Martin Luther King (1964) stated profoundly that to ‘passively accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system and thereby to become a participant in its evil’. The truth is, a society in which racism has proven to be a permanent feature for ‘black’ people, is an unjust system. Since slavery and colonisation ‘black’ people have endeavoured to fully integrate into ‘white’ societies, yet the reality is they are still the greatest victims of racial discrimination, racial inequality and racial violence globally. Almost 30 years after King’s pronouncement, Harvard Law professor Derrek Bell (1992) stated that ‘black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks’ of progress’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial pattern adapt in ways the maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance’.
It is against the context of ‘white societies’ that Johnson discusses integration, briefly in the US context and linking it to the racial commonalities of UK integration.
Johnson answers the questions: what is integration? What is assimilation? What is self-determination? Is integration in itself a proxy for justice? Ethnic groups such as Sikhs, Pakistanis, Chinese, Middle-Easterners in the UK; and in the US, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Koreans and yes, even ‘black’ and African people – can often find more justice in their own communities. They often find equal recognition, fair treatment, social and racial cooperation, power-sharing and meaningful and remunerative economic opportunities. Johnson thus, explains the meaning of ‘self-determination’ for ‘blacks’ as a group in the ‘post-colonial’ context, arguing that it is imperative in ‘white’ society in which racism is irremediable. Essentially, it cannot be fixed.
Some ‘black’ people (or token ‘blacks) can fully participate in ‘white’ society but only through what the Handbook calls an ‘enhanced assimilation’. The truth is ‘black’ people in the UK have only achieved temporary ‘peaks’ of progress’ and short-lived victories. This lecture suggests that the need for self-determination for ‘black’ people indicates that, in terms of ‘race’ and racism, a radical reconstruction of UK and US society is the real issue to be faced.