The end of racism in Britain: Why black British activists say racism persists and what they think the solutions could be.

The purpose of this study is to investigate visions of the end of racism in Britain. This research is stimulated by the persistence of racism in Britain, a western liberal society where incidents, historic and recent, and activists, tell us that racism is sewn into the fabric of its society. Drawing on telephone and face-to-face interviews with forty-four black activists in England and Scotland, this study uses the participants’ perspectives to examine how activists understand solutions to racism and the structures, discourses and languages that uphold and reproduce it. This research shifts the traditional knowledge of how racism is understood and examined by focusing on the collective opinions of people who locate racism in their everyday experiences. The research found that activists believe racism is propagated and maintained through racist ideologies that are rooted in imperialism. Therefore, to eradicate racism in Britain, they imply that the structures upon which racism is built must be dismantled. The participants emphasised that in eradicating (institutional) racism, legislation is merely symbolic; but reparations, the decolonisation of institutions, re-education, the reimagination of blackness and the awakening of the collective black consciousness – all of which must be done through dialogue – are some of the processes that could eradicate racism. The central empirical chapters analyse participants’ views on institutional racism, British race legislation and whiteness. This research concludes that white supremacy is the primary structure that sustains and propagates racism.