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Sivanandan suggests the British government manipulated race relations as necessary to bolster economic productivity. At first, race-based hostility between the white working class and black migrant working class helped prevent the formation of a collective class consciousness capable of overthrowing the exploitative system in place. The government only began properly enforcing and institutionalizing the anti-discriminatory laws they had barely established earlier (more as performative suggestions than anything else) when the black population had grown large enough and mistreated enough to threaten a sufficiently disruptive revolt of their own. Their ensuing "integration" efforts were just a means to placate and dilute the growing radicalism and militancy that put their capital at risk.
The lobbyists highlighted in Bald's Introduction to Bengali Harlem likely recognized a similar logic in the American context, employing it on their own end as they persuaded their government. J. J. Singh and Mubarek Ali Khan understood that racial difference could be looked past in some regards if there was promise of net economic gain. Though useful for satisfying the demands of unskilled labor amidst peak industrialism, an East Indian/non-white immigrant working-class population in America was a liability with no white nationalist loyalty to blind them. Having accepted the "[degradation of] the struggle to overthrow the system to the struggle to be well off within it," Singh and Khan put forth the East Indian middle and upper class in their negotiation for some form of recognition (Sivanandan 358). Meanwhile, Choudry, champion of the working class, attempted to appeal to a more romantic all-American pathos that Sivanandan would find phony.