Dr Jessica White PhD, FHEA

This project seeks to uncover the role of white women in post-war Britain’s history of race and racism. Between 1948 and 1990, Britain witnessed large-scale racialised migration to the mainland, as well as the decolonisation of its vast empire. Often overlooked in the historiography of race and immigration in modern Britain, white women responded to this new politics of race in various, significant, and uncharted ways, from taking part in anti-immigration protests to organising multicultural fetes and helping women re-integrate into British society after decolonisation. By adopting and extending critical whiteness theory, my project explores how white women’s thoughts, feelings and reactions regarding immigration and racial difference played a role in either shoring up or dismantling racial divides in post-war Britain. Drawing on untapped institutional archives and digital sources, this project will refine and reassess how white women played a fundamental role in shaping Britain’s history of race and racism.

Some of this research has been drafted into a chapter on white women's racism on council housing estates in Birmingham, titled "‘Let me tell you how I see it…’: White women, race, and welfare in the 1980s", for an edited collection titled 'Histories of Welfare: experiential expertise, action and activism in modern Britain' for the Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience Series. The chapter is a microstudy of how white women's experience of welfare provision in the 1980s was articulated through racist beliefs about white Briton's superior entitlement to welfare services, such as housing, benefits, and education.

My doctoral thesis examined Black women's lives and activism in Britain’s inner cities in the late twentieth century. In particular, it discussed Black women's experiences of motherhood, activism, multiculturalism, and policing, tracing how activist groups, public events, and creative expression enabled Black women to survive in a Britain that was hostile to their presence. It demonstrated how influential Black women were in creating change in their local area, from social housing improvements to training schemes for young Black people. Rather than peripheral actors in anti-racist and Black Power groups, Black women had their own social networks, protest methods, and vernacular built from their unique experiences as Black women living in Britain. In turn, the thesis reveals the pivotal role that Black women had in shaping post-war Black British activism. Some findings from this research have been published in The Historical Journal and Twentieth Century British History.



I am currently carrying out a small project titled 'History from the Attic', with Dr Jamie Banks (University of Loughborough) and Sarah Garrod (George Padmore Institute), cataloguing the periodicals that belonged to the activist John La Rose.