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Christina Patterson: So where's our black middle class?

It would be better if power structures were representative without any effort - but change doesn't happen without any effort

Wednesday 06 April 2011 00:00 BST
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We can't ever know what Martin Luther King would have made of Ed Miliband's shoulders. We can't know if they were shoulders he'd have liked to stand on, or if he was happy for a white north Londoner whose only job outside politics was in TV journalism to stand on his. But we can be pretty damn sure what Martin Luther King would have made of the announcement on Monday, which was also the 43rd anniversary of his murder in Memphis, that Barack Obama was going to run for a second term as President of the United States.

We can be pretty sure that the news that Obama was expecting to raise a billion dollars for his campaign, which is more than any politician ever, and that so far the Republican Party had failed to muster a single half-credible candidate to run against him, would have perked him up. And we can be pretty sure that he would have thought it was a good thing that a man who, three years ago, gave the most powerful speech about race in America since that one in Washington in 1963, and who had passed legislation that meant that millions of black people who didn't have access to healthcare now did, and who fought the best-funded lobbies in the land to impose regulation on the banks whose activities cost many of them their homes, and their jobs, had a good chance of being re-elected.

If Martin Luther King had been able to go with me to the Wyndhams Theatre on Saturday to see a play called Clybourne Park, he would have been reminded just how far his country had travelled. I don't know how he'd have felt in the first half, as we watched the leader of a local residents' association tell a white couple that they couldn't sell their home in a nice part of Chicago to a black family, as it would lower the prices and the tone. And told them in front of their black servants. I don't know if, like me, he would have been so upset that he practically needed counselling, or if he was made of sterner stuff.

I don't know how he'd have felt in the second half, set in the same house 50-odd years later, as we watched the middle-class white couple who had bought it, and who were planning to demolish it and replace it with something grander, trying to ingratiate themselves with the current leaders of the residents' association, who were black.

I don't know if he'd have appreciated the way that the tables had been turned, or if he'd have been wincing at the white woman's assertion that half her friends were black (which turned out to mean that one of her junior colleagues was) or if he'd have been amused, or distressed, by the way that a careful dance around political niceties soon turned into something like a battle. I don't know if he'd have laughed at the very rude joke, told by the white man, about a black prisoner's unusual approach to sexual seduction, or at the equally rude joke, told by the black woman, about the similarities between a white woman and a tampon.

But I think that Martin Luther King, while watching a play that dramatised some of the shifts, and nuances, and nightmares, of America's racial history in the past half-century and thinking about the fact that for every semi-gentrified Clybourne Park or Harlem there are an awful lot of drug-ridden, gun-ridden, poverty-ridden housing projects that are a lot more like The Wire, and remembering, perhaps, the scenes after Hurricane Katrina, when it seemed that a whole city of poor black people had lost the little that they had, might have taken comfort from one thing that America has that Britain doesn't: a big black middle class. And I think he might be proud that, for all its problems, his country has a lot of black lawyers, and judges, and journalists, and academics, and that it had two black secretaries of state and a black president before Britain had a single black senior politician.

These things do not happen by accident. They happened in America because of campaigns, and legislation, and "affirmative action" programmes, which have, like Labour's all-women shortlists here, and Norway's quotas for women in boardrooms, proved highly controversial, but which have also worked.

It would be much better if the power structures of a country represented the make-up of its populace without any effort, but change doesn't happen without any effort. Those of us who live in London live in a city where 42 per cent of the population isn't white British. If you want to find that 42 per cent in the political, financial, and legal institutions in this capital, or in its media, you'd probably better head for the canteen.

This isn't a question of sticking black faces in TV dramas about fictional English villages whose murder rates far exceed those in The Wire. It isn't even about sticking them on leaflets about electoral reform, though I'm not sure what Martin Luther King would have made of the inclusion of a photo of Benjamin Zephaniah in leaflets for the AV Yes campaign in London, and its absence from those in Sussex and Cornwall. (Not least since the campaign was spearheaded by the man who was so keen on rallying King's shoulders to his cause.) It's a question, like almost everything else in our society, of education and economics.

It can only be a good thing that a new clause of the Equality Act, which comes into force today, means that it's legal, when there are several candidates of equal merit, to give a job to the one who may, for reasons to do with race, gender, disability, religion or sexual orientation, be "under-represented" in the work force. This doesn't mean that you can give the job to a less qualified person, but it does mean that race, gender, etc, can be taken into account. The trouble, of course, is that if you've left school with virtually no qualifications, your chances of attaining "equal merit" with other candidates for skilled or professional work are really rather slim.

It isn't easy to know what went wrong with some of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the Caribbean immigrants who came here, post-Windrush, with such high hopes. If I look at the parents of some of my black friends (who don't, by the way, make up half my social circle) they mostly worked very long hours – as cleaners, porters, or postmen – on very low pay. Mostly, the mothers were matriarchs, and the fathers were still around.

Even with hefty doses of parental discipline in the home, many of their sons ended up doing stints in jail. The generation that followed didn't have the matriarchs, and they often didn't have the fathers. They also often didn't have the qualifications, or the jobs.

If we want to change this, and we want young black men and women to play a significant part in the power structures of this country, then we have, as Obama said in that speech on race three years ago, to "demand" more from fathers. We have to encourage them to spend more time with their children, we have to provide role models other than footballers and hip-hop stars, and we have to make sure that living on a sink estate doesn't mean you go to a sink school.

I'm not sure if the "arc of the moral universe", as Ed Miliband said in Hyde Park, quoting Martin Luther King, "bends towards justice". I don't really know what that means. But I do know that King was right when he said that "we are made by history". What he didn't add, but should have, was that we also make it.

c.patterson@independent.co.uk; twitter.com/queenchristina_

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