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None of my friends are black.

  
 
pointless and uncalled for
11:34 / 22.07.04
To that extent the recent survey by the Commission for Racial Equality, which revealed that 90% of white people have no, or hardly any, black or Asian friends was interesting. In an article in G2 on Tuesday, bestselling author Mike Gayle asked: "What were readers meant to do with that information?"

This article interests me a lot, maybe because it's the first that I've read that seems comfortable to veer from the official line without running to an indignant right.

I appreciate the tone of the article reiterating the point that the survey and the results is more or less a black and white overview of the facts and current state of affairs, but is Gayle on to something? Given the survey in it's entirely (more details here) the report does appear a little more condeming than the Guardian indicates, partcularly if you take into account the commentary from the CRE chair who expresses surprise at the current lack of integration and ties in racism as a relatively direct result.

So is there something that should be done with the information, something positive?
 
 
electricinca
19:57 / 22.07.04
Coincidently I've written a bit about this for my weblog having read the Guardian article.

I have no black friends

Yes there isn't as much integration as there might be and race relations suffer due becuase of it, but it isn't possible to force integration. I have friends of different ethnicity just happen to have no black friends and that isn't due to any conscious choice it's just because it hasn't happened.
 
 
No star here laces
07:16 / 23.07.04
"Don't blame me for not stepping outside my narrowly defined social circle and being scared of black people"
 
 
Cat Chant
07:42 / 23.07.04
Coincidentally, I was just reading in yesterday's G2 someone's vile response to this:

The exercise of totting up black and Asian friends only emphasised the poverty of my friends collection, bereft, as it is, of any Welsh friends, friends on remand, estate agent friends, stockbroker friends, traveller friends, car mechanic friends, fat cat friends, sex industry friends, spin doctor friends and friends who are baronets.

In other words: "Everyone who does not fit into the norm that is me [white middle-class non-imprisoned with a fixed home address and a profession that falls into a certain range] can be assigned an exactly equivalent degree of exoticism, which has no political significance." It made me furious.

I haven't read the links yet, I'm afraid (sorry), so I'll contribute more fully when I have. In the meantime, I'd suggest that one of the things people might "do with the information" is just take note of it, and start thinking that only mixing within your own race/ethnicity/colour is just as much segregation and ghettoization if you're white as if you're not. That is, you might start noticing that the fact that "I never happen to meet any non-white people" might only be because you only go to places where there are only white people.

(Hmm. I was about to start a second thread on "white culture" in the UK after watching that BNP documentary. I should do that now, because this is getting off-topic.)
 
 
Cat Chant
07:52 / 23.07.04
From the first paragraph of your first link:

the UK's white majority population is integrating less with other communities than the non-white population.

From the penultimate paragraph:

70% of white people and almost as many non-white people (65%) agree that ethnic minority Britons too often live apart from the rest of society.

Interesting mixture. As might be apparent from my last post, I think what's importantly helpful about this survey is that it suggests that white people are an ethnicity among others within Britain - the very idea of white people being "less integrated" is sort of counter-intuitive, in a good and thought-provoking way - but that last quote sort of returns to a model where "society" is white and the onus is on non-whites to "integrate". Sounds to me like it's white Britons who too often live apart from the rest of society.
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
08:06 / 23.07.04
on your first response

I'd suggest that one of the things people might "do with the information" is just take note of it, and start thinking that only mixing within your own race/ethnicity/colour is just as much segregation and ghettoization if you're white as if you're not.

But, if we start paying attention to the demographical breakdown of our friends and our own personal social activity, are we not in a very real danger of straying into the other racism? Admittedly it doesn't rush out on a pogrom or piss through letterboxes but it can be damaging in it's own way.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:11 / 23.07.04
Hmm. Yes, we are, but I do think it's possible to think "Oh. All my friends are white. I guess I mostly stick to all-white spaces," without immediately commodifying all non-white people into accessories for a politically correct lifestyle. I don't mean to suggest by my first response that that's the end of the story - in fact, what I'd like to talk about, I suppose, is precisely how to bring about a situation where cross-cultural or cross-ethnic encounters come about more often, rather than the current situation which feels a bit like "Either I stick to my usual pattern or I have to deliberately go out and do stuff I'm not interested in in order to obtain black friends".
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
08:24 / 23.07.04
For me this is key: Commenting on the findings, Trevor Phillips, CRE chair said:

'It surprised me the extent to which the majority community still does not really know minority communities. When it comes to race and religion this clearly shows that we are dealing with a difference of which most people in this country have no first-hand experience.

