In Our Time - Multiculturalism

Episode Date: May 13, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss multiculturalism. The divisions between people provoked and exploited because of differences in religion, culture, nationality and race seem to beset the planet the more information technology promises globalisation. A recent estimate put the figure of people living in a country other than the one of their birth at 80 million. Does this mean that, amongst these eighty million people, their country of origin, their sense of self, and their cultural history are no longer as significant as they were? And how are those eighty million people and their descendants accommodated in the country to which they have moved - do their lives exemplify the success of multicultural policies or are they subject to racism? Is it possible to define how attitudes to race and identity have changed this century, given its vast shifts of population, cultures and peoples?With Stuart Hall, former Professor of Sociology, Open University and currently on a Commission set up by the Runnymede Trust looking at the future of multi-ethnic Britain; Dr Avtar Brah, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Birkbeck College, London University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, a recent estimate put the figure of people living in a country other than the one of their birth at 80 millions. Does this mean that among these 80 million people,

their country of origin, their sense of self and their cultural history are no longer as significant as they were? and how does this knock on to others? And how are those 80 million people and their descendants accommodated in the countries to which they've moved? Do their lives exemplify the success of multicultural policies, or are they subject to racism? Is it possible to define how attitudes to race and identity

have changed this century, given its vast shifts of population, culture and peoples? With me is Stuart Hall, recently retired as Professor of Sociology at the Open University. He's currently on a commission set up by the Runnymede Trust looking at the future of multi-ethnic Britain. He's published and co-authored a large number of books and essays, and his most recent works are focused on the problems of cultural identity, race and ethnicity. On July 1st, he'll be giving a lecture organized by the Amil Trust on Race and Nation at the Millennium. Dr. Aftar Brow was born in the Punjab and grew up in Uganda.

She went to the University of California in the mid-60s and then to Wisconsin. On her way back from America to Uganda, she made a short visit to Britain and was here when she was made a stateless refugee by Idi Amin's expulsion of South Asians from Uganda. She is currently a senior lecture in sociology at Birkbeck College, London University. Stuart Hall, is your own experience since arriving here in 1951 to study at Merton College Oxford? Would that give us a perspective on what's happened here? Well, I suppose so, because when I came in 1951, it was before the sort of war. wave of migration, both from the Caribbean and from the Asian and from the Indian subcontinent.

So I sort of watched the multiculturalization of Britain happening in front of my eyes. I remember in 1952 or three going back to Paddington and suddenly seeing, you know, people streaming, people from the Caribbean streaming out of Paddington Station in a sort of cold, gray morning light and wondering where on earth they'd come from, where they were going to? And so I've seen the whole span of 50 years in which people came from both places and immigration and, I mean, everything that's followed. And I've watched the problems which both Britain and the migrants have had in trying to settle for a kind of peaceful way of coexisting with one another.

Certainly in the early days, everybody asked the question, when are they going home? They asked it of me too. They never asked it until the mobs came. But once there are very large numbers, they wanted to know first thing, when were we going home? And I was just in the middle of deciding not to go home, which is exactly as experience I think most migrants have. It seems to take about seven or eight years before you actually confess to yourself that you have chosen to live somewhere else. And then you and anybody who's been through that experience has this question of, who are you? Where do you belong?

You feel at home in both cultures. you know a great deal about them both from the inside. You do find it difficult sometimes ever to say we or us about either of them. You speak about them from each place, as it were. This is the multicultural experience. I mean, this is a very benign form of it, of course, because many people are moving, you know, under serious economic or other forms of distress driven by civil war or poverty and so on.

I came to study, so it was an easy path to it, but it hasn't, of course, been an easy path through it. Before we move on to Dr. Brahe, can you give me one overall view? I know, and we can't possibly in this program, think through everything that's going on, but your overall take on what's happened in almost the last 50 years in this country, I know it's limited and it's particular, to the position of those who have come from the Caribbean and Asia and Africa. Well, I'd pick out really two things.

