BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Switchboard >

Integration and Society

  
 
nighthawk
17:20 / 17.10.06
I've started this thread to develop some themes from the on-going debate in the Thinly Veiled thread; the recent Concept Interrogation: Multiculturalism thread might also be a good point of reference.

There's been a lot of talk about integration recently, with particular reference to Muslim communities in Britain. Our Ladys Longs For Showers linked to this article in the Thinly Veiled thread. An apparently direct quote from Mr Blair:

When asked at the news conference if a Muslim woman wearing a veil could make a contribution to society, he replied: "That's a very difficult question. It is a mark of separation and that is why it makes other people from outside the community feel uncomfortable. No-one wants to say that people don't have the right to do it. That is to take it too far. But I think we need to confront this issue about how we integrate people properly into our society."


Blair's remarks follow similar noises from Jack Straw:

"What I've been struck by when I've been talking to some of the ladies concerned is that they had not, I think, been fully aware of the potential in terms of community relations," he said.

"I mean, they'd thought of it just as a statement for themselves, in some cases they regard themselves as very religious - and I respect that - but as I say, I just wanted to put this issue on the table."

He said he was worried the "implications of separateness" and the development of "parallel communities".

I have a couple of questions, which I raised briefly in the other thread. What do people understand by 'British Society'? What counts as 'successful integration'? Why is this desireable?

Less on topic, and perhaps better answered in the other threads: What counts as 'visible marker of seperation'? Why should this sort of thing preclude people from functioning as members of particular communities, or (effectively) exculde them from democratic spaces like MP's surgeries, or from workplaces?

There's a few things I want to point towards. The first is the shift away from the language of 'multiculturalism', which has been recognised and highlighted in the press. Its as well to tease apart some different meanings of multiculturalism however. There is the attempt to recognise that Britain is (and always has been) culturally diverse, and to affirm and celebrate this this; but also a set of social policies, originating in the Thatcher and Reagan years, which can usefully be linked to the comments made here by Mister Disco about the sort of role this policy frequently plays. A search for "British Values" on Google threw up this article, which makes the distinction reasonably well (there's bits of the article I'm not so keen on):

But multiculturalism did not create segregation or ethnic enclaves. There is a failure to distinguish between the multicultural society as a fact of Britain's national make-up, arrived at through the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and multiculturalism as a cure-all for racial injustice, promoted by successive governments. The first envisages a culturally diverse society. The second - not really multiculturalism, but what I term 'culturalism' - engenders a culturally divisive society.

'Culturalism' or 'ethnicism' was Margaret Thatcher and Lord Scarman's answer to the racism that ignited Britain in 1981. In his investigations into the Brixton riots, Scarman located the cause of the riots in 'racial disadvantage', the cure being to pour money into ethnic projects and strengthening ethnic cultures.

As the institute of Race Relations pointed out at the time, the fight against racism cannot be reduced to a fight for culture; nor does learning about other people's cultures make racists less racist. Besides, the racism that needs to be contested is not personal prejudice, which has no authority behind it, but institutionalised racism, woven over centuries of colonialism and slavery into the structures of society and government. Scarman, however, denied its existence.

Personally I'm inclined to reject the way the debate is being framed. I don't see how this notion of a unified British Society has any real validity. Or rather, I think its a synonym for the interests of a particular strata of the British population who do share a similar set of values and, more tellingly, interests. I see no reason to conflate these people and British Society, as though the latter were some uniform and homogenous whole with the right to dictate what constitutes 'Britishness', or indeed 'succesful integration'. Besides the fact that I find the idea of such a society a fairly awful prospect, I'm wondering why this sort of unity (or rather homogeneity) is so highly valued?

Its also worth being candid about why the 'integration' of Muslims into British Society is suddenly the focus of so much attention. As far as I can see, its largely a result of terrorist attacks like those on 7/7. The assumption being allowed to frame these debates is that these young men, and others like them, took such extreme action because they had not been properly integrated into British society and so, implicitly, did not share its 'values' - values which preclude terrorist action. Its a problem of cultural differences, and nothing to do with the politicisation of Muslim youths as a result of British foreign policy. We then get the really dishonest move of calling this 'Islamic terrorism', which automatically suggests a connection between terrorist actions and muslim religion/values, something that needs to be overcome by integrating these people into our ways of life.

Mods: This might be better as a Head Shop thread - feel free to move it if you think that's appropriate.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
13:00 / 19.10.06
Two main thoughts on this.

1

The notion of a "unified" country, or more precisely, the need to be more so, is a dubious one. For starters, we already are unified. I mean, whatever differences there may be in the religious/racial superstructure, I have much the same basic- by which I mean, not limited, but fundamental, "important"- needs as the Italian bakers and the Sikh shop owners in my area: food, drink, sleep, entertainment, etc. We are unified in this major way.

In fact, all human beings on the planet are already more unified than they are different. I can't see how "becoming more unified" could mean anything other than, as the poster says, everyone becoming more like one particular segment of British society- the white middle class- which has no claim to objective "betterness" than any other segment.

In other words, a narrative where "we need to be more unified" both denies the unity that already exists, and it makes diversity and the general chaotic craziness, the "spice" and "flux" of life, out to be an area of mutual misunderstanding, ghettoisation, combative stasis, when it is actually anything but. Yes, I would like to be more able to communicate with, say, those Italian bakers or the Sikh shopkeepers- but why the hell do they need to stop being Italian bakers or Sikh shopkeepers?

2

On the other hand, there is one age-old "disunity" which I think is part of the problem. Let me explain. The main body of the discourse on "intergration" seems to involve white people, speaking from the white community, however well intentioned, informing everyone else that they should change. To me, this is just wasted breath- real positive change does not come from without and by force, but from within and by education. I would seriously question the worth of criticisms by the poweful white of, say, practices in the Pakistani community inasmuch as these criticisms will come from an ivory tower, from a position of power, separated by that one basic disunity which arises from those largest distances of governed-government, minority-majority, and communitylanguage-statelanguage, which distances will always distort even the most well-meant and positive message because it is not delivered face-to-face, in dialogue, but through Althusser's Ideological/Repressive State Apparatus- the Police, official letters, schools, one-way communication (monologue) on the radio, the TV news etc.

That is, while I may, and "may" is the important word here, be able to talk with a non-white coleague about the positive and negative aspects of that person's community, and, from an equivalent power-position, suggest a strategy for dealing with the negatives, I would totally doubt my ability to do this constructively from Jack Straw or Tony Blair's position.

Which leads us to the point where we say "Yes, we need dialogue"- which is all very well, but the tricky question is: how do we create it? How do we turn "dialogue" from a vague abstraction into a concrete activity?
 
  
Add Your Reply