'Therefore it is not surprising that they can be misled about blacks, Gypsies and Muslims, and it's not surprising that for no apparent reason they can become hostile and racist.'

electricinca Yes there isn't as much integration as there might be and race relations suffer due becuase of it, but it isn't possible to force integration. I have friends of different ethnicity just happen to have no black friends and that isn't due to any conscious choice it's just because it hasn't happened.

I don't think anyone wants to ram integration down your throat, I think the useful response to this is about trying to make sure that do what we can so that people aren't discriminated against on the basis of their skin colour, you've got both main parties in Government with openly rascist campaigns, hateful papers like the Sun and the Mail who are more than happy to print Islamaphobic articles by the likes of Melanie Phillips and TV shows and then when the BNP pop up they are rightly reviled as though they've spoiled the huge multicultural jamboree we were having over there.
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
08:26 / 23.07.04
the UK's white majority population is integrating less with other communities than the non-white population.

Sounds to me like it's white Britons who too often live apart from the rest of society.

Taking into consideration the numbers and population density models, is there much opportunity/choice for this imbalance to be redressed though? Take my own situation as an example. I grew up in the largest and fastest growing village in Europe with an estimated population in excess of 10,000. For a very long time ethnic diversity could be counted on the fingers of one hand. I can't apologise for any questionable or negative views held by those in a similar situation, but what is a reasonable expection of these people in terms of integration?

It sounds more as if there is a construct of divisionism on both sides that needs addressing.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:43 / 23.07.04
You're right, Seldom Killer, but I think it's important to think about. Certainly I think some of the most useful challenges to my own "learned racism" have come about through encounters with people of other religions, races or ethnic backgrounds - again, not that I think it's the duty of non-white people to educate me, but it does make me realize that there's just less motivation to become educated, as well as less opportunity for... um, singular encounters, outside a particular range of public discourse on race... if you only mix with people of your own race/culture/religion/ethnicity. (Again, if you're white and mixing mostly with whites, it becomes easier to think race/culture/religion/ethnicity/skin colour as a single thing).
 
 
No star here laces
09:34 / 23.07.04
Er yeah, as Deva already said plainly and I already said flippantly there is only one correct response to this nonsense and it is:

That is, you might start noticing that the fact that "I never happen to meet any non-white people" might only be because you only go to places where there are only white people.

And, please, if the only response is "if people started trying to be deliberately nice and welcoming towards black people, something bad might happen"?

I tell you what, why don't we give it a go and see what happens eh? Bet you a million dollars the end result is not worse than a pervasive and widespread form of covert racism that "liberal" middle class people can pretend doesn't exist...

(which is quite clearly what we have just now)
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
15:45 / 23.07.04
hmm.

That is, you might start noticing that the fact that "I never happen to meet any non-white people" might only be because you only go to places where there are only white people.

Or, as Gary Younge points out in that article, perhaps it's a dash of that and a whole heap of:

"I never happen to meet any non-white people because there are still so many social, professional etc spheres to which non-white people are denied access/form a tiny minority that unless my life has some very specific characteristics/drives, I'm never going to be in the same room as anyone non-white."
 
 
Tryphena Absent
16:22 / 23.07.04
you might start noticing that the fact that "I never happen to meet any non-white people" might only be because you only go to places where there are only white people.

In my year group at secondary school over a period of seven years there were between three and five non-white kids at any given time. There were 168 people in my year for five of those years. None of them took more than one class with me until year 9 (the third year). Some people don't have any friends who aren't white because there just aren't any in their area. It really is that simple so I'm extremely suspicious of these kinds of surveys. I'm also curious as to how they got these figures but I'm sure that's stated somewhere, I'll have to take a proper look.
 
 
Bill Posters
16:51 / 23.07.04
From Electronica's blog:

The reason I've never had a black friend is down to statistics there has simply been very few black people that I've encountered in any way more than just in passing. The place where I grew up had very few people who were black in fact there were more Filipinos. Again when I went to university there were very few black people on my particular course and now in employment there are no black people employed by the company I work for.

