Britain Becomes a Land of Methodists and Muslims

The Empire came home to Britain on a cold June morning in 1948. Docking in London, the S.S. Empire Windrush delivered 500 passengers from Jamaica, black men in suits carrying British passports and hungry for waiting jobs. For the first time, large numbers of people who weren’t white had arrived to live and work among the British at home.

Fast forward to 1998. The Royal Navy, for centuries the guarantor of an empire on which the sun never set, is conferring with friendly navies of Turkey and Pakistan: How do they adapt uniforms to permit use of Muslim head scarves by female officers?

In half a century, the face, taste, texture--and self-perception--of Britain have changed strikingly and irreversibly with the oft-troubled birth of a multiethnic society. Following blacks from the Caribbean came Africans, displaced Indians from East Africa, and Asian immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Now Britain is taking a hard new look at its new-look society.

Government, public institutions, businesses and everyday people are trying, often belatedly, to catch up with breathtaking change.

Jarring incidents and dissenting voices provide a counterpoint to multiracial growth. But from Parliament to city streets, adapting to dazzling multiethnic reality has become a key priority for Britain.

The reasons are manifest: 50 years after Windrush, more than half a million blacks live in London. And across an officially Protestant country, there are mosques in every major city and as many Muslims, 1.3 million, as there are Methodists.

“The situation is clearly better than even five years ago. We are working hard to maintain that streak of goodwill within society,” says Herman Ouseley, chairman of the government’s Commission for Racial Equality. “We are on the right track, but momentum is important. There are still high levels of unemployment, racism, prejudice. Despite greater sensitivities, some people are not prepared to accept a multiracial society.”

Today, one Londoner in five is an ethnic minority. Nationwide, minorities total about 3 million, or about 5.5% of the population.

On the surface, races seem to mix more easily in Britain than across the Atlantic, but there are still racist barriers, say activists such as Simon de Banya, a British-born son of African parents.

“In America, racism is overt. You know how to deal with it; you can be better prepared. Here it is very covert, but very institutionalized,” says De Banya, who lived for several years in New York and who now heads the 1990 Trust, a black think tank. “The official line is that this is a multicultural country, but I think blacks are more tolerated than they are integrated.”

Still, racism that might once have gone unchecked increasingly finds its way into courtrooms and onto front pages. This month, a new inquiry opened into the 1994 killing in London of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Five white youths have been publicly accused but never tried. The Lawrence case, which police were shown to have investigated poorly, has become a symbol of racism--and of the need for redress.

In Birmingham earlier this year, 32-year-old George Lewis, a black man, won more than $320,000 after serving five years in jail for robberies he did not commit. A judge ruled that police had racially abused Lewis and fabricated evidence against him.

Interracial Marriage

If racism remains a fact of daily life, and poverty and unemployment shadow ethnic communities, new Britain is also home to economic success, social progress and degrees of integration that might surprise many Americans.

In London, particularly, black-white partnerships are common, and the number of children of mixed parentage is rising sharply, according to the racial equality commission. Responding to a national survey on ethnic minorities last year, 74% of British whites said they wouldn’t mind if a close relative married a black; 70% had no objection to marriage with an Asian.

James Kelsey, an Anglo-American music promoter of mixed-race Jamaican ancestry, came back to London from New York nine years ago, married a Chinese-Filipina and says he is here to stay.

“I think that back in the States our kids would be confused about who they are. Here, education seems to count more than attitude. There are racial tensions, sure, but somehow people overcome them,” Kelsey said.

In January, a blue-ribbon commission launched the biggest study of multiethnicity ever undertaken in Britain. Its goal: to formulate policies that can better adapt social and political institutions to the changing nature of the population.

Such long-term initiatives are accompanied by here-and-now calls for reforms. The Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group for Britain’s unions, is formally demanding better pay, more jobs and quicker promotions for minority workers, who want an end to the racial abuse that 29% of them tell their unions they have suffered at work.

The British police and the armed forces--long seen by blacks as bastions of institutionalized racism--are vigorously recruiting minorities. The BBC has just concluded a major reform to better reflect minorities in everything from recruiting to programming. The civil service and the professions are changing as well: Asian students already make up 50% of the student body at some medical schools. Recently, Muslim private schools won government funding for the first time, putting them on a par with Christian and Jewish schools.

In the new melting pot, “Goodness Gracious Me!”--a TV satire by British Asians about British Asians--made its debut this winter. “That we are prime time is evidence of how society is adapting. Ten years ago, we would have been dropped into the 3 a.m. ghetto slot,” says Meera Syal, who writes for and performs in the show. Another 1998 newcomer is the Chronicle, an Internet magazine for British black achievers: https://www.thechronicle.demon.co.uk

Enjoying Diversity

More than ever, ethnic food, music and fashion are part of British life. London clubs rock with bhangra, which, rhythm under rhythm, draws on classic Hindi and Punjabi music blended with hip-hop, reggae and techno.

Even white conservative politicians dance at the Caribbean community’s Notting Hill carnival in London, Europe’s largest street festival. A Hindu-dubbed “Jurassic Park” played to full houses in one of London’s Indian cinemas.

