THE NEW RACISM

Actually, there's nothing new about it. It's just that we don't hear much about it because it's

not by whites, says Nicholas Farrell THE BIGGEST survey (done once every ten years) of race in Britain — by the Left- ish think-tank the Policy Studies Institute, published last week at a cost of £1 million — has found that 250,000 Britons are vic- tims of racial harassment each year. The racial harassment in question is by white Britons of non-white Britons.

The PSI and others in the race relations industry are always telling us about white racism. But what of the racism of the three million black and brown Britons? On this, silence.

Or almost. But in February a survey by the Institute for Public Policy Research (the New Labourish think-tank chaired by the Labour peer Baroness Black- stone) made some disturbing discoveries — disturbing, that is, in leftish circles. This is because it touched on non- white racial prejudice for, said the Institute, the very first time. It polled non-white Britons about what in think- tank circles is called 'inter- ethnic' marriage and in common parlance 'marrying out' — a key test of how racist people are.

Asked if they would 'mind a lot' if a close relative were to marry an Afro-Caribbean, 32 per cent of Asians and 29 per cent of Jews said they would — compared to just 13 per cent of whites. (Whether the Jews are a race or not, or white or not, did not pre- sumably concern the authors of the report.) Asked the same of marriage to a Jew, 30 per cent of Asians said they would 'mind a lot', compared to 10 per cent of Afro- Caribbeans and 5 per cent of whites.

Most of the other questions, as usual with such surveys, were geared to white racism, such as asking non-whites which races whites are prejudiced against, but not which races non-whites are prejudiced against. And, alas, non-whites were not asked if they would mind relatives marrying whites. The answer to that would have been very interesting. Yet, on the marriage test at least, it would appear that white Britons, followed by Afro-Caribbeans, are the least racist of the races in Britain and Asian Britons are the most racist.

Why had it taken the race relations bureaucracy so many years to get around to examining what, to many outside it, seemed blindingly obvious? The survey co-ordina- tor Yasmin Alibhai-Brown explained, 'In the Eighties, we Asians used to call our- selves black. We thought there was some- thing to be gained from being part of a very strong movement. Five or six years ago, many Asian people said they did not want to call themselves black any more. Then, more recently, many of us thought that we should try and look at what is happening across the board, not just at white racism, that we wouldn't gain the respect of the white community if we talked about white racism and no other.'

She added, 'The mistake we've made is not thinking about white identity enough over the years. I feel "multicultural" wrongly meant the non-white culture. Any- body who tried to assert white culture was automatically a member of the British National party. That was wrong. We're going to have to look at people being proud of being British and white without them necessarily being the enemy.'

I decided to have a look at non-white racism. I spoke first to Anu, a 27-year-old Midlands doctor and Hindu, whose family come from the Punjab. Yes, Asians were racially prejudiced, he freely admitted, mostly so against blacks — and, if Hindus or Sikhs, against Muslims, and if Muslims, vice versa. As for being traditionally regarded as black for race-relations pur- poses, many Asians found that insulting. He explained:

Blacks are perceived very much as savages.

It's as harsh as that. It's partly because nobody has seen blacks in India. Also there is a complex about dark skin in India. If you have a daughter with dark skin it's an enormous impedi- ment. In India the lower castes tend to have dark com- plexions.

The very worst thing for an Asian Hindu or Sikh would be if his children were to marry a black or a Muslim. A white marriage would be considered better. If I married a black or Muslim it would be a much bigger disaster than marrying a white girl, even though cul- turally I would have much more in common with a Mus- lim girl.

There's worse racism among Asians towards blacks than among blacks towards Asians.

My brother owns several prop- erties, but says there's no way he'll ever have another black tenant because of all the trouble they've caused him in the past. That's a racist remark. He's saying all blacks cause trouble.

I was at a party the other week, doctors mainly, and one man said that a family friend's daughter had married a West Indian and the friend's father had committed suicide. He said that if there were more suicides like that, then maybe our girls would know better.

Whites were prejudiced against Asians at work in subtle ways, he said, and blacks on the street in far from subtle ways. He had been mugged twice by blacks and the attacks, he felt, were at least in part racially motivated. He said, 'They target Asians because we wear a lot of gold and are weaker generally and less likely to make a fuss.' True, blacks tend to be bigger and poor- er than Asians, but being Asian does not make the Asian the prey — unless small- ness and wealth are a function of being Asian. It is more a case of the law of the jungle than a question of racism. And what of Asians refusing to marry blacks or whites? Is that racism?

Not for Anu. For him, that is cultural self-defence. He said:

To say I don't want my daughter to marry a black or a white is not necessarily a racist remark if you see it as an attempt to preserve your own cultural identity. Everywhere Asians in the West are surrounded by the West. If the West comes into the home as well, then the culture stands no chance. This isn't perceived as racist by the Asian commu- nity.

Tony, a white psychiatrist, also from the Midlands, who has a lot of Asian patients, said:

The other day I had an Asian woman patient who has been assaulted three times by black youths. She can't give her child a bike because the blacks will take it off him straight away. Her husband is a minicab driv- er but he daren't come home until 5 a.m. because the blacks will smash up his car. The black community know who the culprits are but refuse to speak up to the police. Is that racist? I think it is.

