Culture, Society and the Media

10

How the media report race

PETER BRAHAM

INTRODUCTION

Since 1948 when the first post-war West Indian immigrants arrived on the Empire Windrush, the number of black people resident in Britain has risen to more than one million. Though there has in this period been substantial white immigration, the word ‘immigrant’ has come to be generally employed as a synonym for ‘black’, thereby excluding the large number of immigrants to Britain who are white and including the large number of black people who were born here. Thus most people would assume that a headline which read ‘IMMIGRANT BIRTHS UP’ would be about an increase in the black population. Many of the connotations of the word ‘black’ are to be found in Britain's colonial past. According to Dilip ...