Adding race to an intellectual field’s agenda required bitter internal struggle against unconscious silence

Evidence

Actually getting Cultural Studies to put on its own agenda the critical questions of race, the politics of race, the resistance to racism, the critical questions of cultural politics, was itself a profound theoretical struggle, a struggle of which Policing the Crisis , was, curiously, the first and very late example. It represented a decisive turn in my own theoretical and intellectual work, as well as in that of the Centre. Again, it was only accomplished as the result of a long, and sometimes bitter—certainly bitterly contested—internal struggle against a resounding but unconscious silence. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 250

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the Frankfurt School reading: the Institute’s own relation to anti-Semitism was belated and contested — institutional self-blindness repeats across the two critical traditions.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what precisely made Policing the Crisis ‘late’? What was on the Centre’s agenda through the 70s that crowded race out until then?