Britain’s first race-relations act was tepid. It didn’t tackle endemic housing discrimination, and it had enough caveats to allow wriggle room for those who were intent on keeping black people in Britain as second-class citizens. An inadequate antidote to decades of targeted violence and harassment, the Race Relations Board appeared to exist only for posturing reasons. Most black and Asian people in Britain didn’t even know it existed. The 1965 Act’s weaknesses were obvious. The efforts to challenge racism came from the very same state that had sanctioned racism decades earlier with
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