‘The Fire Next Time’—with this alarming subtitle, the British Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) published a report on ‘youth in multi-racial society’. It stressed that the children of post-colonial migrants from India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean faced disadvantages in education and the labour market. Spending much of their time in public spaces and out of work, these young people had become a focus of public concern. The CRE argued that youth work should play a central role, particularly by engaging ‘Black youth’ in inner-city areas, described as ‘virtually or totally alienated from society’, through supervised leisure programmes aimed at averting unrest.1
Continue reading Between Control and Emancipation: Youth Work with the Second Generation of Post-Colonial Immigrants in 1970s and 1980s London- Commission for Racial Equality, Youth in Multi-Racial Society: The Urgent Need for New Policies. ‘The Fire Next Time’ (London, 1980), 11. [↩]
