Race is to the miffed
For all the praise or flak it gets for being a multicultural London borough, some folk seem unable to talk about Hackney’s racial make-up without reaching for a dog whistle and giving it a good, hard blow.
You’ll see what I mean if you take a look at this post of Luke Akehurst’s, which I picked up on over at Dave Hill’s Clapton Pond Blog. In it, Luke is taking a pop at this Spectator article by Anthony Browne, formerly of the Policy Exchange and now Boris Johnson’s Policy Director.
I recommend you read Browne’s article. I fully agree that he talks a lot of bollocks, including nonsense like:
Many on the Left hope so because they believe that the only way to end racism is to end races; the only way to conquer Nazism, they argue, is mass miscegenation — interracial love rather than war.
It’s a cheap shot, and it certainly doesn’t - in my opinion - reflect the views of most people on the Left. You could certainly argue that Browne is puffing on the dog whistle himself, but for a different audience. But, insofar as I can see, the rest of his argument boils down to:
1) The modern trend towards diversity is a Western phenomenon.
2) People tend to gravitate towards others who have the same language, culture and values.
3) As poorer economies prosper, fewer people leave for richer countries in search of prosperity; and, indeed, many people start to return to their homelands.
4) The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them.
I agree with the first three points (Poland and migrant Poles would be a good, up-to-date example of them), even if I have major reservations about the fourth. I also think Browne has a rather distorted idea about what Hackney is actually like, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.
Up to this point, I suspect Cllr Akehurst and I are mostly in agreement. As he says:
One of the things that is right about my borough though, and really works, is that it functions pretty well as a model of a multifaith and multiethnic community. People live along side [sic] each other in relative peace and harmony and on the whole they appreciate and enjoy this diversity.
He’s right. We do live alongside each other in relative peace and harmony (though it’s far from perfect), and - on the whole - people are pretty tolerant of each other. However, I don’t think Hackney really works well as “a model of a multifaith and multiethnic community” - what it does do, though, is show that a fairly large number of communities can co-exist in the same administrative area, live mostly separate lives, and rub along well where they have to or want to. But to imply, as Luke does, that Hackney is a single, multicultural community does not reflect the reality.
I’d be happy to disagree, and leave it at that. But Luke made my jaw drop by failing to actually address Browne’s argument, instead listing these quotes from the latter’s article:
“Many on the Left … believe that the only way to end racism is to end races; the only way to conquer Nazism, they argue, is mass miscegenation” (I’ve never heard anyone on the left say this!
“The champions of diversity ultimately believe that our future is not as a species with many races, but with one race — a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian, a quarter African and a quarter European.”
“The eternal human urge for self-segregation — surrounding yourself with people like you — is likely to triumph over the more ephemeral economic and political incentives to leave what you know.”
“It is not Hackney that is the future of the world, but Japan.”
“Sharing the same language, culture and values as the people you come into daily contact with may not be excitingly multicultural, but it means you end up with deeper relationships, a sense of community, belonging and security.”
“The white flight — or white self-segregation — which is such a feature of US cities is now endemic in the UK, with hundreds of thousands of white Briton’s (sic) fleeing the effects of the government’s open border policy on London each year.”
“The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them.”
All of which, selected with the true skill of the dog-whistler, are designed to spark fear and worry amongst minority groups - and others - who might not have read some of the following from the same article:
“…I have been convinced that mixed-race people, by a blessing of nature, combine the best of all their parts.”
“And as our minorities keep telling us, it is not easy being a minority, since in democracies it is the majority that sets the rules.”
“Self-segregation is apparent all around us, but there is a reluctance to accept it because it mocks multiculturalism”.
In a tour de force of doublethink, though, Luke does accept the self-segregation that’s all around us. Why else would he go on to say this?
Do Hackney’s Tory Councillors, eight out of nine of whom are from minority faith and ethnic communities, know about the views of their London Mayor’s Policy Director about the model of community harmony represented by our borough?
What? Does Cllr Akehurst really believe that all those Orthodox Jewish councillors (for that, at root is what he’s talking about) are going to get upset that someone has said this in print?
“Sharing the same language, culture and values as the people you come into daily contact with may not be excitingly multicultural, but it means you end up with deeper relationships, a sense of community, belonging and security.”
It’s all these things that have made the Chareidi so strong a community in Hackney. You could say the same, to a greater or lesser degree, of other faith and ethnic groups in Hackney: the Turks and Kurds who live in the north of Dalston and south of Stoke Newington; the Vietnamese in Shoreditch; the Africans and Caribbeans in Dalston. You could even make the same point about the enclaves of the (mostly white) middle-class people who are centred on Stoke Newington Church Street or in the leafy, spacious streets and squares of De Beauvoir.
And this brings me back to the point on which I disagree with both Anthony Browne and Luke Akehurst. Browne concluded his article by saying:
The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them. Not all the world will look like Hackney, just those countries that opened their borders when push-migration was at its peak.
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech attacking multiculturalism, ‘the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities.’
What Browne doesn’t realise he is saying is that, if there’s a worldwide trend towards less diversity within nations, the global picture will look more like Hackney: a place in which people band together mostly with those who have the same “language, culture and values“, but still have to find ways of getting along together with others as groups and as individuals.
That’s Hackney’s strength. And I like it: except when people on both left and right exploit the weaker relationships between those communities for political gain.
NEED A UK COPYWRITER? Someone who writes crisply, convincingly and without using ugly jargon? Websites, reports, commercial bids, trade magazines, newsletters, advertisements, press releases: any job tackled quickly, effectively and at a good price. Visit www.benlocker.co.uk to find out more.
Published on 3rd August, 2008
No Comments »
No comments yet.