Posted: Tue 21 Aug 2007 15:07 Post subject: Whites keep Britain racially tolerant
Quote:
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Whites keep Britain racially tolerant
Published: 06 August 2007
The Independent
According to an ICM survey of 18- to 34-year-olds for the BBC Asian Network, most white Britons - a whopping 87 per cent - would happily marry out and between 78 and 83 per cent would date people from outside their own race. Depressingly, the same survey shows that only 53 per cent of Asians say they would marry outside their communities and between 44 and 53 per cent would date non-Asians. Despite the popularity of the BNP, the rise in inter-ethnic tensions and pervasive racism, and our own dreadful Asian prejudices, indigenous Brits are becoming more delightfully open when it comes to love and sex.
Inter-racial relationships have long been barometers of social integration, cohesion, trust and equity between peoples, and these isles now have the highest numbers of mixed-race families in the Western world. However, numbers on their own can't tell the whole story. High levels of sexual communion between different races sometimes indicates subservience and abuse.
Miscegenation in the British colonies was often about control and power. Masters and mistresses used their slaves for violent sex and uptight colonials sought furtive sexual release with "submissive" and obliging natives. The centuries of imperial domination left psycho-sexual damage on both sides. There were examples of genuine, poignant affection between the rulers and their subjects, most noticeably in India before the imperial takeover. In Burma, China, parts of Africa too, some mixed-race couples resisted rules and expectations. With the arrival of ex-colonial migrants, a more equal crossover became possible.
White British women, mostly from the working classes, reached out to black and Asian men, who reciprocated. Explosive sexists and racists tried but couldn't stop transracial love and lust. In 1957, an academic, S F Collins, confidently asserted that the racially mixed family would soon be a normal feature of British life.
He was wrong. The fear of contamination got worse in the lovey-dovey Sixties and Seventies. When, in 1961, The Rev Clifford Hill said on radio that he could accept a good black man for a son-in-law, he was deluged with furious letters: "I sincerely hope that God will cut short your life and that you will die soon so that dear, little white girl may be saved from the hideous fate you plan for her. A black blubber-lipped Negro on top of her." Until the Eighties, mixed-race families were ostracised, mostly by white Britons. Then it started to change. Surveys I commissioned for two books I wrote on the subject showed white attitudes were shifting. Fewer of them cared about "purity" and more were drawn to different cultures and races.
As if to fill that airless space, black and Asian Britons started objecting to what they saw as pollution of their race. Note that the outrage burst out as more black and Asian women chose white partners. Until then, that had been the prerogative of their men. All too soon, though, the chorus of disapproval spread. Black women accused black men of seeking trophy blondes; Asian women said Asian men had white lovers because the women were easy. Young black and Asian people moved into single-identity mental enclaves and sought marriage partners of exact specifications in terms that would never be accepted of whites.
In the Sixties a distinguished Caribbean scholar Fernando Henriques slammed biological and cultural protectionists : "The notion here is that an ethnic group has an almost divine mission to maintain its racial purity. The consequences of this belief have produced immeasurable suffering in the world - Hitler's genocidal activities were only one of the manifestations of this delusion." White Britons have dropped that delusion while Asians have picked it up. Let's hear it for the whities. They keep alive possibilities my brethren seem determined to destroy.
Posted: Tue 21 Aug 2007 15:30 Post subject: The same paranoia and jealousy across the Pond
Quote:
Margaret Busby: The enduring invisiblity of the black community
Where negative stereotypes are concerned, we remain the most visible of the ethnic minorities
Published: 13 August 2007
The Independent
You are walking along a busy London pavement when a stranger crashes into you. Do you think: (a) just one of the many collisions of urban life, or (b) that white person did not see me because I am black? This dilemma confronts many black people every day in a culture that seems either to render them highly visible and dangerous or, paradoxically, totally invisible.
Fifty-five years ago the late African-American writer Ralph Ellison wrote in his famous protest novel Invisible Man: "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me ... When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me ...
"I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds ... It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back."
I have not yet started to bump people back, but Ellison's anger is not an unfamiliar feeling. As a city-dweller, I don't expect the type of civilities common in small communities, whether in rural Middle England or a Caribbean island or an African village. In London mode, I can be as suspicious as anyone of the smiling stranger on the Tube or bus. But each time someone walks right into me I am left wondering whether it is indeed the magic cloak of my skin that is anathema to basic courteousness.
Paradoxically, of course, being black also makes you ultra- visible, to the extent that the shop assistant will follow you around as soon as you enter the store. Just in case ... And I have passed through English hamlets where I was such a stared-at rarity that my visit was probably thereafter used to date other events ("It was around the time that black woman came to town ...").
Yet the presence of black people in Britain goes back centuries, far beyond 1948, when some 492 immigrants on the Empire Windrush from Jamaica became the significant post-war influx that six years later, in 1954, prompted worried comments from Winston Churchill about black immigrants. According to the then Home Secretary, the total number of "coloured people" in Britain at the time had risen to 40,000 from a figure of 7,000 before the Second World War.
Almost 200 years earlier, in 1764, the Gentleman's Magazine was complaining of almost 20,000 black inhabitants in London alone, with the Morning Chronicle the following year claiming the nationwide figure to be 30,000. Where did they all go? Undoubtedly there were many interracial relationships, whose descendants would increasingly become indistinguishable from other citizens, achieving another sort of invisibility.
