Maybe we’re segregated because we want to be…
Immigration in this country could be summed up as white liberal-leftists telling the white working-class poor to live cheek to jowl with people those same white liberal-leftists wouldn’t be seen dead with themselves. The poorest of whites live with the poorest of immigrants, competing for stretched local services, jobs and room to breathe.
Those whites who protest are abused as racists until they see the light. Diversity programmes hammer the message home until we’re all too afraid of the abuse that being honest entails - so we go with the herd. Meanwhile, every aspect of non-white people’s failure, frustration or unhappiness is blamed squarely on white people and their institutions.
Yet the intolerance and disdain shown to us by those in authority still has not achieved the intended aims. And as the multicultural experiment starts fraying, its advocates start panicking. Trevor Phillips (pictured), head of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE):
“The fact is we are a society which, almost without noticing it, is becoming more divided by race and religion. We are becoming more unequal by ethnicity.”
The dewy-eyed belief that children will pave the way for a multi-cultural wonderland seems not to be delivering the results the diversity-fanatics want:
According to Phillips, new research also pours cold water on hopes that children mixing in schools might break down the barriers between communities. The study by Bristol University found that children are slightly more segregated in the playground than they are in their neighbourhoods. “That means that not only aren’t the children meeting — nor are their parents”.
In school or out, people just won’t do what their masters require of them:
New CRE research will also show that most white people do not have a non-white friend, while young Asian and black people have almost exclusively Asian or black friends.
In a country that’s 92% white if you picked your friends on character alone then statistically most of your friends would be white. But blacks and Asians seek out people like themselves - not people like me.
Phillips suggests that schools could be given cash incentives to increase their ethnic mix and local education authorities could be forced to broaden their catchment areas to include a more even racial mix.
He suggests that young people of different ethnic backgrounds should be brought together in summer camps to overcome suspicions and prejudice; he will also say that schools should be encouraged, or even coerced, into accepting a greater ethnic mix of pupils.
He wonders whether local authorities should be forced to redraw their school catchment areas so as to encourage integration.
I think Mr Phillips misses the point. People tend to stick to their own racial or religious type not because they dislike other races but simply because they prefer their own. All the force and coercion in the world won’t change what people prefer.
And what good is a greater ethnic mix of school pupils if those kids seek out and socialise with their own? You end up with the same number of segregated groups but with more people in them. Segregation is chosen by the very people whose segregation Mr Phillips laments…
In Aston, a predominantly ethnic minority area of Birmingham, Pardeep Modhvadia was quite frank last week about how insulated his life can be from mainstream white British culture.
“We are very much involved with our mosque and events in the Asian community,” said the 34-year-old IT consultant whose wife, Nazia, is 33. “Many of these events involve Asians exclusively and it can be easy to get wrapped up in Asian culture and not embrace other communities around you.”
Modhvadia admitted that he and his wife “mainly only see Asian people”, partly because of religious and family ties.
Truth is, there are so many immigrants in this country that individuals don’t have to integrate - there’s plenty of their own to live a whole and happy life with. In London, in fact, 45% of the population comes from a minority so why seek relationships with people whose language, religion, culture, mindset and so on is so different from your own? There are, after all, plenty of people around who are just like you - whoever you are.
Whites are just the same:
James Parker, a 24-year-old mechanic, who lives in the same area of Birmingham with his girlfriend Chloe, 22. He, too, was straightforward about the ethnically restricted ambit of his life.
“Our friends are mostly white,” he said. “I knew a lot of Asians in school and they mainly talked only to each other and would sometimes speak in Gujarati — it was like their own club. So everyone kind of divided into their own racial groups.”
Mr Phillips and his middle-class intellectual friends might hob-nob with whitey but his brothers and sisters in da ‘hood prefer their own.
At least Mr Phillips recognises and, more importantly, acknowledges the failures of the multicultural experiment:
[M]ulticultural tolerance, Phillips now believes, has ultimately helped to build ghettos. “We have allowed tolerance of diversity to harden into the effective isolation of communities in which some people think special separate values ought to apply,”
It has also allowed the traditional British values of free speech and family to be eroded. He points to such incidents as Sikh activists trying to ban a play they found offensive rather than support free speech; and to the “almost casual” acceptance of Afro-Caribbean fathers abandoning their children.
We even tolerate evangelical African churches performing exorcisms on children in the name of multiculturalism, he notes.
Unfortunately, despite sounding like the most sensible of the various ‘equality’ promoting intellectuals in this country when it comes to ways of forcing us to integrate - because that, in the final analysis, is what he’s trying to do - it’s all stuff we’ve seen and heard before. He suggests
A better balance to be struck between multiculturalism, “which leads to greater division and inequality”, and enforced assimilation, which creates an “intolerant repressive uniformity”. “Integration” is the key.
Sorry - but completely meaningless to me. Mr Phillips wants to balance two bad things - multiculturalism and enforced assimilation? And what is this magic ingredient - integration? How does it work and how do you get it?
Establishing a set of non-negotiable “British values” to which all groups must subscribe, including respect for democracy, freedom of speech, tolerance of others, care for children and equality of opportunity.
Nice but when some of these values are only patchily shared by the white community these days how exactly do we persuade people - white and black - brought up on a diet of rights, victim status and the certainty that all the evils of society are whitey’s fault to suddenly transform themselves?
A recognition by government that anti-discrimination laws alone are not enough to foster a properly integrated society, and for new measures to be taken to foster greater “equality, participation and interaction” between ethnic groups.
‘New measures’ suggests to me we’re going to have government schemes to make us want to live with each other. This is also known as social engineering and brainwashing - held together with the certain knowledge that if the average joe doesn’t comply he’s going to be called a racist.
More “equality audits” to root out institutional racism in the public and private sectors; more ethnic minorities to be appointed to public bodies such as health boards.
Witch-hunts, widescale branding of white people as racist (which is what the term ‘institutionally racist’ does) and quotas of blacks and Asians in public jobs - discrimination against white candidates, in other words. What’s known, I believe, as fighting fire with fire….
And absolutely no mention whatsoever of whether or not the minority groups themselves should do anything to meet Mr Phillips’ desire that they be integrated.
And, of course, no admission that maybe many people don’t integrate because they simply don’t want to.
[Quotes from The Sunday Times]
It doesn’t happen often but 
