Racism rose across Western Europe on staggered national timelines with country-specific forms

Evidence

If these categories are applied to the European experience, country by country, we observe considerable differences, which I endeavored to analyze, along with a research team, at the beginning of the 1990s (Wieviorka, 1994). In the main, racism seems to be on the rise everywhere, since the 1960s in the UK, the 1970s in France, in Germany, in Belgium and at later dates as we go towards the south of Europe. But the development does assume different forms. Thus, racist violence is a major phenomenon in the United Kingdom, in particular in the form of racial harassment, which was already noted in Liverpool in the 1950s in relation to the Jamaicans who had come to work in the factories during World War II, or in London, for example, with the white teddy boys, who sometimes claimed to be fascists of the Oswald Mosley type and who, in 1958, attacked the Trinidadian workers who had settled in their area. At the end of the 1980s, a report from the European Parliament gave the figure of some 7,000 racist attacks per year in the United Kingdom and according to a Home Office estimate (June 1992) a racist attack took place every 30 minutes in Great Britain. On the other hand, the statistics available for France, which are published annually in the report of the Commission nationals consultative des droits de I’homme show figures which are derisory in comparison. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3134

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book_so_far’s running theme of racism as a differentiated social phenomenon with distinct national manifestations, complementing earlier chapters on the US and apartheid South Africa.
• CANDY: The 1958 teddy-boy attacks on Trinidadian workers and the ‘a racist attack every 30 minutes’ stat are striking, quotable details.