America is often heralded as a bastion of good race relations. But in New Orleans, we saw evidence of the manifest neglect of a poor, largely African-American district, whose citizens – socially, economically, culturally and psychologically marooned outside the mainstream of American society – could not evade the hurricane’s deadly path.
Until Katrina whipped up the wind of truth, Americans prided themselves on having found the holy grail of integration. Whilst they were lauding the success of black millionaires, academics and sports stars, it was easy to forget the segregated reality of many of their neighbourhoods.
Today, the stars and stripes represent a society in which the average black child still attends a black majority school and the average white person lives in an all-white suburb; a democracy in which black politicians generally represent black districts; an economy in which black businessmen sell their wares largely to a black middle class; and an education system in which most black academics teach in urban institutions disproportionately packed with ethnic minority students.
But we Brits cannot and must not be complacent. The fact is that we too are a society which is becoming more divided by race and religion.
Residential isolation is increasing for many minority groups. For example, the number of people of Pakistani heritage, in what are technically called ‘ghetto’ communities, trebled between 1991 and 2001. And new research from Bristol University shows that, far from becoming sites of integration, children are slightly more segregated at school than in their neighbourhoods. Different groups also increasingly inhabit separate social and cultural worlds. For 95 per cent of white Britons, most or all of their friends are white. The proportion of ethnic minority Britons who have mainly or exclusively ethnic minority friends is 37 per cent.
If we allow these trends to continue, we could end up living in a New Orleans-style Britain of passively co-existing ethnic and religious communities, eyeing each other uneasily over the fences of our differences. And when the hurricane hits – and here it could be a recession rather than a natural disaster – those communities are set up for destruction.
Even if there is no calamity, these marooned communities will steadily drift away from the rest of us: evolving their own lifestyles, playing by their own rules, and increasingly regarding the codes of behaviour, loyalty and respect that the rest of us take for granted as outdated and irrelevant. We know what follows then: crime, no-go areas and chronic cultural conflict.
But the American situation does not have to be repeated in Britain. We can be an example to the world of how to handle multi-ethnicity, but only if we begin to build an integrated society. A society where we can celebrate our diversity, but where difference does not have to mean division. A society in which we share basic values and everyone has the chance to participate in making the decisions that count.
Our success will be dependent on achieving three key goals: equality for, interaction between, and participation by all sections of the community. This is what we mean when we speak of integration; not a policy of assimilation where new migrants are told to leave their identities behind so we all speak, look, dress, worship and act the same. Rather, we mean a process in which everyone who lives in this country has the right to every opportunity it offers, and the duty to make every contribution of which they are capable.
The integration agenda confronts the country with new challenges. But it uses some very old principles. When we meet each other as real people we tend to treat each other as real human beings, we extend tolerance and, above all, we see that we have more in common than we have that divides us. We not only need to pick up the pace on policies designed to achieve racial equality in employment and service provision, but also to come up with new ways to ensure that we interact more and that everyone has a voice when the decisions that count are being made.
If we put effective policies and programmes in place, we can arrest our drift to separation before it becomes irreversible. The CRE is about to invest over £2m in funding for sporting initiatives that help bring together Britain’s diverse communities, as well as proposing the creation of summer camps for school leavers of all backgrounds. But some policies will be more controversial and will involve answering some difficult questions. Take education: should we be considering using the funding system to encourage schools to attract a diverse intake? Should catchment areas be drawn in a way that encourages integration, rather than cutting pupils off from others who do not share their race?
This may provoke cries of ‘social engineering’, but it may also guarantee that we do not follow the path of America and become a safer society, not just next week or next year, but for generations to come.