Electronica, are you seriously suggesting that there's nothing racist in the social structure which creates your blatantly segregated life-situation and experience? I'm not saying you personally are being racist, but jeeez, I am alightly alarmed to read that it's simple "statistics" which account for your lack of black friends! As opposed to, say, massively racially discriminative demographics! (Oh and I also have plenty of non-black, non-white friends (eg. Asian or Jewish) but they don't find it so hard to get into privilaged schools as black people do, so it hardly gets me or anyone else off the hook.)

Some people don't have any friends who aren't white because there just aren't any in their area. It really is that simple.

Anna De L, does that really have nothing to do with the fact you went to school in a relatively posh area? I'm not saying it's conscious racism on your part or indeed that of your parents, mind, but it surely isn't indicative of an equal playing field?

However, I don't mean to be nasty, and before Electronica and Anna and/or anyone else accuses me of being holier-than-thou, I should say that I too have no black friends. What's worse - and takes this thread a little further into troubled waters - is that I live in a mixed area which I'd guess is 50% white, 50% black or Asian, and I work in a mixed workplace (roughly 30% black, 10% Asian and 60% white, I guestimate). I think one needs waaay more than to share space with people... it's about culture as much as geography. The reason I have no black friends is that I rarely have anything in common with the majority of the many black people I meet. And while that's not exactly conscious racism on my part, it's surely a product of a racist society, and therefore to some degree racist? It's culturally segregationalist if not old fashioned biological racism.
 
 
Bear
17:12 / 23.07.04
I am alightly alarmed to read that it's simple "statistics" which account for your lack of black friends! As opposed to, say, massively racially discriminative demographics!

It really depends where a person is from Bill, I lived in a city of a population of around 20,000 and there were literally no black people there.

As for London I'm not sure where people are going where there's no mixing I'd be interested to see who completed the survery and which areas they lived in. Everywhere I go in London there doesn't seem to be a problem it's one of the things that impressed me when I moved here.
 
 
Cat Chant
17:22 / 23.07.04
Just to clarify - I never meant to suggest that personal choice was the only factor behind "only going to places where there are only white people". (Posting very quickly today and not as careful with my phrasing as I usually try to be.)
 
 
Cat Chant
08:16 / 24.07.04
BiP wrote:

"I never happen to meet any non-white people because there are still so many social, professional etc spheres to which non-white people are denied access/form a tiny minority that unless my life has some very specific characteristics/drives, I'm never going to be in the same room as anyone non-white."

and I've been trying to fumble together a response to it. That sort of 'gatekeeping' or control of access is (of course) one dimension - probably the main dimension of institutional racism - and certainly when we're thinking about 'segregation' it needs to be borne in mind that majority white culture/economics in the main dictates who has access to which spaces. (Though I also wanted to ask - do you know [because I don't, in terms of statistics/reality 'on the ground'] whether this is true cross-class? My intuition would be that access was controlled more stringently to higher-status professional spheres, but I don't know about the social gatekeeping.)

Anyway, but the other side of that - and this is something I've been thinking about for a while, which the CRE statistics collided with in my brain - is the way that cultural hegemony works, which is that it's nigh-impossible for non-whites to be ignorant of dominant white culture (if such a thing there be, I know I'm begging a lot of questions here) while it's very easy for whites to be ignorant of all other cultural traditions, languages, religions, etc in Britain and even in their own area. (Trivial example: I was living in Leeds for five years before I bothered to find out what a mela was, despite passing posters for the annual Leeds Mela on a regular basis.) It strikes me that one way to actually achieve (or work towards) a huge multicultural jamboree is to take seriously the idea that Britain is multicultural, and that the 'other' cultures within Britain can be part of whites' cultural vocabulary as well. I'm not sure what I think about charges of 'cultural appropriation' in this context, but I think it's more complicated than just policing cultural boundaries - for example, is it more or less 'appropriative', if chicken tikka massala is Britain's national dish, and balti was invented in Birmingham, for them to be staged [served] in restaurants that provide a particular spectacle of exotic "Indianness"?

Sorry. What was all that about? Oh, yeah.

"unless my life has some very specific characteristics/drives, I'm never going to be in the same room as anyone non-white."

