“Britain no longer has a serious race problem.”

Note: I do not live in Britain, so I am just throwing this out there for comment.

In 2013 “Britain no longer has a serious race problem. The trouble is isolation,” says The Economist, a white British news magazine well to the right.

[T]he country tends to look at race in the wrong way. These days, overt discrimination is not nearly as big a problem as isolation. This is true of blacks and Asians as much as whites.

It compares three poor communities, one white, one Pakistani, one Afro-Caribbean. They are ethnic ghettos cut off from the rest of society by cultures that discourage assimilation (for Pakistanis), ambition (for whites) or obedience (for blacks). For their respective ethnicities, however, they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

Britain is “comfortably colour-blind” (rather than “comfortably numb”?):

On just about every reliable measure, Britain is exceedingly tolerant on race, and becoming ever more so.

“Exceedingly”! Opinion polls prove it! Oh, and “tolerant”!

And besides:

• Except for the Chinese, more blacks and Asians are marrying white.
• In the 1970s Britain made it illegal to discriminate on racial grounds in employment or housing.
• Since the 1980s the police have been under pressure to behave better.
• Hate speech is now a crime.
• Poor whites do worse at school than poor black and Asian students. (In Britain, Asian mainly means South Asian.)
• Unlike the rest of Europe, immigrants are less likely to drop out of school than natives.
• In 2011 the unemployment rate for immigrants was 8%, only a shade worse than the 7% for natives.
• Many in Britain hate immigration maybe because they are so racially tolerant that they expect immigrants to be given the same rights and opportunities as natives.

Pakistanis: In London “many have blended happily into British life” while in Bradford they are “mired in old ways” where clan culture is strong, where men rarely wear blue jeans or date white women. Racism and Islamophobia are not dead, yet it is mainly their culture that cuts them off.

Afro-Caribbean communities: “A culture persists down the generations” of opposing authority. It starts with boys challenging teachers, then the police. They form gangs. They riot from generation to generation. “It is exacerbated by racial discrimination, including among the police. … Still, overt discrimination is not nearly as bad as it once was.” Only some communities and families are like this, not all, and only males, not females. The issue is specific, not general.

Apparently these communities are screwed up mainly for reasons of their own “cultures”, not because of racism, white people or British institutions.

Some things The Economist does not tell you:

• Unemployment in April-June 2012:
  • 7.3% White
  • 9.0% Indian
  • 11.6% Other
  • 13.3% Chinese
  • 13.5% Bangladeshi
  • 15.5% Black
  • 16.6% Pakistani
  • 17.3% Mixed
• Police stop and search: In 2010-2011, blacks were seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites, Asians twice as likely. More than 90% of these lead to no arrest.
• Hate crimes: In 2010-2011, black adults were nine times more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than whites, Asians 18 times more.

Sources: The Economist, Institute of Race Relations.

See also:

• Racism in Britain
  • golliwog
  • Shilpa Shetty
• colour blind racism: the four frames – how many does The Economist use?
• British, the
• The Economist
• King’s Dream at 50: A Report Card
• Grada Kilomba on racism in Europe
• Black France
• black ghetto – in America, at least, these do not drop out of the sky but are the creation of racist policies.