UNIVERSITY of Warwick Professor Emeritus John Rex, 86, died on December 20, 2011. He was a scholar in race and ethnic relations theory. Sivanadan of the Institute of Race Relations in London noted that Rex was one of the few sociologists who introduced social class to the study of race vis-a-vis a ground-breaking work with Robert Moore on housing in Sparkbrook in Race, Community and Conflict (IRR, 1969).
“We are deeply saddened to hear the news of Professor Rex’s death. He was an immense figure in British sociology and a valued and respected member of the Warwick community. Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this time (Professor Nigel Thrift, Vice Chancellor, University of Warwick).”
Professor John Rex was a native of South Africa. At a mission school in the former Rhodesia, he was labelled an ‘undesirable’, as a result of his resistance to apartheid in South Africa. Rex arrived in the UK in 1949, completed the Ph.D. at the University of Leeds, where he held his first teaching post, followed by other teaching positions at the University of Birmingham, the University of Durham, and the University of Warwick.
As an undergraduate in the UK, I was in awe in Rex’s theoretical underpinnings of race relations theory. And when I conceptualised the book idea of cultural identity and national unity, I was determined to have Professor Rex gracing the pages of this book. He did accept to become part of this research enterprise and wrote the Note for my book, Cultural Identity and Creolisation in National Unity: The Multiethnic Caribbean, Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, a Division of the Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group (2006). So I really want to use this week’s ‘Perspectives’ as a tribute to Professor John Rex.
In my book, Rex wrote the Note on “Multiculturalism, Plural Colonial Societies and Creolisation: A Note.” In this work, Rex presented two theoretical approaches to Creolisation. The first approach explains an idyllic kind of multiculturalism in Great Britain. The second approach elucidates ethnically plural colonial and post-colonial Caribbean societies.

In relation to Britain, Rex drew on the work of T.H. Marshall (1951) who focused on the issue of prevailing over class identification and class conflict with citizenship. Marshall believed that the British working class achieved political and social equality after 1945, when they obtained social citizenship. Social citizenship entailed settlement of industrial wages and conditions through free collective bargaining, social insurance in ill health, unemployment, and having minimum standards, in health, education, and housing.
Nevertheless, Marshall did not address ethnic minorities and cultural diversity. It was the British Home Secretary in 1966 who first introduced the concept of ethnic minorities and cultural diversity to politics, and he saw the integration of immigrants as “not a flattening process of uniformity but cultural diversity coupled with equal opportunity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.”
Jenkins saw two cultural domains: First is the public domain, where all relate to a public set of rules and which advances equality of opportunity. The second domain is that of the separate ethnic groups, with their own languages at home, their own religions, and their own family traditions. And then there is the intermediate domain, relating to cuisine and the arts, and which balances the public and separate ethnic groups domain.
And this discussion about multiculturalism in Britain should be differentiated from that of colonialism and post-colonialism. J.S. Furnivall (1939) drawing on Indonesia saw colonial societies as lacking order necessary for modern market-based societies, and the only moral authority prevailing was found within the separate ethnic groups domain. This domain was relatively similar to Jenkins’ separate ethnic groups domain.
Then there was M.G. Smith (1967) who saw each ethnic group in a plural colonial society as having its own institutions, except the political institution in the hands of the colonial power; and where one of these ethnic groups will replace the colonial power at the end of colonialism. Rex disagreed with Smith. Rex argued that the economic units of the plantation were part of the power-holding group, as there were relations of economic exploitation.
Rex, in his Note, then examined various uses of the terms Creolisation  and mestissization as applied in Latin America.  In Argentina, the term referred to White Spanish inhabitants to differentiate them from the natives; mestizzo in Mexico was used to depict people of mixed ancestry and cultures. In Prem Misir’s book, Rex concluded with the question whether the term Creolisation  refers to people with a racial and cultural mix, or whether it refers to a situation where there is a dominant  ethnic group.