76 Per Cent. Agree

White and Coloured: the behaviour of British people towards coloured immigrants. By Michael Banton. (Cape, 21s.) MR. BANTON is puzzled. He cannot square the obvious discrimination against coloured people

with his belief that most Britons have little colour prejudice. On his opening page he poses the paradox, 'Why should coloured people so often be shabbily treated when the vast majority of individual Britons are favourably disposed to- wards them?'

The evidence about British attitudes comes mainly from a new survey made by Mr. Banton.

He interviewed fifty ordinary voters in each of six districts : Alcester (a rural area in Warwick- shire), Coventry, Leith, Hawick, Leeds and Ipswich. They were shown a set of cards contain- ing statements like 'Coloured people have stronger sexual urges than white people,' and 'A lot of the

coloured people here are very clever,' and asked whether they agreed or not. Seventy-six per cent. agreed that 'Coloured people are just as good as us when they have the same training and oppor- tunities.'

One thing wrong with this is that the six districts can hardly be representative of the country as a whole. What the 'vast majority of individual Britons' think is still unknown. The other thing wrong is that less than half the people questioned had ever come across coloured immigrants at all.

I doubt whether many West Indians have yet moved out of Notting Hill into Alcester. Since the informants have no experience of their own to draw on, it is not surprising that they appear un- prejudiced. Many of them may have answered the way they thought the questioner wanted them to.

About the existence of discrimination in dis- tricts where coloured people live and compete with white there is no doubt at all. In a series of vivid chapters Mr. Banton shows us something of what it is like to be a coloured person in dock- land, in the universities, and in industrial cities like I.ondon and Birmingham. He draws here mainly on what other people have written. I was most struck by the lengthy extracts from the un- published manuscripts of two students, Eyo Bassey Ndem on Negroes in Manchester, and Miss Sheila Webster on coloured students at Oxford and Cambridge.

The general picture is disturbing. It can be sum- marised by the words which Mr. Banton quotes from Peter Abrahams, the South African novelist. Mr. Abrahams is walking in Birmingham :

I hailed a nice-looking young chap near the centre of the town, tried on a West Indian accent and asked for directions to Small Heath, He

averted his face, side-stepped and kept moving. I tried another older man, prosperous-looking.

He mumbled something and kept moving. . . .

One man directed me to what I knew was the wrong bus; a woman raised her nose in the air. Then a young Indian who had seen me snubbed crossed the road and came solicitously to me . . • he advised me that it was better to ask directions of coloured people.

I would put more weight on this than on a hundred attitude surveys in Alcester. If we wish to understand the behaviour of white towards coloured, and coloured towards white, detailed accounts are needed of what actually happens in districts like Notting Hill, Nottingham and Birmingham. We need more studies of the kind that Mr. Banton himself made so well in StepneY

and reported in his previous book The Coloured Quarter. If we knew more, we might be able to prevent racial relations inside Britain being trans-

formed, for the worse, just when Britain's relations with its former colonies are being transformed for