Trevor Phillips is an interesting dude
The chairman of Great Britain's Commission for Racial Equality, he has been quoted here several times, most recently in a link to a BBC article. Seems the British are as hung up on terminology as Americans are.
Anyway, he's turned up again, and I keep blogging about British race issues because they are so close to ours, yet no being ours there's a chance people will have enough distance to consider them rationally. So today I link to How British do you want to be?
If there is a tension between people from different ethnic backgrounds, who has to act to change that? Those who feel persecuted, learning their Shakespeare as rapidly as possible, or the majority, claiming that the very notion of Britishness may be under threat?
The Observer asked people from across the cultural and racial spectrum, all British passport holders, for their points of view. From Chinese restaurateurs to Muslim musicians to white postmen, we asked: Is multiculturalism a threat to Britishness? Or is it an essential part of it?
The polls suggest that Britain is a country uncomfortable with ethnic diversity. One poll last weekend found that a quarter of the public want to 'close the doors' to any more immigration and that 16 per cent would consider voting for the British National Party.
At a time of heightened ethnic tension, rows over immigration and concerns over the position of British Muslims in the country of their birth, Trevor Phillips's comments were bound to spark a debate. Some may think that his call to be abandon multiculturalism, as presently understood, was the last thing a chairman of the CRE should be saying.
And I link to an article by Phillips himself, titled Multiculturalism's legacy is 'have a nice day' racism, explaining his debate-causing comments at length.
…This was a debate waiting to happen. Some on the left had been worrying aloud for months that "immigrants" are doomed to become ghetto-bound minorities, a divisive presence threatening Britain's underlying social fabric. They need to relax. All but the racist fundamentalists of the far right accept that Britain's economic and social vigour has always been renewed from the wellspring of immigration. Scotland's first minister, Jack McConnell, sensibly wants new migrants to revive Scotland's relatively elderly population. Even Norman Tebbit recently stunned a BBC audience with a warm and unqualified welcome to migrants from eastern Europe. The real argument is how we manage the process of integrating migrants.
Integration only works if it both recognises newcomers' differences and extends complete equality. Celebrating diversity, but ignoring inequality, inevitably leads to the nightmare of entrenched segregation. Half a century after legal segregation was outlawed in the US, nine out of 10 African-American children are in black-majority schools; nine out of 10 whites live in areas where the black population is negligible. Guess whose schools underachieve, and whose districts are poorer.
That is why I disagree with those who say that integration and Britishness are irrelevant to the struggle against racism. There can be no true integration without true equality. But the reverse is also true. The equality of the ghetto is no equality at all.
And yes, newcomers do have to change. The language barrier is a real obstacle to work, friendship and democratic participation. Many Bangladeshi-born women in Britain are economically inactive and thus largely excluded from society. But we have to do more than teach people English. Too many institutions have seized one half of the integration equation - recognition of difference - while ignoring the other half: equality.
