![]() ![]() 3 Hinds, Jones and John insisted that these texts failed to record anything revealing or significant about the experiences of these ‘coloured people’ they studied, and served only to cast them as a problem. 2 Half a decade on from Hinds and Jones, the Grenadian writer Gus John complained that he was ‘overwhelmed with academic social science on race relations’, a literature which, he proposed, did ‘little more than quantifying the obvious’. 1 A large part of this literature, soon to grow bigger still, was what came to be termed ‘race relations’ research-a field which, as the Trinidadian activist Claudia Jones noted in 1964, boomed despite the vanishingly small numbers of people of colour in Britain relative to the majority white population. ‘Apart from the Second World War and Sex’, wrote the Jamaican journalist Donald Hinds in 1966, ‘it is hard to find another topic which has provoked British pens to such voluminous prose as Coloured People in Britain’. Reading the social encounters of ‘race relations’ research as moments in which state power and state-sanctioned racial knowledge were engaged and contested reveals the steady process by which the foundations of an unpopular and ineffective ‘race relations industry’ were cast into doubt, or consent for it refused. It highlights the ubiquity of challenges or evasions to those research institutions and their claims to epistemic authority, and it shows how these researches were indicted as distractions, attempts at pacification, and misuses of funds. Relative to the dominant reading among historians of late-twentieth-century Britain of the rise of social research as a democratic story, in which ‘ordinary’ voices were listened to and given weight in the development of social policy, the study of race relations research in this article reveals a far less consensual, less democratic relationship between state-sponsored research institutions and the black and brown people who became targets of race-relations research projects. The analysis focuses on contestations around issues of epistemic authority and resource allocation in the relationship between black citizens and the state in the post-war decades, helping us to understand why so many black citizens saw the state and its programmes of social research not as enabling or providing but surveilling and disempowering them. This article reads late-twentieth-century race relations research projects from the perspectives of the black and brown Britons who were the targets of research.
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