I'd say that a very important turning point is in the mid-70s, when the dream, illusion, perhaps, on either side, that assimilation, full assimilation was possible. That's to say that the people who came would over two generations really sort of disappear into the host community and become more or less indistinguishable from them. That dream of assimilation was buried on both sides. The British didn't want it and to be honest migrants didn't want it either

it was too big a trade-off it required them to give up too much it was just not on and that's a very big turning point because I think until you ditch the idea of the possibility of assimilation you don't really confront the problems of multiculturalism

after that we then had to ask the question well what is it like to live in a society where different cultures to some degree do persist, but where the people are trying to make a common life together. That's the multicultural problem. And the second thing that I'd pick out is really what's happening just right now. There is a sort of common sense that Britain has become and is being accepted, sometimes grudgingly, but nevertheless widely accepted as a multicultural society. I think I would

describe this as a kind of multicultural drift. I think we've just found ourselves in the situation where we're surrounded by people of different cultures and different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and well, that's what it looks like Britain is going to be. It's not been a thought-out progress, and we haven't really confronted what then are the problems which that poses as to how we should live together. And right alongside that is, of course, a significant minority of British-born people who don't think that's the way in which Britishness and Britain should go. So, actually, the increased in multiculturalism as a sort of accepted

definition of what Britain is is running right alongside with, I think, a sort of increase in racism. So this doubleness presents very difficult problems of trying to sort out a way of life. Dr. Aftar Bra, your experience is more complicated from the Punjab to

Uganda, to America, to Britain almost accidentally landing up here. because while you were here, you made stateless. What view do you have of the situation in this country? We can expand it in a few minutes, but in this country, just to get a fix. From that very turbulent background. Well, I feel that the whole question of belonging is a very complex one.

And when Stuart mentioned the notion of accommodation, and so you spoke about assimilation. And I think that there are two aspects of that, because assimilation by definition means that there is something to be assimilated into. And whereas I always felt wherever I was, that in a sense, although we use these terminologies, and of course the power dynamic is such

that the dominant culture can somehow talk about assimilation, but in actual fact, Something is always happening when a so-called outsider comes in. The insider also changes. For me, that is quite important. It takes a long time, really, to actually, for the receiving group, receiving society, to really accept that. But for me, that's quite a profound thing,

that the presence of somebody or someone constructed as the outsider from the day zero, really. starts changing, in fact, the insider. But in, and so for me that's quite significant. Yes, I think that's very meaningful. I think that Britain has been changing, not since just 1950s, although I know that's obviously the question

that we're addressing today, but for a very long time, you know, for actually thousands of years, it's useful to think about that. Do you find it personally? I mean, did you encounter racism at any time? I mean, I read a, I thought, an excellent piece by Darkus Howe

in the New Statesman last month. week where he was telling his children what happened to him in South London 30 or 40 years ago what was happening to them and they couldn't believe what was happening to him because it was so terrible and foreign to their experience although now and then bad things happen to them and so A did you encounter racism and B I'm almost sort of saying this as I hope it has has it got better in the last 30 years maybe sort of trying to wrinkle out an optimism optimistic view that isn't there but what's your view on that do you encounter racism and Have you, have things changed for the better?

Yes. Please excuse the price. No, that's fine, actually. I do feel quite optimistic despite everything. I mean, this is why I think, for me, this question of insider outsider is very, very important. Because in America, my outsiderness was experienced very differently. I was a student and I was a student in America at a time where, you know,

the heyday of 1968, 1969. in 1970, that was the period and it was a time of sort of, you know, hippies going around, a lot of political activism, you know, protests against Vietnam War, etc. So how was I positioned there? It was quite differently. And although I'm sure that there are all kinds of, you know,

orientalisms, you know, that were perhaps, you know, directed at me, but the experience was something like I was someone who was an outsider, but not someone who was totally undesirable. I think that was the difference. I was different, and as I said, Orientalism itself can have, even the delicate one, the subtle one, also has a power dynamic,

so I'm not denying that. But when I came to Britain, within two weeks, I was called a Paki. Now, that really was quite a shock to me. And I just sort of really stopped short. And my first reaction was, total silence. I didn't even know how to respond.

