Serious study of race and race relations as important social issues can be traced back to the early part of the twentieth century.
The expansion of research and scholarship in this area, however, happened around the 1960s, in the after-math of the social transformations around questions of race that took place during that decade. The idea of race has been utilized to comprehend processes of migration and settlement as well. They are sometimes posed as a minority, ethnic or an immigrant problem. John Rex’s analytical model in race relations asserts that reading social relations between persons as race relations is encouraged by existence of certain structural conditions:
(i) Existence of unfreeze, indentured or slave labour
(ii) Unusually harsh class exploitation
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(iii) Strict legal distinctions between groups and occupational segregation
(iv) Differential access to power
(v) Migrant labour as an underclass fulfilling stigmatized roles in a metropolitan setting.
In his context, Rex, in studies conducted by him, explored the degree to which immigrant populations shared the class position of their white neighbors and white workers in general. His analysis outlined a class structure in which white workers won certain rights through the working class movement, through the trade unions and the Labour Party. His greatest contribution is the proposition that races are created within the context of political and social regulation, and thus race is above all is a ‘political’ construct.
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The first proposition is that the concept of “race” is a human construct, an ideology with regulatory power within society. The use of race and race relations, as analytical concepts, disguise the social construction of difference, presenting it as somehow inherent in the empirical reality of observable or imagined biological difference. Radicalized groups are produced as a result of specific social processes, or specific social actions such as the defence of domination, subordination and privilege.