More than skin deep
Don't be fooled by the success of a few minority Americans - racism is still rife
Trevor Phillips

…America's most abiding failure has been an inability to erase the racial divisions etched in its social DNA; its defining success has been a genius for embracing and exploiting the economic potential of a continuous stream of immigrants. By contrast, Europe trembles at a level of migration that Americans would regard as piffling. Yet from Rome, through Constantinople to Venice and London, our nations have a history of peacefully absorbing huge, diverse movements of people, driven by war, famine and persecution; and there is no history of long-term ethnic segregation of the kind one can see in any US city.

That is why it is so exasperating when friends return from their summers on Martha's Vineyard or in San Francisco, enthusing about the success of minority Americans. I know that we home-grown black folk can't aspire to the glamour of some Americans - Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice or my great friend from Harvard, Skip Gates, who has become a BBC TV star. But our lack of celebrity should not blind intelligent people to a few basic truths.

First, on race equality, America has failed in every way possible. The small group of successful black professionals and the ghetto-fabulous gangsters who turn up on our TV screens loom too large in our picture of the US. For the average black or Latino American, life is better than it was; but the gap between minority households and whites continues to grow every year, in terms of employment, education and health.

Those who do succeed outside of entertainment and sport do so only and exclusively through two routes, both of which are widely regarded with distaste by Europeans. One is contract compliance, in which both the government and big private sector companies are, in effect, compelled to give a proportion of their work to minority entrepreneurs. I have yet to learn of a black millionaire who has not benefited from this provision; I have yet to meet a white liberal who does not feel uneasy about it.

The other route is affirmative action. Powell, Rice and Gates all state baldly that they would never have reached their current eminence without positive discrimination at some stage in their lives. In his single public disagreement with the president, Powell cited his own successful military career to argue why American universities should retain the right to use race as a factor in admissions policy. Affirmative action alone accounted for most of the black senior American faces we saw in Iraq.

…This summer has brought a new discovery: multiracial America, or as Timothy Garton Ash called it in these pages last week, "Californication". Visiting Stanford University, he has been bowled over by a student body "sporting every shade of skin colour" and representing a spectrum of ethnic combinations. This, he declares, offers "the ultimate answer to the problem of racial difference". How can someone so galactically brainy put his name to this tosh? In the 1970s some of my fun-loving student comrades advocated the left's cause through what we called the "horizontal road to socialism". The difference is that we thought substituting sexual congress for the trade union version was a joke.

The truth is that even in liberal California, racial mixing is still a rarity. More than 30% of the US population is either black, Asian or Latino. Statistically, if Americans chose their partners at random, more than a third of American births should be of mixed race. The figure is, in fact, just 1.6%. Here, it's about 1.1%. But to count inter-racial sex as a reliable indicator of good race relations you'd have to write off the entire history of slavery in America; there was probably more miscegenation on the plantations than at any time in human history. Even if you were silly enough to confuse sexual intercourse with social integration, we still beat the pants off the US. In Britain, up to half of all marriages involving a black man are with a white partner - and "mixed" is now the fourth largest group in the population, after white, Indian and Pakistani.

Of course, the Brits have been at it longer. Two centuries ago, there were some 20,000 to 30,000 black Georgians in London, so familiar they got a name - the Blackbirds of Covent Garden. Yet four generations later, a black face was unusual in London, because the blackbirds had produced so many mixed-race chicks. And it's worth reminding ourselves that Americans have a unique way of discouraging inter-racial relationships: US papers were last week reporting yet another mysterious hanging of a black man alleged to have been in a relationship with a white woman.

The great shock that I received when I came here was to hear of the arguments and opinions that Americans had about the war in El Salvador. My impression, coming from El Salvador, was that because of the major role the US was playing in our country, most people would know what was going on. But the shock was that the only thing they "knew" was so limited and distorted, that they thought it was only a fight to stop communism. And they thought the communists were trying to take over El Salvador - things that were so diametrically opposite to what was actually happening in El Salvador.