I've been working in an ethnically diverse area for years and only once have I heard of Asians taking an overdose because of white racism. But I've heard of hundreds of cases involving Sikhs and Muslims. All of this is left out in the race industry's rhetoric. They're not truthful. If you want to get rid of racism, even supposing it were possible, you have to tackle all forms of racism. If you're not prepared to do that then you too are guilty of racism.

Hackney in east London is as good a place as any to study at first hand how the races get along. One in three of the bor- ough's 25,000 school pupils, for example, does not speak English as what the council calls their 'home' language. In all, 36 `home' languages are spoken by the bor- ough's schoolchildren. Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, black Caribbeans, black Africans, Turks, Turkish Cypriots, Kurds, Hasidic Jews, all live side by side. In the Kingsland Road, Dalston — Hackney's Oxford Street — there is an unofficial apartheid between the races. The restau- rants of each race stand out like flags. No Asian will be found cooking kebab or Cypriot curly. The Turks have their numer- ous football club cafés. The Kurds have the vast Halkevi community centre, plastered with posters supporting the PKK's sepa- ratist war against Turkey. The Muslims, of whatever race, have their mosque; the blacks their Pentecostal churches and all- night dance clubs.

Suzanne Nuri, a Turkish Cypriot born in Britain and married to another Turkish Cypriot, is a journalist with the local Turk- ish community newspaper Toplum Postasi. She said:

If I had married out of the community my family would not have been happy. It's a defi- nite no. We've had people in my family marry out, but we don't see them any more.

If you want to call that prejudice, I don't know. I suppose it is. When you talk about racism the first thing that comes to mind is neo-Nazis. But there's also racism between the various communities. In the schools there are rival gangs of black youths and Turkish youths, but it's all kept very quiet.

Osman, a 64-year-old Turkish Cypriot minicab driver from Hackney, came to Britain in 1953. He was married first for seven years to a white Englishwoman with whom he had three children and many rows. Then he married a Turkish Cypriot woman. Though a Muslim, he does not go to the mosque. Nevertheless he strongly disagrees with 'marrying out' on cultural grounds. He does not see this as racist.

He said, 'You should stay within your own culture.' By culture, he did not mean British food — he likes a good fry-up. He meant women. 'I used to argue with my first wife about things like circumcision and what names the children should have.' He would not let his wife go out on her own either. Why not? 'I don't agree with it.' Culture also meant school. He said, `They've just sent us a questionnaire asking if we agree to my granddaughter, who's 12, having sex lessons. Sex lessons! At her age? Of course I don't. This is the trouble living in another culture.'

David Rosser-Owen, president of the British Association of Muslims and a white Muslim convert, believes that the race rela- tions industry does more harm than good because it has been obsessed with race at the expense of religion. The Koran is adamant: thou shalt not, for example, many out. Yet there is a law only against racial discrimination, not religious discrimi- nation. He said,

Islam itself is colour-blind. It does not recog- nise differences in colour and race. I had a case recently where an Algerian Muslim cook was dismissed by a hotel chain for refusing to handle pork. He could only bring a case against the employer under the Race Rela- tions Act. But it was a religious issue.

So what? He said:

Emphasising race perpetuates an existing situ- ation which if left to its own devices would diminish down the generations. A Gujerati girl I know of was virtually disowned by her family for marrying a Turkish Cypriot even though both were Muslims. Constantly harping about race prevents Muslims integrating with each other and with the British way of life.

Islam may be colour-blind, but what of Muslims? He said, 'I've certainly come across racism among Muslims in the same way as one does in any community. It's quite common for white Muslim converts to be ignored and dismissed as "gora" the equivalent of "honky".' And yes, con- centration on white racism had, he said, been unfair:

There's a perceived wisdom that racism is a function of being white when of course it's not. The law has not been applied universal- ly. It's allowed non-white people to be as prejudiced as they like on the one hand and on the other cry foul when they receive prej- udice back.

If a white Briton expresses a desire to preserve white British culture by, say, not `marrying out', or objecting to non-Chris- tian religion being taught in schools, that is seen by the race-relations industry as racial prejudice. But if a non-white Briton expresses a similar desire, that is fine because, in the jargon of the industry, it is not racial prejudice at all but a 'religious requirement' — or, as Anu, the Hindu doctor from the Midlands, puts it, an attempt to 'preserve cultural identity'. So to keep out the East is a prejudice, to keep out the West a requirement, the will of Allah.

In the Crown and Castle, a black pub in the Kingsland Road, Roy, a 52-year-old Nigerian, summed up the multiracial situa- tion in Hackney: 'Everywhere there is rac- ism. With black and black there is racism. With white and white there is racism.' Was he racist? 'Me, I belong to every religion,' he said with a chuckle, 'I belong to the United Nations.' It seemed to me that black Britons are the least racist of the lot, but I've been mugged three times by blacks, never by Asians. But these were not, of course, racial attacks. For as one attacker once put it, 'Hurry up, man, I do this for a living.' No doubt these muggings were nothing to do with culture either, the result not so much of a religious require- ment as a financial one.