Partly because you weren't of Paki in the sense in which you were being addressed. I mean, it was a complete misrecognition of the complexities of the roots by which you would come to Britain. But on the other hand, that for me was not a problem because I realized that Paki was actually a term of abuse. Yes, of course.

And in that sense, you know, it didn't really matter who I was. I was being constructed as something. Yes. But I knew it was a term of abuse and it was a racist term of abuse. But two things happened. One was the silencing.

And that I thought this is really, you know, then I started talking, thinking about people in America because I had been an activist there. I had protested against, you know, discrimination of African Americans. But this was a different experience because it hit me, you know, very, very directly. And I suddenly realized that there's this difference between being subjected to racism in that direct form. and the indirect forms that I had been experiencing and I could now really identify with the black Americans

in a way, ironically, that I never did when I was in America. Are there vast difference? Are there deep and definable differences, Stuart, between the British experience and the American experience at the moment? Before I come back, I want to come back to a point you made in your own remarks, but just to take up from what Aftar has said, between America and Britain, Just to get that perspective, then I would like us to come back to this country

because I think the listeners would be intensely interested in what you do have to say in this country. But just about America, what are the differences? Well, of course, superficially, they look so similar that you really have to look hard to see what the differences are. But I think the differences are really very significant, and I would certainly identify three things. One is that...

The United States has always had a self-conception of itself as a sort of machine capable of producing Americans out of variety of ethnicities. The ethnicities don't rank equally, you know, if you're Scandinavian American, you have a much better chance than if you're African-American, but both of them have the possibility of becoming American. The British have never conceived of themselves as a group of ethnicities, although historically, actually, that is what they are. But that's so long in the past that they see themselves as a unified thing. And in spite of its their colonial experience, they've always seen others as either good in a positive or negative way, but different from themselves, essentially different from themselves. That's not capable of being, as it were, absorbed into the body politics. So that's one basic difference between the way in which the two nations conceive of themselves. A second one is that although both have been slave societies, I think the colonial relation

in Britain makes a difference. The colonial thing is a different thing from slavery. The two are very connected in the new world, but elsewhere, which has been without that form of slavery, as it had indentured labor, etc. I'm not trying to say this is a wonderful thing, but it constructs the relationship to the other in a different way. And the third thing is that in the United States, I get the feeling that there is a kind of intimacy to the enmity between blacks and whites.

It's as if African Americans look at white people and they can still see the possibility that their ancestors owned our ancestors. Now, of course, this is also partly true in Britain, but the fact of difference and distance has produced a different kind of sense. Britain has constructed its relation to the ethnic minorities as if it began in 1954. You know, I mean, one of the things, the striking things for me in the 60s

was that the British looked in the faces of these black and brown people whom they have been ruling for 400 years, as if to say, well, I don't really know where you've come from or why you've come here, or what we have to do with your futures. You know, it's kind of amnesia about empire, which settled because, of course, of the paradox that these people came at the very moment

when Britain was thinking it was drawing down the flag and was rid of them. They completed their journey just as Britain wanted to cut the umbilical cord. So it's as if race and ethnic relations in Britain have been reconstructed in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s and new as if it didn't have a history, although, of course, the histories that are there keep coming back to, I mean, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, the long reservoir of attitudes and so on, which underpin the way in which the outsiders are seen. Coming back to that in one second,

but just a slight diversion here. Dr. Brahe said that he saw a time when class would overthrow ethnicity as a driving force in socialization. Do you think that is so in this country or in America now? No, I don't think so, and I don't even think it was true at the time of Marx. I do really think that the whole thing. question of how we think about ethnicity and obviously, you know, Stuart

has kind of contributed to how we can think about ethnicity. If we really think about ethnicity in terms of sort of constructing a sense of belonging to a group where the boundaries are

