The age of Obama

The changing place of minorities in British and American society

Tom Clark, Robert D. Putnam, Edward Fieldhouse, Robert D. Putnam, Edward Fieldhouse

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719082788
  9780719082771
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847794710
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on collaborative research from a distinguished team at Harvard and Manchester universities, The age of Obama asks how two very different societies are responding to the tide of diversity that is being felt around the rich world. Guardian journalist Tom Clark, Robert D. Putnam – best-selling author of Bowling alone – and Manchester's Edward Fieldhouse offer a wonderfully readable account. Like Bowling alone, The age of Obama mixes social scientific rigor with accessible charts and lively arguments. It will be enjoyed by politics, sociology and geography students, as well as by anyone else with an interest in ethnic relations.

Injustice, it turns out, still blight lives of many UK and US minorities – particularly African Americans. And there are signs the new diversity strains community life. Yet in both countries, public opinion is running irreversibly in favour of tolerance. That augurs well for the future – and suggests a British Obama cannot be ruled out.

1
Introduction: the diversity revolution

I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one. (Senator Barack Obama, March 2008)

In electing Barack Obama, the United States has not only chosen a leader who embodies the union of black and white America. It has also selected a President who reflects the ties between established Americans and new arrivals. His white Kansan mother married not only a black man, but a man born abroad. There is no denying that Obama has won real power, but does his arrival also reflect wider change in the treatment of America’s immigrants and minorities? And if so, are similar changes under way in the UK? Or is it true, as Obama suggests, that his story is a uniquely American one?

These are among the questions that this book seeks to answer, by drawing on sweeping, collaborative research – and particular papers – from a distinguished team from Harvard and Manchester Universities. The work was carried out under the auspices of SCHMI – Social Change: A Harvard-Manchester Initiative. A series of five comparative academic studies provides us with the raw material for this volume. We thoroughly acknowledge our debt to the authors of these papers, without which there would be no book. The papers contain more detail on methodology and much greater depth than it is possible to explore in this monograph, so we refer the interested reader to the full underlying analysis which is available on our website.¹ One data-driven difference between the papers, reflected in what follows, is worth being explicit about at the outset – namely, the territorial reach of ‘Britain’, with Scotland sometimes included and sometimes not.²

Our transatlantic collaboration refreshes long-standing links: Henry Dunster, who became the first president of Harvard in 1640, came from the Mancunian hinterland. More importantly, though, it brings together top academics in two different nations, and so allows us to get to the bottom of the same searching questions in two different countries at once.

The diversity revolution

Pardeep Saini was discovered in the undercarriage of a jumbo jet at Heathrow airport in 1996. During the ten-hour flight from Delhi to London, temperatures plummeted to –40°, and his brother was killed. Yet Pardeep somehow survived. On the other side of the Atlantic, hundreds of people die every year trying to enter the United States – whether by swimming across the Rio Grande, trudging through the desert or charting the ocean on home-made boats. But if hundreds die, hundreds of thousands make it. The pull of the rich world is powerful, and it creates a tide of diversity – a tide felt from Sydney to Stockholm, from Toronto to Tokyo.

For half a century, ever-more immigrants have been drawn to the prosperous parts of the planet, helped on their way by more affordable travel and encouraged, too, by the increasing ease with which it is possible to stay in touch with people back home. Figure 1.1 shows how immigrants have already grown as a share of the rich world’s population and are commonly projected to continue growing, on the basis of extrapolation from current trends. Such projections, like much of the analysis in this book, frequently rely upon demographic data drawn from the census which – being collected infrequently and processed slowly – is invariably out of date. Britain’s last census was in 2001 and America’s in 2000; in the near-decade since, both societies have only become still more diverse.

Of course, these trends could evolve, but they are unlikely to reverse. Closing the gates is almost certainly impossible. It would also be profoundly unwise: an ageing indigenous population needs a growing workforce to sustain it. But even if the rich world could close the gates, in many nations the band of relatively young immigrants already admitted – together with their families – would, for decades, continue to grow as a share of the population. About the most certain prediction we can make about any advanced economy is that it will be more ethnically diverse a generation down the line than it is today.

Figure 1.1 The growing share of immigrants as a share of host populations in the rich world – past and projection

Welcome or not, this change cannot and will not be halted any time soon. Like the industrial and communications revolutions before it, the diversity revolution is going to happen – in fact, it is already under way. Its social effects may eventually compare with those of the spinning jenny in the eighteenth century, or the internet in our own time. This book illuminates this global phenomenon by shining a light on two very different societies: Britain, where diversity is a comparatively recent development, and the United States, where heterogeneity is becoming more marked, but where – for good and for ill – it has always been seared into the national DNA.