I guess I'm suggesting that one of the approaches to take - as well as dismantling the hierarchical system of gatekeeping - is to put those 'specific characteristics/drives' into more white people's lives, by encouraging the idea that black, Asian, Jewish and other 'immigrant' cultures are as much a part of British culture as dominant Anglo cultures (Celticness is interesting here), so that it becomes less taken-for-granted that whites can perform Britishness without ever being in the same room as non-whites. Does that make sense? Like I say, I'm in the middle of thinking about it & would appreciate input from various people before I convince myself...

Oh, and finally, Bear, I thought you might have misunderstood Bill (I sound like a Playschool presenter!):

Bill:

I am slightly alarmed to read that it's simple "statistics" which account for your lack of black friends! As opposed to, say, massively racially discriminative demographics!

Bear:

It really depends where a person is from Bill, I lived in a city of a population of around 20,000 and there were literally no black people there.

I think what Bill is saying is that massively racially discriminative demographics account for the fact that there were literally no black people in your city, and that the fact that 'it really depends where a person is from' is not a marker of the absence of racist structures, but rather the opposite.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
18:20 / 24.07.04
Anna: a quote from that GY article on the survey:

Indeed, it neither accuses nor assuages. The numbers on their own are neutral; only the context in which they are (mis)understood gives them the capacity to discriminate.

I think this is very important. And that there's a real danger of being diverted into guilt/hand-wringing/accusation and Moral judgements/arguments. Which doesn't move the conversation, and gets people feeling defensive/singled out.

Again from that article:

What were readers meant to do with that information?"

Which is what SK is asking:

GY again:

It is a good question. First, they might have put it into context. Given that minority ethnic groups comprise around 10% of the population and are concentrated in urban areas, the statistic itself is not that shocking. Then, they might use it like any other poll, to help them better understand the world they live in/

So how about following this line. Younge doesn't say at any point that not having any black friends equals=racism, but he does point out that the greater the variety of cultures around you, the more mixed your influences and possibly therefore insights are going to be. As with his initial anecdotal example.

So, if you think this is a desireable state of affairs, you can then think about yr own 'world' in these terms. How diverse is it? Do you often come up again cultural gaps like the one Younge describes?

So perhaps one useful step is looking again at those figures with respect to one's own life circumstances. If 1 in 10 people belongs to an ethnic minority, and yr experience hasn't included any it would suggest that there are
other life circs which the 'ethnic minority' isn't a minority. Or it might occur to you to wonder why your life hasn't brought you into much contact with non-white folk.

It might relate to location, class, economics, profession, aspirations, familial circumstances etc.

That's on the personal side. It's also possible, I think, to conclude, that while issues notionally based around race/faith dominate the media, many people won't have any of their own anecdotal/relational knowledge of the 'kinds' of people being referred to.

And the combination of those, I find worrying.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
18:43 / 24.07.04
It's also worth emphasising that the CRE survey appears to post questions that relate to different criteria of cultural classification.

Ie some of the qu's appear to divide respondents into ethnic minority/majority,others into racial subset: white, asian, black; some into faith-based categories: christian, muslim, sikh etc.

And while these categorisations overlap, there are important differences in the results also.

Deva, will have a chat to someone and see if I can get stats on 'gatekeeping' issues/social/professional class.

But I bring this up as my hunch would be that this is an area where it's very important to know where the differences between the (multiplicity of) Black and Asian experiences would be pretty glaring.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
18:46 / 24.07.04
Deva, will come back on your point about britishness including other 'ethnic' identities, as it's an interesting, but problematic one.

(and apols if this is gibberish, I'm fluey atm.)
 
 
No star here laces
19:57 / 24.07.04
See to me, I don't feel institutional shut-outs are the main obstacle. ACtually I'd say it's cultural, and it's precisely the liberal educated middle class that's at fault here.

It's not that black people can't get into university, it's why on earth would they want to enter a social environment that is so stridently, exclusively, smugly white in its outlook and preferences.

Your average university social milieu is about what? The student bar. Drinking pints. Rugby. Indie discos. Second hand clothing.

Your average university educated person is happy to embrace other races in principle but in practice won't go to the black or indian part of town, won't listen to black or indian music or watch black or indian films (that's if they don't actively denigrate such things, which is often the case).