constantly shifting, you know, they're not really always there forever as one talks about in the construction of race, then I feel that questions of ethnicity are always there. If it is about how a group constructs itself

as being different from another group and that construction of difference doesn't always have it to be embedded within unequal power relations. So we can be different and yet equal. I'd like to go back then for the last part of the programme, Sue, to something you said in your

remarks, which is I take it, and you obviously put me right if I'm wrong, you're saying two things were happening now. One is that we're becoming accepting of, drifting into the words, drifting towards, there it is, Britain now is multicultural, multi-ethnic in many ways,

and there we are, that's what we are. And by that, I got the impression of a slightly benign drift. But you can tell me. And secondly, at the same time, there was a sharpening of racial antagonisms. And we don't have to refer only to the Stephen Lawrence case to see that.

So can you just develop those two, and let's spend the last 10 minutes developing those two, about this country now and in the next few years? Well, on the multicultural side, you say it's benign. Yes, I think it is benign. I mean, in that sense, I think things are better than at a time when a black and Asian people were regarded as really as deeply and profoundly and forever outsiders. So that is a positive thing. But what I think is not positive is a drift. See, I think we just sort of found ourselves in this situation. And my sense now is that if Britain is going to be self-consciously

and positively a multicultural society, all sorts of other things have to change, which, as it were, we can't simply leave to the slow movement of culture or history. I mean, you know, the notion, for example, that you can be black and British is a very profound one. It goes to the very roots of Englishness and Britishness, a sense of Britishness, because although Britishness was never racially and ethnically coded, it always carried that assumption that if you were British, there were certain things you were not. All these identities depend on things that you are not as well as what you are.

Well, if you're going to say that it's possible to be black and British, what you're saying is it's possible to have a hyphenated, sense of belongingness, to feel some loyalty to both the culture and the places of your origin, although you don't want to preserve them in Aspic. And on the other hand, you do want a full participation in the life of the place where you've chosen to live. But a very good previous example in this country, perhaps the most recent powerful example, are Jewish people, aren't they, who are British Jews.

They're very, very much so, making enormous contribution to this country. At the same time, a great number of them, not all of them, but a great number of them. great number of them have a definite loyalty to and feel real obligations to the state of Israel. Yes, I think that's true, but I think if you look at the world context in which multiculturalism is arising, and it's, of course, not only happening here but elsewhere, the processes which enabled the Jewish minority or, you know, to gradually to assimilate so closely to British life that many people don't notice the difference or the differences don't really matter,

don't seem to me to be processes which are happening to the Asian and African and African-Caribbean minorities. So something more deeply is inhibiting it. Now what? I think this takes us to the other side of the kind, you see, because what I think is inhibiting it is in part a much more profound sense of crisis about what being British is.

And this goes back to after's earlier point, about how the outside changes the inside. The inside is changing very rapidly indeed. The sense of what it might be in the 21st century to be British is a very profound question, and it's built, it's being constructed on the back of the weakening of the nation-state, of devolution, of the rise of super nation-state, regional associations like Europe and so on,

of a sense of the loss of empire and of British hegemony, which, you know, has not been requited in the English soul. It's still experienced as a sense of loss by many people. And this does mean that although they might accept a sort of floating into a more culturally diverse world, the actual shift of perception and consciousness and the shift in terms of legislation and public values which would really valorize difference. which would recognize that difference is here to stay, that our sense of belonging to something called British identity

or the British nation is going to come through very different cultural roots and that our different histories and different cultural traditions are going to inflect the way in which we inhabit our Britishness. All of that is, I mean, it will take a much bigger and more concerted effort, it seems to me, than we are really putting in at the moment. And for one thing, it's going to take really a concerted effort to break down all those barriers which prevent the ethnic minority peoples from having a full access to the definition of what Britishness is going to be.

I mean, if it's changing, everybody must now is now in the business of saying, well, what is it going to be like? If it's not Britain of the 19th century and not Britain of the first half of the 20th century, what sort of place is it? What sort of laws do you have which recognize cultural difference? Yes, this brings in the role of the liberal state, doesn't it really, of Damar. Could you talk to that? Because the liberal state, as it were, promoting and defending the individual, is sometimes at odds with cultures which have a different take on what they should do with their lives.

