A British Obama?

Published: 26/03/2009

A British Obama
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Our first black PM, our own Obama? After a century perhaps, I said, and made my son very cross. He, a young barrister, is more upbeat and hopeful than his grumpy old mum. Seems new research agrees with him. Harvard Professor Robert Putnam and Manchester University have been comparing race and opportunity in the US and UK and find many reasons to be cheerful.

First we are not ‘sleep walking into’ segregation, as some warn. Even in cities with high Asian populations, there isn’t a single ward which can be described as a ‘ghetto’ unlike in the US where de facto residential segregation persists. I once went to New Orleans to write on the legacy of Martin Luther King. Poor blacks and whites lived in separate neighbourhoods and successful African Americans were confined to their own affluent quarters, kept out of white locales. That simply does not happen here.

However Obama proves racial attitudes in the US are shifting. Here too, according to this latest research: ‘ People born after 1960 are permanently less prejudiced than their parents’. Fewer white Britons object to mixed marriages ( a test of racial perceptions) – in fact the opposition comes now from the ‘ethnic’ side, as I found when writing a book on the subject of mixed race Britons. In the rest of Europe segregation is common, so too overt discrimination.

Here, a young black child can see black power. Our Attorney General, Patricia Scotland, Peers Bill Morris, Herman Ouseley and Valerie Amos exert immense influence as do Trevor Phillips, David Lammy, Trevor Macdonald and other names in arts, popular culture, sports and design. Tidjane Thiam is the new CEO of Prudential and Damon Buffini, a multimillionaire private equity operator.

But look closely and gloom spreads across the picture, a stain on our system. White Britons may think it is great to love across racial boundaries yet too many find it hard to accept that person of colour can climb to high places or should. Twelve years ago I was the first non-white regular weekly newspaper columnist in this country. I still am. And I still get letters telling me Asians should be cleaning toilets, not appearing on the media. Black men get it even worse says one, a lawyer who cannot get parliamentary seat: ’They think lurking behind the smart suit is a mugger or a rapist. That we will revert to primitivism if provoked’ Does he think we can have an Obama? Maybe, but not any time soon. If this new evidence is right, such pessimism is out of date. I hope so. This is an argument I want to lose, and conclusively.

Published in Evening Standard