Questions from picture-book history

Even the sketchiest awareness of the two nations’ histories invites intriguing questions about the different ways that our twin themes of race and immigration might play out on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Every reflective American is aware that theirs is a country of immigrants. Inside that great national icon, the Statue of Liberty, the inscription reads: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’. That promise to welcome newcomers surely informs Obama’s claim to a uniquely American story. The pledge has not always been honoured, as we will see, but it nonetheless makes for a telling contrast with the fusty myths of the old-style British nationalism, about an island people who have fended off foreigners since 1066. On the basis of picture-book history alone, one might wonder whether America would be the easier place to settle.

Even if the sunny ideas about immigration prove tenable, however, the long shadow of slavery dominates the picture on race. Abolition in the 1860s was not the end but the start of a process, a process that weaved its way through the Jim Crow laws and the civil rights era and continues to this day. Ethnic diversity has been a feature of American life from the very beginning, though not in a happy way. The pall of slavery makes it natural to ask whether the race divide is especially marked in the US, and whether American society will struggle with managing the growing trend towards non-white immigration. And yet the old picture-book histories are rapidly being re-written to reflect the inauguration of an African American as President of the United States, so it is now equally tempting to speculate on whether the race divide is starting to heal.

Britons, too, were thoroughly embroiled in trading slaves, but slaves did not sweat on the UK’s shores in the same way, so there is not the same social legacy. But it is as well to recall the British Empire’s colonialism, conceived as ‘the white man’s burden’. That ensured that by the time the steamship Empire Windrush delivered the first modern black immigrants in 1948, Britain, too, was endowed with some decidedly warped ideas about race. Whether a former imperial power can treat former subjects as equal citizens is yet another compelling question.

The rest of the book

All these gripping questions jump out of a child’s first book of history, but answering them involves much more than picture-book analysis. We start in the next chapter with an overview of diversity in Britain and the US (Chapter 2), setting out the number and the nature of the minorities in both, while also comparing the distinctive manner in which race and immigration is thought about in each country. After that, we dig deep into the data to try and establish three things:

• How do migrants and minorities live and work?

• How does diversity affect community life?

• How, if at all, might political debate and media coverage shape this effect on communities?

With access to millions of census records – and computers powerful enough to crunch them – we paint a newly definitive picture of living and working conditions. The main focus of Chapter 3 is on where minorities live – separated into ghettos, or integrated into the community? The chapter also reports on earlier studies covering everything from the health of migrants and minorities to their chances of ending up in jail, arguing that all sorts of social problems are more common in communities that feel compelled to live a life set apart. The extent of segregation – which varies both between our countries and between different minority communities – thus matters not just for gauging social cohesion, but also for monitoring social justice. Chapter 4 contributes to the latter, both by asking how open the world of work in Britain and America is to minorities, and by asking, in particular, just how frequently minority individuals really can clamber up the ladder of opportunity towards a better career.

The second and third questions (Chapter 5 and Chapter 6) both carry profound implications for diversity – will it, as some suggest, tend to reduce social solidarity? And if it does, can this effect be ameliorated by political will? The obvious relevance of these questions explains why they are so often already debated. The difficulty in answering them, though, has always been that there have never been enough data to cut through the chicken-and-egg confusion about exactly what causes what. Do the problems of diverse neighbourhoods reflect the fact they are mixed or instead the poverty that a racist society imposes upon them? Does intolerant talk among the elite whip up racism among the public, or does it merely reflect underlying resentment? Without a clear means to answer such questions scientifically, political prejudices tend to fill the gap – pessimists assume innate human prejudice is important, whereas optimists presume people start off as a prejudice-free blank sheet. But on both sides of the Atlantic SCHMI researchers have secured privileged access to opinion surveys, so we know the locality in which respondents live. This allows us to forge a link between individual attitudes and neighbourhood characteristics, and thereby start to displace political heat with analytical light.

Before concluding, we turn to consider the matter that has attracted so much interest in the wake of Obama’s elevation – the changing place of minorities in elective politics (Chapter 7). In particular, we seek out the roots of the President’s victory in majority public opinion. We ask whether – through all the ebbs and flows – underlying attitudinal currents can be discerned over the decades. This not only help us understand more clearly the arrival of a black President, but also allows us to reflect on whether the UK has seen the sort of parallel changes that would be required for a British Obama to move into No. 10.

