About 130,000 African-American military personnel were stationed in the UK by June 1944. The US military brought with it to Britain the same system of rigid racial segregation that it employed at home.
The response of ordinary Britons to this has become a small but important ...
The response of ordinary Britons to this has become a small but important ...
... bit of folk myth in the ‘People’s War’ narrative. The story goes that the British were shocked by the US military’s racial apartheid and responded by rejecting colour bars and welcoming Black GIs more warmly than white Americans. In other words, American intolerance ...
... provided a sharp contrast to essential British decency in a conflict already accelerating democratization at home.
theconversation.com/black-troops-w…
Like all good myths, there’s a kernel of truth to this. Few Britons in 1944 had ever met a non-white person. There was, then, no ...
theconversation.com/black-troops-w…
Like all good myths, there’s a kernel of truth to this. Few Britons in 1944 had ever met a non-white person. There was, then, no ...
... tradition of large scale formal racial segregation in the UK itself (the Empire being a closed book to most people). Britons suddenly presented with such a system were surprised by it, even shocked. A-A GIs were exotic, well paid by British standards, and more polite than ...
... white US troops (‘politeness’ around whites being, of course, something that Black GIs from Jim Crow states knew was vital to not getting killed). Being nice to Black troops was also a way of winding up white Americans whom some Britons found obnoxious. And it gratified ...
... their own sense of superiority.
But, as @daniel_todman has recently pointed out, that does not mean that the British were relaxed about race difference. They panicked about miscegenation. They operated colour bars if it made financial sense. They shouted racial slurs ...
But, as @daniel_todman has recently pointed out, that does not mean that the British were relaxed about race difference. They panicked about miscegenation. They operated colour bars if it made financial sense. They shouted racial slurs ...
... at Black GIs when the mood took them. Perhaps most of all, being high-minded about overt US segregation allowed the British to forget about their own more informal systems of racial apartheid, both at home and abroad.
Some of the responses to recent events in the US ...
Some of the responses to recent events in the US ...
... have tapped into this tradition of looking on with horror at racial bigotry on the other side of the Atlantic as a way of not having to think too hard about bigotry closer to home. ‘We do things differently here.’
theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/d…
theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/d…
