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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
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