Carl Hiaasen

Michael Banton

The Idea of Race

Banton Michael

The years 1965-8 were the 'liberal hour' for race relations policy in Britain. Laws were then enacted, enforcement agencies created, and community relations councils established. These bodies, and their personnel, have been called 'the race relations industry'. To many people, the output of this 'industry' appears disappointing relative to the input into it. This book examines a variety of optimistic assumptions about the speed with which immigrants adjust to a new environment; inadequate minority bargaining power; insufficiently speedy and decisive action by the central government; unwillingness on the part of the white majority to accept the desirability of such action; and the difficulty of fitting a race relations policy into an administrative system created to serve an ethnically homogeneous population. The policies initiated in 1965 reflected the ascendancy of liberal over conservative assumptions about race relations. Now these are under sharp attack from a radical standpoint. Promoting Racial Harmony shows how the debate has changed, drawing upon recent economic theory to formulate the issues in an original but non-technical manner.

Promoting Racial Harmony

This is the first book to provide an inside account of how a United Nations human rights treaty body actually works. At the same time it is an introduction to the international law of racial discrimination. The book focuses on the practical operation and implementation of the International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, emphasising throughout the relationship between the law and politics. The book takes account of current issues in international race relations - from the process of dismantling apartheid in South Africa to recent horrors and genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Michael Banton's latest work will be crucial reading for anyone interested in eliminating racial discrimination on an international level. About Michael Banton: Michael Banton is Chairman of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 1996-98.

International Action against Racial Discrimination

Attempts of nineteenth-century writers to establish "race" as a biological concept failed after Charles Darwin opened the door to a new world of knowledge. Yet this word already had a place in the organization of everyday life and in ordinary English language usage. This book explains how the idea of race became so important in the USA, generating conceptual confusion that can now be clarified. Developing an international approach, it reviews references to "race," "racism," and "ethnicity" in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and comparative politics and identifies promising lines of research that may make it possible to supersede misleading notions of race in the social sciences.

What We Now Know About Race and Ethnicity

A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown

West African City

The Policeman in the Community

There has been much discussion in recent years about the construction of theoretical models useful in the explanation of particular areas of social organization. This volume charts that discussion and its results and covers a wide ethnographic range from the Pacific Island of Truk through African pastoral societies, south-east Asia and Hong Kong, back to Polynesia. First published in 1965.

Michael Banton

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