of this admirable and supremely necessary book, it may be said that the one real defect is the title. It does the book an injustice by seeming to limit its scope and blunt its insight. “This country,” said an American Negro leader several decades ago, “doesn’t have a Negro problem—it has a white problem.” Which is ten times truer of Britain in 1961. A country which can’t digest an immigration amounting to half of one per cent of the population, made up of people who resemble the older inhabitants in citizenship, loyalties, language, religion, and all but the most superficial of social habits, and who are distinguished quite simply by the colour of their skin—well, honestly, a country which makes heavy weather of this simple test needs to take a long cool look at itself. The long cool look is what Mrs. Glass, doing a public service, takes. Her book is informative about the West Indians, but it is really searching about Britain.
There are two long chapters, rightly taking up more than half of the book, called “Attitudes” and “Disharmony and Harmony”. Here we find a very close, careful, and penetrating analysis of white attitudes to coloured people. Mrs. Glass has been the only investigator, to my knowledge, to probe the special English brand of ambivalence (her word, and a good one), and to show that it is something more complex than the hypocrisy which, very naturally, it seems to be to those on the receiving end. I’d call it the Jekyll and Hyde syndrome. Most of the time, the English are ashamed of being beastly to coloured people; it is by now notorious how nobody, even when voicing the most blatant expressions of prejudice, will admit to being prejudiced. Then, quite suddenly, they are ashamed of being too friendly, of being “soft”. In many respects and for considerable periods, their conduct is entirely decent. Abruptly, they strike out. In a mean street in Paddington, I heard a man justify what is normally deep in the pre-conscious mists: “You’ve got,” he said, “to slap them down now and again, and then you don’t have no trouble.”