“I knew we had arrived the day I saw a Ford advertisement saying that one of its models was hotter than a vindaloo,” says Jatinder Verma, who runs an intercultural theater company. Vindaloo is an Indian stew whose green chilies take no prisoners. What tickled Verma is that the ad was directed at young, affluent Brits who regularly step out for a curry and a pint.

Although Britain is 94.5% white, it would be hard to find a village without its Indian and Chinese takeout restaurants, or a village school without the restaurant owners’ children.

Says food fan Verma: “When I came 30 years ago, the smell of our food--curry--discriminated against us: We couldn’t rent flats [apartments]. Today, curry is the national diet. But I don’t think society’s mind has yet caught up with its stomach. There are still moments when we have to say to politicians: ‘What about the Asians? What about the blacks?’ The true sign that we have arrived will come when people think of that without being reminded.”

Early Caribbean immigrants were blue-collar workers whose descendants are still vital to the running of London’s subways and double-decker buses. Today, there is scarcely a neighborhood without a corner grocery shop run by an Asian family living upstairs. Ethnic minorities contribute 12% of students on British university campuses, more than twice their proportion in the population.

Individually and collectively, minorities are leaving an indelible mark. Among Britain’s best writers, Salman Rushdie is of Indian origin and V. S. Naipaul is of Indian descent but came from the West Indies.

Trevor McDonald, the nation’s favorite TV newscaster, is a black man from Trinidad. Ruud Gullit, the people’s favorite soccer manager, is a black man from Holland. London-born model Naomi Campbell’s model mother hails from Jamaica. Nine members of the House of Commons boast Caribbean or African roots.

Economist-philosopher Amartya Sen, 64, born in what is now Bangladesh, where his father and grandfather were professors at Dhaka University, was lured home from Harvard recently to head Trinity College in Cambridge, his alma mater and one of the nation’s most distinguished centers of learning. Another British Asian, Swraj Paul, owner of a steel empire, is one of 300 minority millionaires in the country and one of Britain’s 500 richest people.

Despite a minority sprinkling in the House of Lords, class-conscious British society at the highest levels remains generally closed to minorities.

And racism--both street-rough and sugarcoated--is ever present, notes Colin Salmon, a black actor who plays the secret service chief of staff in the latest James Bond movie.

“I feel like a Doberman pinscher. On occasion, people don’t know how to deal with me,” Salmon says. “There’s this innate fear of a big black man. I’m careful . . . to give women plenty of space.”

Salmon’s mother was English, his father Ghanaian and his stepfather West Indian. “We were the first black family in a white community. It was quite heavy at the beginning--a brick through the window, my dad chased by skinheads. Now if there are problems, I try to think of them as an affirmation of my power. On a bad day, though, I do get angry,” Salmon says.

Although there have been black people in Britain since North African troops of the Roman army guarded Hadrian’s Wall, large-scale minority communities did not spring up until after Windrush.

“People didn’t want us coming here, but in the end everything reasonable was done,” recalls Sam King, whose family sold three cows to buy his Windrush ticket. “People said we wouldn’t last more than one winter, but we stayed. I didn’t go back to Jamaica for 25 years.”

Early immigrants were economically welcome because of labor shortages, but race riots in Notting Hill in the 1950s underlined racial strains that their arrival had triggered. The 1960s and ‘70s saw major black unemployment, and with poverty and disaffection came repeated clashes between blacks and police and great racial tensions.

“In the 1970s, if I had to go anywhere, I’d walk briskly with both hands in my pockets,” says Ouseley of the racial equality commission. “If you were young and black and standing on the street, you could be arbitrarily arrested. Even now, black men are still stopped disproportionately.”

Antidiscrimination laws, repeatedly reinforced, have been on the books since the ‘60s. But the Asian community, which began growing rapidly in the ‘70s, also bears scars, satirist Syal says.

“Racism is part of everybody’s past. Our parents bore the brunt of it, but everybody my age had problems at school,” says Syal, who is in her mid-30s. “Of course racism persists. There’s always somebody to remind you about the way you look.”

One fruit of a society reinventing itself is a new-breed Brit who is emerging within it.

“I can be a fully paid-up member of Britain and still have deep ties to other countries,” Syal says. “I will never be just British, but a British-born Indian.”

Says actor Salmon: “I’m a Cockney born in the East End of London, English, African, Caribbean. I celebrate my complexity. That’s what we all have to do here.”

Over lunch one recent afternoon, Indian-born Iftikhar Husain recalled how he came to London with a master’s degree in 1960, felt lucky to find work as a porter in a department store, got married, started a corner store with his wife for a second income, and raised their son as a respected family in a white neighborhood.

“I wouldn’t do it all over again. We will always feel that this is not our country. I cannot become an Englishman: I’m the wrong color,” said Husain, who is now retired.

Iqbal Husain, a 29-year-old dramaturge, listened to his father’s story with a smile, toying with an imported-from-India Cobra beer. “But Dad,” said the London-born, university-trained son of a Muslim father and a Sikh mother, “I am an Englishman, and there are millions more who look just like me.”

Montalbano, The Times’ London Bureau chief, died March 19.