The Windrush Generation and the Mystique of British Anti-Racism

Race #1 of 4. Over the last five years the British government has been reckoning with more recent expressions of the anti-immigration and anti-Black sentiments among its elected officials. The “Windrush scandal” broke in 2017, revealing that the British Home Office systematically and intentionally denied citizenship privileges (like access to the National Health Service, passports, visas for visiting family members, and more) to those of the “Windrush generation.” The Windrush scandal highlights the disconnect between Britain’s self image as an antiracism world leader and the reality of racist policies and practices in modern Britain, but as this episode explores, the current scandal is just one of a long list of injustices imposed on citizens from the West Indies and other former British colonies.

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Select Bibliography

Kenetta Hammond Perry, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Kieran Connell, Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain (University of California Press, 2019)

Guardian staff, 'It's inhumane': the Windrush victims who have lost jobs, homes and loved ones | Commonwealth immigration,” The Guardian (April 2018)

Amelia Gentlemen, “Lambs to the slaughter': 50 lives ruined by the Windrush scandal,” The Guardian

Olivia Peter, “Windrush scandal: Everything you need to know about the major political crisis,” The Independent

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