, made themselves financially sound by discovering oil and organiscd the only efficient army in the province. By then the whole of South Africa is breaking up into little African or multi-racial states. Old Father Granite (or Dr. Verwoerd) manages to hold on to power in the Transvaal only by forming an alliance with the Communists: they find they can agree on suppressing the opposition, censoring the press, nationalising the gold mines and deriding liberal humanism. The hard-headed businessmen of Durban, wanting to embrace the Zulus and their oil, lead a coup against Mr. Portcullis, who is left with only the consolation of South African brandy. Delius catches brilliantly the tone and the absurdity of white politics in South Africa; he can, for instance, reproduce exactly the pained self-righteousness and the verbosity of a Verwoerd broadcast. He is also good at exploding his surprises at regular intervals. He avoids altogether satirising non-white politics: his only African character carries little conviction, and there are no Indian characters although the novel is set in Natal. Perhaps it is this avoidance of the deeper issues and concentration on the game of politics as it is played by the whites that keeps him so cheerful.
Race & Class | 1962
Philip Mason
any change in those aspects of established law and custom which affect their relationships with Africans. The mathematical findings based on response to a series of statements are backed by a very considerable number of interviews; there is detailed analysis of the results and some generalised sociological discussion; there is a wealth of legal and historical detail. It is all very thorough and painstaking. Sometimes the results are mildly surprising; much more often they confirm what any detached observer would expect to find, but they are none the less valuable for that. They provide strong reinforcement for what might otherwise be regarded as mere subjective surmise. The authors began by taking at random a 10 per cent sample of the European population of Southern Rhodesia and from this constructing a smaller and more manageable sample which included representatives of the various elements in the population in the same proportion. That is to say, in this smaller sample, the ratio between men and women, between adherents of the United Federal Party and the Dominion Party, between Jews and Roman Catholics, would be as in the larger. To each person in this smaller sample there was presented a list of sixty-six statements concerning existing law or custom between Europeans and Africans; each was asked to say of each statement whether it was felt to be:
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