The belief in returning home deferred migrant confrontation with British racism

Evidence

In the first generations, the majority of people had the same illusion that I did: that I was about to go back home. That may have been because everybody always asked me when I was going back home. We did think that we were just going to get back on the boat; we were here for a temporary sojourn. By the ’70s, it was perfectly clear that we were not there for a temporary sojourn. Some people were going to stay, and then the politics of racism really emerged. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 225

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘temporary sojourn’ illusion as a mechanism parallels the myth-of-return literature and later Muslim-migration studies.