Yes, that is true. I mean, there is kind of a fundamental contradiction there, but I think that applies to other kinds of cultural differences as well, because I think we have this notion somehow that we think about, other cultures only in terms of ethnicity. But I think if we also thought that there are questions about different class cultures as well, that in one sense, the liberal state,

you know, in its focus on the individual, in terms, actually, actually disavows a lot of multiculturalism even over and above the whole notion of ethnic multiculturalism, so to speak. But I wanted to just very quickly, I know we have very little time pick up two points. One is, you mentioned the notion of Jewishness, and I think we have to address the question of which Jewish groups are we talking about?

Because if you're talking about black Jews or Asian Jews, okay, in Britain even, then we're actually not talking about Jewishness per se. The whole question of colour in this context, we cannot ignore, okay? And the whole notion we've been talking about Britishness, Englishness, we can't forget Europeanness. So a European Jew has, a different positionality, really, within this whole kind of debate

as compared with, let's say, black Jewish person. So I think that that is quite important. Do you think that colour is as important in this argument, as Aftan has said? Yes, I do, actually, because, you know, I think when we say race, actually, we think what we're talking about are sort of deep genetic and biological differences. But the only way in which we have of negotiating that socially is through the visual clues that we have,

and colour is one of the principal ones. You wanted to continue, after? Yes, I wanted to continue, because in terms of when you, earlier on, you said, you know, is there anything we can be kind of optimistic about? I mean, I'm really interested in looking at a lot of young people. I mean, ours is a migrant experience, you know, but young people either born or bit, you know, here or came here

when they were very young. And I think that in terms of sense of belonging, because we're always looking to, you know, the kind of dominant group, but we also have to look at how a sense of belonging develops. And I think the whole question of locality is very, very important. Because if you talk to people who've grown up in London or Glasgow, you know, or Birmingham, they have a very deep-rooted sense of belonging to that locality, to that region. And in a sense, that sort of...

belongingness is also shared with their white peers, you know, with their all kind of different ethnicities, have that very strong feeling. They support particular kind of football teams. I know, you know, my nephew, you know, Manchester United. I mean, he died for that. You know what I mean, I know, but you know what I mean. But I think that's very, very important.

That kind of commonality of experience is what does bind us. But then there are also those constructions of race which lead to racist forms of behaviour, which also continually in society, in a myriad of ways, through cultural processes, through operations of how media works, how education works, actually talk about this group as being different as being an outsider. But finally, sir, I'm afraid we don't have much more time at all,

but you talked about Drifter and you were worried about it. I sort of interpreted it as pragmatism, and the sort of pragmatism, which in the end, makes this country what it is and is a very worthwhile part of our tradition and it gets things wrong and so and so, but a pragmatism which after I think is hit on a key point

which you and your talks give about local affiliations, local loyalties, it may be in this global world the way through is starts with very small groups, multicultural groups at a local level. Well, I mean, what I would say

is that, is that, you know, the sense of belongingness depends on attachments of a variety of kinds, of which culture and ethnicity are only two. And we talk, we have to really stop talking about cultures as if they totally enclose us in every way and, you know, sort of speak us completely. We aren't cultural beings in that sense at all. Cultures are very moving things.

They're constantly taking in influences from the outside, borrowing, constructing new things by combining cultural elements and so on. And locality is not only one of the places where you will find genuine integration really beginning from, but it has a very global kind of meaning because it is a sort of response to the abstractness of global belongingness, at least that is a place where you're born, a place that you recognize, you have friends of different kinds.

A genuinely multicultural being does come out of those, those contexts. And there I am, I feel positive about it. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Stuart Hall and Dr. Afterbra. Next week I'll be joined by Sir Martin Rees and Paul Davis, and we'll be talking about how the world began, no less. Well, thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.