Why the hell would anybody feel welcomed into such an environment? Feel that people genuinely want them there and accept their right to be there?

The smugness of the middle class is to assume that if minorities are to have what they have, the only possible way for them to get it is to relinquish their own cultural identities and become just like the white people. Because that's what being intelligent and educated is about, right?

"I can't believe how well-spoken he is"
 
 
Tryphena Absent
21:16 / 24.07.04
Anna De L, does that really have nothing to do with the fact you went to school in a relatively posh area? I'm not saying it's conscious racism on your part or indeed that of your parents, mind, but it surely isn't indicative of an equal playing field?

It has everything to do with the location and wealth of my school but that's half my point. People don't mix because they haven't been exposed to other cultures from a young age.

Your average university educated person is happy to embrace other races in principle but in practice won't go to the black or indian part of town, won't listen to black or indian music or watch black or indian films

I think you're patronising ethnic minorities because you're talking about white dominance and how terribly uncomfortable it must be for someone Asian or black to go in to that environment but want white people to go somewhere to be dominated themselves. Can we not treat people entirely equally? Yah there's a cultural problem, I agree with you but Jefe how can I individually address that? One of the people who effects me most in my life came to this country as an asylum seeker when she was 5, went to school with me, lived in the same house as me at university and made Iranian food for me but that doesn't change a thing about society, intergration of cultures or white acceptance. I watched Bollywood soap operas at primary school but that doesn't mean that culturally I can make a difference to anything outside me individually... get in to the institutions, get all schools to do that, introduce equal opportunity monitoring and perhaps things begin to change in the country.

I don't feel institutional shut-outs are the main obstacle. ACtually I'd say it's cultural

I think that once you are in constant contact with people from other cultures everyday at a school in a privileged area the institutional shut-outs begin to disappear but that's not the case. It's blind to say that its purely cultural because these things go hand in hand. It's like saying 'well, that part of the system's fucked but this part couldn't be better' when actually the entire thing's screwed to high heaven. Those shut-outs are our culture and we can't deal with anything else until we rid ourselves of them. We need to get to the point where you can buy a Bollywood film in a tiny video shop in the deepest countryside, not make people travel to get hold of a culture they know nothing about institutionally.

Who's saying people need to be just like the white people except for the awful David Blunkett's of this world... but wait, that's institutional isn't it? I mean he's a major politician, he creates institutions.
 
 
electricinca
22:16 / 24.07.04
I've had a few days to reflect on this subject having written the piece for my blog. I reacted badly to the article and took it as a personal attack. "You have no black friends. You racist fuck!".

When in fact it should have been a wake up call. To put my own situation into context I work in IT which is an industry that is predominately white male but has a larger than average ratio of Asians working in it but virtually no black people. That is a statistical fact, but the reasons behind it are what should analysed and questioned in response to this report.

It's not that black people can't get into university, it's why on earth would they want to enter a social environment that is so stridently, exclusively, smugly white in its outlook and preferences.

Well many other ethnic minorities and people of other nationalities do it so why can't black people. This is problem even before the university stage, black children are underachieving at school and nothing seems to be happening to correct this problem.

Having spoken to a Filipino friend about this he said that he felt that he had to act white in order to get on and succeed but that he didn't lose a sense of his cultural identity in doing so. To paraphrase a bit he acted white at the office and Filipino at home. Now I'm not saying this is the solution that people should act white to get on in this country but in acting white he has made the IT industry more multicultural and is now free to act less white now he's made it.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
18:02 / 25.07.04
Location does have a lot to do with it- although, as heas been rightly pointed out by Deva and others, there's a reason for that.
When I was growing up in Yeovil (Somerset), I only knew one non-white person (well, and her family). Could this be connected to the fact that that particular town is, apparently, the most racist town in the south of the country? If you live somewhere where (this is absolutely true) there's a big outcry because someone's applied for planning permission to build a mosque, which one particularly odious individual interviewed on R4 said was obviously a bad thing because it "would attract Muslims", then you're not really gonna get much exposure to other cultures. Which of course is a vicious circle.
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
09:42 / 26.07.04
I get this inkling that I may have made the title a little misleading. It's meant to refer to a common social condition rather than my own personal situation. I have friends who are black* amongst the diversity in my social groups. I'm not going to get into numbers but I'm generally comfortable with the level of diversity in as much as I don't feel as if I've been even sub-conciously exclusionary.