A recent poll of black Britons undertaken by The Voice newspaper found that while 65 per cent are glad they or their family migrated to the UK, 7 out of 10 of black people believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, expressing most concern about racism and crime. While many well-meaning people claim proudly that they are "colour blind", the challenge is not about ignoring someone's race (or gender) but about making rational and sensitive decisions about what to do, or not do, with that information. The flipside of the coin is the disproportionate visibility accorded to black people when the media reports on crime, resulting in the sort of fear that makes people cross the road the minute a young black hoodie hoves into view.
Thankfully, among a certain generation there remains a self-awareness that still makes it automatic for us to acknowledge each other in the street, a legacy from the 1950s and 1960s, when our numbers were fewer. "You know so many people," the daughter of a friend of mine commented wonderingly the other day, as he nodded in greeting to yet another passing stranger.
It is no victory that black youths have won the right to ignore the precedents of their grandparents of the Windrush generation, becoming capable of bad behaviour to match anyone's. However, where negative stereotypes are concerned, we remain the most visible of the ethnic minorities, with newspaper headlines, such as those surrounding the death of the boxer James Oyebola, counterbalanced with not much positive press. But the consequence must not be that we all, of whatever racial origin, give up on one another.
I was on a bus the other day with a friend, a black counsellor as disciplined as he is pacific, who dared politely to ask some inconsiderate (non-black) teenagers to turn down their iPods. They complied. The gratitude of fellow passengers (non-black) was unmistakable. Suddenly the elderly white woman who in other circumstances might have seen my friend as a potential mugger felt able to engage him in conspiratorial tut-tutting about the younger generation.
None of us is born a xenophobe. The very concept of stranger is one we should be brave enough to challenge more often, if only with a smile or an occasional apology or "Excuse me" where needed. What we should all advocate and support is the making of connections between us, the small courtesies that make everyday life less of an obstacle course.
The author is a writer and broadcaster, and was Britain's first black woman publisher
Sir: Margaret Busby's suspicion (Opinion 13 August) that people may be bumping into her in the street because she is black does not surprise me, given the attitude and thinking of British blacks.
My wife is of mixed-race origin from Brazil and I know many black Brazilians and Africans. They have a totally different mindset from that of blacks in Britain, especially in London. My wife once said to me that Britain's blacks are obsessed with their colour and race. If anything goes wrong, it's "because I'm black". If they receive bad service in a restaurant, for instance, it's "because I'm black" - as if no white person ever receives bad service in a restaurant.
London is aggressive and British people do not know how to walk through crowds. I watched my wife in Rio city centre once walk through large crowds of people, and she simply turned her body sideways when somebody came towards her. She never bumped into anybody and people coming towards her did the same. I now do this in central London when I visit and it works. British people do not do this. You need to try it.
JOHN ROWLANDS
LIVERPOOL
Quote:
Sir: Thomas Blair (Letters, 9 August) is right to point out that the ever increasing number of inter-racial unions and mixed-race children has little overall bearing on the economic and social inequalities of blacks and whites in Britain, without the sustained efforts of everyone who would seek to end discrimination or injustice.
However his assertion that inter-racial marriage is "a way of reconstructing race by broadening the boundaries of whiteness" fails to convince. Why should I, or any other mixed-race person, be compelled to regard "whiteness" as our dominant identity? He goes on to describe this social phenomenon as "one stage in the process of 'aryanisation' of blacks that benefits whites". This viewpoint appears to support the desire to maintain the black/white divide by avoiding miscegenation. Would we have much sympathy for those who discuss the "negrification" of the white race?
Sir: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown says that "inter-racial relationships have long been barometers of social integration, cohesion, trust and equity between peoples". ("Whites keep Britain racially tolerant", 6 August), But interracial marriage does not challenge or change the historically deprived and disadvantaged status of blacks.
Britain's centuries-old mixed-race settlements - in Butetown, Cardiff; Moss Side, Manchester; St Paul's, Bristol; Toxteth, Liverpool and the old dockland boroughs of London - remain among the poorest in the land.
I doubt that black-white intermarriage is the solution to deep-rooted race problems. Yes, it opens up a different dialogue about race identities, and offers multi-race children an opportunity to be heard. But mixed-race status guarantees very little. Britain is not an untroubled colour-blind society where everyone has equal social standing and equal opportunity.
"Race" continues to shape one's life chances. The colour line will be a major social problem of the 21st century. And it will take vigorous collective action by the mixed race-ers, with their progressive black and white co-families and allies, to mobilise a popular and legislative struggle to end race-based discrimination and segregation.
If not, interracial marriage will be perceived as a way of reconstructing race by broadening the boundaries of whiteness. Far from proving "Britain racially tolerant" it may be seen as one stage in a process of "aryanisation" of blacks that benefits whites without the perils of their mixing with and furthering the progress of disadvantaged black people and communities.
If not, interracial marriage will be perceived as a way of reconstructing race by broadening the boundaries of whiteness. Far from proving "Britain racially tolerant" it may be seen as one stage in a process of "aryanisation" of blacks that benefits whites without the perils of their mixing with and furthering the progress of disadvantaged black people and communities.
Isn't there a precedent for this kind of thinking in Anglo cultures? I am thinking of the Aborigine program in Australia/efforts to "civilize" Native American children in the U.S. and encourage them to marry/procreate with Whites. I am also thinking about the attitude of some Black (male) nationalists who justify their preference for White women as actions taken to eradicate whiteness.
I'm not convinced that cultural and genetic amalgamation or assimilation is something to fear, disdain or avoid. It seems to happen over time in every society when newcomers arrive. I am wondering, however, that since most if not all Anglo societies have white supremacist underpinnings, could the author have a point about B/W mixing? Even if the point is valid, are Whites not allowed to benefit from anything in the post-Civil Rights era???
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