Britishness has always been racialized as whiteness though long silenced publicly.

Evidence

Of course, Britishness as a category has always been racialized through and through—when has it connoted anything but “whiteness”? But this fact has been carefully segregated from the national discourse, popular and scholarly. “Race” has struggled to be seriously acknowledged in mainstream political theory, in journalistic or scholarly thinking. This silencing is breaking down as these terms force their way into public consciousness. Their growing visibility is, inevitably, a fraught and difficult process. What’s more, this is now “race” in quotation marks, “race” under erasure, “race” in a new configuration with ethnicity. This epistemic shift is one of the multicultural’s most transruptive effects. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 338

Categorization

• XREF: Direct bridge to the reader’s downstream Islamophobia material: the racialization of national identity connects to how Muslimness gets configured against Britishness in contemporary British discourse.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘race under erasure’ as a working concept for the toolkit.