Race riots of 2001, ten years on
Categories: Latest News
Thursday May 26 2011
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The BBC reports on new research by academics at Bristol University which shows that schools in Oldham are “largely polarised along racial lines.” |
“More than 80% of primary school pupils of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin attended schools, in 2009, in which no more than 20% of the pupils were white.
“The study, by Bristol University, found more than 70% of white pupils were in “majority white” schools, in which at least 80% of pupils were white British.”
The Independent today runs a feature article by Ben Chu on the race riots of 2001 which occurred in Oldham and Burnley, and the ensuing inquiries and reports which have variously referred to problems of “self-segregation”, “parallel lives” and the failures of multiculturalism.
Chu writes:
“…something interesting has happened since that rude awakening. Academics have begun to question the findings of those initial reports on the riots. Cantle’s “parallel lives” thesis was challenged by Ludi Simpson and Nissa Finney from Manchester University, who pointed out that places such as Bradford, Burnley and Oldham were much more ethnically mixed than this soundbite implied. And Lord Ouseley’s “self-segregation” finding was contradicted by research by Yunas Samad in Bradford last year. Samad found that geographical segregation was a consequence of “white flight” rather than separatist Asian attitudes. There have been other challenges to the idea that Asians do not integrate. A 2009 Gallup poll found that the Muslim community is much more likely to identify strongly with Britain than the rest of the population. It also showed that they are collectively more in favour than white Britons of mixed ethnic communities.
“These are very different pictures. So which is closer to the truth? Are British Muslims self-segregators, culturally antithetical to British values, a community that incubates the virus of religious extremism? Or are they patriots and victims of white racism, a misunderstood and slandered migrant community, like so many others before them, from the Jews to the Irish? It is exactly a decade since the Oldham riots, the violence that prompted this revolution in race relations.
“The people of Bradford, Burnley and Oldham might disagree on the root causes of some of their communities’ difficulties. But they seem to be united about one thing: anger at the national media’s promotion of a grossly distorted vision of their communities. Time and again I heard the complaint that the media come in and stir things up in order to tell a simplistic story of segregation and inter-racial animosity.”
Read Chu’s article here.
UPDATE: See also “Muslims in Britain continued”