With this final question – as with all the questions – we look at the two countries together, in part because we wish to discover differences between them. But there is also great value in establishing similarities, too, as patterns that hold in more than one country at once are relatively less likely to reflect the chance circumstances, and relatively more likely to reveal deeper social realities.

2
Two concepts in two countries: race and migration

There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 per cent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else. (Theodore Roosevelt, speaking in 1918)³

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams. (Jimmy Carter, speaking in 1976)⁴

Diversity gives rise to some diverse reactions, as the above remarks from the 26^th and 39^th American presidents reveal. Is it a stepping stone towards a unified country, a destination that requires migrants and minorities to assimilate into the mainstream? Or is the multicultural mosaic, in Jimmy Carter’s phrase, something that should be celebrated in its own right? Such questions are hotly debated in Britain, too – as indeed they are in most societies as they grapple with becoming less uniform. The research this book pulls together can inform such discussions. But to make sense of it we need first to pause and consider exactly what is meant by diversity – and its twin conceptual components, racial difference and migranthood, both of which happen to be embodied in Barack Obama.

Beyond comparison

Racial divides relate back to differences in physical inheritance, and yet the significant divides are not forever fixed; they are a product of society, and – as we shall see – they can and do change over time. That is part of the reason terms such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ have contested meanings, while other categories such as ‘Asian’ signify different things in Britain and the US. There are also fierce debates among activists and academics about whether the salient ethnic divide is between black people and the rest on the one hand, or, on the other, between white people and everybody else. At first blush, our second concept – immigration – looks as if it should be less slippery: immigrants are people who move to a new country. As with any social schema, though, fuzziness creeps in round the edges. Do we treat the native-born children or even grandchildren of newcomers as part of an ‘immigrant community’?

Most right-thinking people, like the authors of this book, would want to avoid getting lost in this sort of thick conceptual fog. But we must at least skirt round its edges to obtain a clear view of the facts in two countries at once. For data do not come ready-made; rather, they depend on what particular governments decide is important enough to count. There can even be cross-national differences in what it makes sense to count. Different historical experience in Britain and the US means information on race and immigration is not just labelled differently, but is actually carved up in different ways. The risk, then, is not so much that they say tomayto and we say tomahto, but rather that we end up talking about totally different things – at which point, it really is time to call the whole thing off. Forming a view on even the simplest question – the relative degree of diversity in our two countries – turns out to require going beyond a crude comparison of ready-made statistics.

Consider, for instance, Figure 2.1. It charts the growth of Britain’s minority communities from the census, which sounds straightforward enough, but on close inspection it turns out that all sorts of judgement calls are involved. The way minorities are identified in the data changes between earlier and later years, to reflect the addition of an ‘ethnicity’ question to the census in 1991, something we will consider further later in the chapter. Then there are questions about the treatment of ‘white minorities’, ignored in this chart, as they were traditionally ignored in debates about diversity, although this is something that has recently started to change. One affected group is Irish immigrants, excluded in the chart as they are ethnically similar and come from a part of the British Isles, but this is a debatable decision which further underlines the way that preconceptions come into play whenever we carve society up into numbers. Indeed, if a longer historical view is taken, it becomes apparent that ‘native Britishness’ is itself the product of diversity. Over the millennia, the supposed pure-bred Brit was in fact distilled from a mix of the Beaker People, Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, assorted Vikings, Normans, Jews, Huguenots, Russians, Dutch, Portuguese and French – all well before arrivals from the New Commonwealth began to land on British shores in the second half of the twentieth century (Winder, 2004).

Figure 2.1 The growing population of Britain’s minorities, 1951–2001

Because all of this mixing happened over thousands of years, however – as opposed to in a mere two or three centuries in the American case – it has been possible to sustain the illusion of Britis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of tables, boxes and figures
• Notes on the authors and contributors
• 1 Introduction: the diversity revolution
• 2 Two concepts in two countries: race and migration
• 3 Home truths: how minorities live
• 4 The rickety ladder of opportunity: minorities and work
• 5 Mosaic or cracked vase? Diversity and community life
• 6 Distorting mirrors: media framing and political debate
• 7 Tidal generation: politics and deeper currents in public opinion
• 8 Concluding thoughts: making a success of the revolution
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes