British multicultural celebration and institutional racism co-occurred within a single conjuncture

Evidence

Both processes are alive and well in Britain at the turn of the millennium. Both thrive hand in hand in a fateful symbiosis. The celebration of the anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush—described by some as “the irresistible rise of multi-racial Britain” (Phillips and Phillips 1998)—occurred within a year of the long-delayed Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence by five white youths, with its finding of “institutional racism” (Macpherson 1999). Both these events are deeply paradigmatic of the contradictory state of British multiculturalism, and their appearance together, in the same conjuncture, is essential to an understanding of Britain’s confused and problematic response to “the multicultural question.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 380

Categorization

• XREF: The Empire Windrush/Macpherson juxtaposition exemplifies Hall’s conjunctural method — a mechanism the reader’s Islamophobia framework can reuse; also a concrete anchor for understanding British institutional racism debates that precede the Islamophobia literature.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the scaffolding project: the Macpherson finding of ‘institutional racism’ is a key term the reader will need when Islamophobia critique inherits this vocabulary.