However, back to the subject in hand. Is there a reasonable case of cyclical social conditioning?

We're often reminded that there is a lack of diversity in role models in western society to the extent that ethnic minority** groups have little breadth in role model aspirations, particularly with respect to more recreation activities. This in turn leads to a higher interest from minority groups where these role models exist. To whit a major encroachment of whites into non-white cultural enclaves may be seen as pissing on the wrong tree and ultimately result in failure to properly address the issue. In response to my own question I think that a more effective may in which the information can be responded to is to look at means by which we can encourage and aid the gap to be bridged from the other direction, thus allowing minority groups to bring their cultures to whites in a way in which whites can better understand and therefore learn from the influences.

* Sorry, I find this a difficult thing to phrase comfortably, hopefully you get the idea.

** I've recently learnt that diversity action groups are shunning the phrase "ethnic minority" as a perjoritive having had negative connotations attached to it through common usage. The prefered substitute is "minority ethnic" it seems.
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
12:32 / 12.12.06
This thread seems to be based on a really odd premise to me: that people can freely, consciously and polutically-motivatedly choose their friends, when in my experience friendship is a two-way and very unpredictable process, and depends very heavily on things such as particular personal interests, which in turn can (don't necessarily) depend on upbringing/"culture" (in the background/milieu kind of sense) and religion or other important personal ideology - which in turn are linked, albeit hopefully not inextricably, with ethnicity...

In focusing on white people not having any black friends, and identifying this as a bad thing, i note the survey doesn't stop to consider whether black people want those white people to "have" them as friends...

my minority status, as a disabled person, is probably relevant here, as i think it's no coincidence that several of my closest friends are also disabled people, and there are things that (despite the diversity of their individual disabilities from mine and each others') all of them understand about me that none of my non-disabled friends "get". i imagine that for people of minority ethnic groups, the same or similar is true, likewise for people who are queer, transsexual, whatever...

i'm very very uncomfortable with the idea that people should be encouraged to "get more [group X] friends", probably mainly because i see friendship itself as a very individual, sacred, deep and personal thing - the idea of deliberately setting out to become friends with someone, not because of anything personal like experiences or interests shared, but simply because you "need" more friends in X category for political reasons, is one i find deeply abhorrent and almost impossible to get my head round.

if i want to analyse the demographics of my own friendships, of the 10 or so people i consider to be close and meaningful friends, 3 are white, queer and disabled, one (my ex) is mixed-race, straight and disabled, one is "black" (well, actually mixed-race but visually what most people would see as "black") and not disabled, one is "white" but of mixed ethnicity, unsure of sexuality and not disabled but sees herself as an "ally" of such, and the rest are pretty much white and non-minority (all are women, but that's more because of my own androphobia issues than anything else)... but does any of that really matter? they are my friends because things that happened in our lives brought us together and we ended up caring about each other, not because of any political demographics (tho i suppose aspects of the latter can be counted in the category of "things that happened in our lives to bring us together")...

i do know that i (usually) feel more comfortable around people who are in (some or any sort of) minority or badly-treated group than "mainstream"/"majority" people, but i don't know whether i should see that as a good or bad thing...

i think i don't really "see" race (due in part to my own upbringing (or lack thereof) and status as a socially excluded and invisibly disabled person - all "cultures", including the one that's supposed to be my own, are equally "exotic" to me), tho i do "see", and am often interested in, physical differences such as skin colour, hair texture, shape of facial features, etc (i find people of some "races" much more attractive to look at than others, which occasionally nags at me as a worry that that might make me racist). i also don't think i really believe in "cultures" as discrete, concretely definable entities (which is one of the reasons why i have problems with the apparently currently favoured definition of "multiculturalism"... i know there's a thread about that somewhere), but would rather see "culture" as something that can and should be cross-pollinated as freely as possible (but cannot be forcibly made to do so)...

hmmm, probably rambling now - sorry for not really coming to a point... friendship as a concept and its intersection with the personal-as-political is probably a good topic for a thread tho, tho i dunno if i'm the right person to start it...
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
12:34 / 12.12.06
i really didn't mean that post to be that long...
 
