Multiracial Britain

Министерство образования и науки Украины

Таврический национальный университет

Им. В.И. Вернадского

Факультет иностранной филологии

Кафедра английской филологии

Гура Егор Николаевич

Реферат на тему: «Multi-racial Britain»

Дисциплина «Лингвострановедение»

Специальность 7.030502

«английский и немецкий языки и литература»

курс 4, группа 42

Симферополь 2001

For
millions of people all over the world, Britain is the land of tradition, the
Royal Family, Beefeaters, Bobbies on the beat and, above all, white people. In
much of middle America, it comes as a shock for them to hear that there any
black people in Britain at all. But even if people can get their head around
the idea that an afroamerican might be British, the notion that he could be an
MP often perplexes them.

An
MP? Surely, one can see their eyes say, a British MP must be white. There are
many lifetimes of war, conquest, history, literature, culture and myth behind
the idea that Britain is a racially pure society. And in the study of history,
myth is just as important as reality. But the racial purity of the British has
always been a myth.

From
the days when the Norman French invaded Anglo-Saxon Britain, the British have
been a culturally diverse nation. But because the different nationalities
shared a common skin colour,
it was possible to ignore the racial diversity, which always existed in the
British Isles. And even if one takes race to mean what it is often commonly
meant to imply - skin colour-
there have been black people in Britain for centuries. The earliest blacks in
Britain were probably black Roman centurions that came over hundreds of years
before Christ. But even in Elizabethan times, there were numbers of blacks in
Britain. So much so that Elizabeth I issued a proclamation complaining about
them. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, black people make
fleeting appearances in the political and cultural narrative of the British
Isles. Black people can be seen as servants in the prints of Hogarth. And in
many paintings of the era. In Thackeray's "Vanity Fair", Ms Schwartz,
the West Indian heiress is obviously supposed to be of mixed race. She is
gently mocked but her colour
is not otherwise remarked on.

British
schoolchildren are taught about the abolition of slavery. They hear less about
the key role that slavery played in the British economy in the eighteenth
century. Britain was the center of the triangular traffic whereby British ships
took goods to Africa which were exchanged for slaves which the same British
ships transported to the Caribbean and North America before returning home. The
majority of these slaves worked in the plantations of the Caribbean and North
America. But some came to Britain to be personal household servants. Over time,
they inter-married with native born Britons. It
would be interesting to know how many British people who consider themselves
racially pure have an African slave generations back in their family. And,
of course, between the wars, black seamen turned ports like Liverpool and
Cardiff into multi-racial areas. Yet there was tendency for the black areas of
these seaports to be cut off from the rest of the city. It was possible until
not so long ago to visit Liverpool for the day and not be aware it had a
sizeable black community. Such was the de facto segregation that still existed.

So
in the literal sense, multi-racialism is nothing new. Britain has always been a
multi-racial society. What is new is the visibility of its racial diversity.
And what is newer still is a willingness to accept that all the races can have
parity of esteem. For a long time, even when it was acknowledged that there
were people of different racial origin within the British Isles, there was an
assumption that the white race and culture was, and should, be dominant.

The
creed of racial superiority was very much part and parcel of the culture of the
empire. The British Empire was built on a theory of racial inferiority. The
great Victorian writer and poet, Rudyard Kipling, wrote extensively on the
supposed superiority of the British and talked about "lesser breeds
without the law". It was the alleged superiority of the non-white races
that supposedly legitimized taking over their countries and subordinating them
to second class status. So even until quite recently British text books talked
about Europeans "discovering " countries like America, Australia and
the source of rivers like the Nile. Whereas in fact there were plenty of
non-white people who were in America and Australia all along who knew perfectly
well where the source of the Nile was. And until recently writers talked about
the Europeans bringing civilization to Africa and the Indian sub-continent. As
if these countries had not seen highly sophisticated Empires and societies long
before the Europeans came. When you read in the old textbooks about the
supposedly civilizing mission of the British, one is reminded of the comment of
Gandhi. He was asked what he thought about British civilization. He paused for
a long time and then said thoughtfully "It would be a good idea". So
fixed in the British mind, was the racial inferiority of the people whose lands
they took over that for a long time archaeologists believed that the sculpture
and carvings of the city of Benin in Nigeria could not have been done by black
people. And similarly that the great 'lost' city of Zimbabwe in southern Africa
could not have been built by black men. In direct line of descent of that kind
of thinking is Prince Phillip's idea that poor quality electrical work must
have been done by Indians.

Racial
stereotyping echoes through British literature and culture almost to the
present day. And for some time, assumptions of racial inferiority coloured
mainstream British perception of non-white culture and art. The Notting Hill
Street Carnival is the biggest street festival and a miracle of creativity with
costumes that take months to sew and wonderful music and dance. But it is only
recently that mainstream press has reported it as anything other than a law and
order issue.

