Black Minority Participation in the USA and Britain

Little attention has been paid to the comparative study of the politics and administration of race in the USA and Britain. There exist certain important similarities between the two countries particularly with regard to the way in which even militant leaders are willing to co-operate with centrally funded community agencies and to moderate their demands to gain political and economic returns for their organisations from government. There are, however, structural differences between American and British community bodies which affect the success of those institutions in obtaining the allegiance of community militants and in more fully integrating moderate leaderships into local level participatory processes. In the USA the system encourages an apparently high degree of ‘voluntarism’ and ‘independence’ from direct central control through relative institutional autonomy. This is more conducive to group co-operation than Britain's more centralised community relations framework with its closer direct association with government and the so-called ‘white power structure’. Because, therefore, of the American version of ‘independence’ groups there are actually more effectively integrated than the British into governmentally funded institutions.