 
Dutch
14:33 / 19.12.06
Although it was pretty long, you did make a good point about friendship. It is not something that is forceable, or should be forced into one direction or the other (if I read you correctly). As human beings I think we tend to drift towards those who share our interests, have certain character traits that web find interesting/(annoyingly) stimulating or enjoyable (or all at the same time).

While it would certainly be a good thing if cultural or institutional barriers were smashed beyond repair, I don't think that it can or should be forcible done top-down. I think that there is a better way , and that it has started breaking down borders already. As a medium, I think the internet holds a very important key to broadening people's horizons and increasing acceptance. People who share interests and ideas across the cultural divide have this place to call their shared home and broaden the horizons of themselves and others.

Now, there remain the problems millions don't have access to the internet as a means of intercultural communication and that this is still not face to face contact, still not the actual mingling of groups in real life. How the latter is to be promoted and encouraged I do not know, save for subsidization of inter-cultural neighbourhoodprojects/arts/music/theatre, etc.
 
 
Elettaria
17:43 / 06.01.07
Let's not forget that as well as being concentrated in urban areas, ethnic groups often stick closely together in certain districts, particularly when immigration is relatively recent (Jews used to be strongly concentrated in the East End of London, for instance, but are now far more spread out and also culturally assimilated). The proportion of Jewish and Asian students at my school was probably higher than you'd ever get outside London in the UK, and possibly just outside that area of London (Edgware). I grew up in a borough of London (Barnet) where 1/6 of the population was Jewish (highest concentration in the UK), and moved to Edinburgh where I am frequently told that I am the first Jew that person has met. Of course, most Jews in this country are not visibly Jewish, so they may have met some before without knowing, just as I often gently remind people who say, "Oh no, I don't know any gay people," that they probably do. I wonder what the results would be if they polled for how many people knew someone queer? Far less geographic clustering there.
 
 
Leigh Monster loses its cool
20:19 / 09.01.07
I grew up going to public schools in the most ethnically diverse city in the United States, and the friendships that "happened to me" reflected that fact. Now I attend a private university, and my circle of friends is suddenly overwhelmingly Caucasian. The interesting thing to me in this case is that it's not purely a result of demographics. A fair* number of ethnic minorities [I am one myself, and have never had a problem with the term] do attend my school. It's just that I no longer feel that I have the right to approach all of them as friends. Being Asian, I could probably have more Asian friends if I felt like joining the Japanese Student Association or whatever--but I certainly couldn't join the African American Student Society without getting some strange looks; and, generally speaking, once these social groups have been formed the students don't look outside of them. I happened to have been assigned a black roommate my freshman year; through this happenstance we became best friends, and she is my only black friend on campus. She will probably be the only one for the duration of college, simply because there is no context for others. Her friendship circle is similarly limited, and I am one of her only non-black friends--unsurprisingly, because her major is Africana studies and her main outside activity is breakdance.

I actually think that this sort of self-segregation is partly a result of how we want to identify ourselves, rather than just being a result of inaccessibility. My roommate grew up in a white neighborhood; her studies now are a reflection of her defining herself as African-American, not of her inability to make friends with white people. It's her prerogative to do this in the way that it's my prerogative to take part in activities that define me as Asian. Unfortunately, this results in my having the sense that it's not my prerogative to participate in Africana studies, because I would dilute the experience of what it is to be African-American for the other students, and I would feel unwelcome. This may be entirely projection on my part, but I have to (very guiltily) admit that I don't always have the best reaction when non-Japanese people show up at the Japanese cultural events. In a melting-pot country where we all, to a degree, live within the same American culture, some part of my ego thinks my Japanese-ness is suddenly at stake--especially when most of my social interactions outside said cultural events are mainly with Caucasian people.

I recognize that it shouldn't be impossible to have friends of varying cultures and still retain your own cultural identity, but I think that realistically, depending on your situation, it can be challenging to balance the two. I know I'm speaking conservatively; but I'm not trying to be exclusionary, I'm just trying to point out that there is a lurking grey area between integration and assimilation, which may be consciously or subconsciously threatening for whichever side happens to be in the minority.



*not really fair at all, but for anecdotal purposes, enough that you're likely to meet people from many different backgrounds often; we're all jammed on the same campus.
 
  
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