However,
in recent years, people have begun to acknowledge the presence of non-white
people in Britain in a positive way. And even to talk about Britain as a
multi-racial Society. Although there are some people who would resist this
description and pretend Britain's continuing ethnic diversity doesn't exit and
insist on Britain being described as a European or white country. But although
the phrase multi-racial society is used quite frequently, a genuinely
multi-racial society with genuine parity of esteem is quite difficult to
achieve. The Caribbean is often cited as a part of the world where you can find
multi-racialism in action. The national motto of Jamaica for instance is
"Out of Many, One People". However, it is noticeable that even in these
supposed bastions of harmonious multi-racialism, tensions have arisen between
different races. In Trinidad, for instance, the archetypal multi-racial island
in the sun, there is bitter rivalry between the Asian and African-Caribbean
community. The issue is equality. Where one ethnic group is demonstrably
subordinate to another, it is idle to talk about multi-racialism because in
reality one culture is dominant. Furthermore, the political attractions of
playing the race card are often irresistible, multi-racialism just doesn't have
the same visceral appeal to popular sentiment.

But
multi-racialism is a tricky balance to achieve. On the one hand, there has to
be a measure of economic equality and genuine parity of esteem. But on the
other, it should not mean obliterating differences or pretending differences do
not exist. Britain would be the poorer without its different races and their
different cultural traditions. But it would also be a mistake to try and iron
out these differences in the name of multi-racialism. Of course, a vexed
question is of the relative merit of different cultures and cultural
traditions. It is very difficult in these cases to distinguish where objective
judgement starts and prejudice begins. In European societies, the bias tends to
be that European culture and tradition are necessarily superior. But in the
words of the American blues songs "It ain't necessarily so."

But
with all the difficulties in practice, multi-racialism is still an ideal worth
striving for. Because you can look around and see where ethnic tensions and
rivalry can lead. The civil wars in Africa get plenty of coverage. One of the
original ethnic conflicts was the Ibo insurrection in Biafra in Nigeria. But
the fighting in Yugoslavia is just as much an ethnic conflict as any African
bush war. And the prospects in Yugoslavia are a nightmare. Serbs, Croats and
Muslims are so intermarried and intermixed that Yugoslavia seems destined to
shatter into a multiplicity of mini-statelets. All ethically pure in themselves
but in almost every other way, unsustainable as modern nation states. So a
multi-racial society is not just a rosy and possibly unrealistic ideal. It is
vital to understand how a multi-racial society can be made to work if we are
going to avoid further turmoil across great swathes of Africa, Asia and Central
Europe.

To
have a genuinely multi-racial society there needs to be genuine economic
equality between the races. It's unbelievable that one can talk about a
multi-racial Britain or anywhere else unless there is a measure of economic
empowerment for all groups within Society. This means making sure that there is
genuine equality of opportunity in education for all races. And that the
barriers for black and ethnic minority advancement in business and in the
profession are taken down. But economic empowerment for minorities is a
necessary precondition but not sufficient to bring about a genuinely
multi-racial society. Because nationhood and society is as much about ideas as
anything else, the role of culture, literature, philosophy and the arts in
building a multi-racial society is key. The first step is that the influence of
black and ethnic minorities in the culture of a country like Britain is
properly acknowledged.

There
is no doubt the history of twentieth century popular music is very much the
history of African music as it has been mediated through North America. There
is almost no sort of pop music that doesn't owe something to black American
influence. And in art, the influence of African art has long been acknowledged
on modern abstract painters like Picasso. More recently, the literary
establishment has been willing to acknowledge the contribution of black and
ethnic minority writers like Ben Okri, Alice Walker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Arundathi Roy, Salman Rushdie and Nobel prize winning Toni Morrison. And at the
level of popular culture, different races have enriched British life greatly.

There
is no doubt that the presence of ethnic minorities in Britain and much more
foreign travel have transformed the British diet for the better. Noticeably
fish and chips have been overtaken by curry as the most popular British
takeaway. For many years, Britons have got used to seeing black athletes like
Linford Christie representing them internationally. And much of the famous
"Cool Britannia" that mix of music and fashion, which is admired
internationally, derives from different ethnic street styles. We are also
seeing an unprecedented level of intermarriage between the races. It is
noticeably more common to see mixed race couples in Britain than in the U.S.,
which has had a larger black population for longer. There can be no doubt that
as more and more British either have a black person in their family or at least
knows someone that has a black person in their family, ideas about the
desirability of racial purity will have to be examined by even the most die
hard conservative.

So
multi-racialism is easy to talk about but hard to achieve. Yet as we have
approached the end of a millennium, Britain is a more open, more multi-racial
society than ever before. And one where different races and cultural influences
are beginning to be positively acknowledged and given equal respect. British
society have come some way but there is still further to go. Martin Luther King
dreamed of an America where a man's character would be more important than the
colour of their skin.  The indication of Britain's becoming a genuinely
multi-racial society is when the skin colour of a British MP is no more
significant than the colour of their eyes.

While preparing the essay the following publications and
resources were used:

1.   Diane Abbott, MP.  Multi-racialism in
Britain Oxford,
1995.

2.   R. Rees Davies, M.A.,
D.Phil. The
Matter of Britain and the Matter of England, Oxford, 1996

Internet resources:

1.   www.bbc.co.uk/history

2.   www.planet-britain.com