'We need to improve our diversity training'. That was the response of Chris
Fox of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) to the revelation in
a BBC documentary that police recruits in North Wales and Greater Manchester
liked cavorting in Ku Klux Clan outfits. Ah yes, diversity training. It's
become the contemporary version of ghostbusting - an army of people always
on call to clean up any polluted air and put the genie of racism firmly back
in the bottle. Back in the eighties, diversity training was the province of
loony left councils. Today, there's barely a blue chip company that has not
called on services of diversity trainers to help its employees understand
their differences.
The fashion for diversity training reflects the new-found emphasis on the
celebration of cultural diversity. Twenty years ago it all looked very different.
I became an antiracist because I thought it unjust that people should be treated
differently simply because they happened to have a different colour skin.
Today that's just what antiracists want. Where once I fought for equal treatment,
antiracists now demand respect for diversity. Where once I wanted to be treated
the same as everybody else despite my skin colour, activists now want to be
treated differently because of it. 'You have to treat people differently in
order treat them equally', as Lee Jasper, Ken Livingstone's race adviser,
told me. 'It’s good to be different' might well be the motto of our
times.
But is it that good to be different? And can diversity training really exorcise
the ghosts of racism? Earlier this year I attended a diversity day organised
by North Wales police as part of a film I've been making for Channel 4 about
multiculturalism. In a Mormon church in Gaerwen, a tiny village in the middle
of Anglesey, seven police officers were put through their paces by five trainers.
The day began with a video of racism in North Wales. 'I know nearly everybody
in that film', one of the policemen remarked. 'There are not many of you -
visible ethnic minorities - around here.'
The officers then went off to see the four 'visitors' for the day to learn
about the diversity of Welsh culture. It was becoming uncomfortably like a
Richard Littlejohn parody - there was an Asian woman, a disabled man, a lesbian
and a transsexual. Each visitor sat in a cubicle-like room, into which the
officers came, one by one, to listen to their life-stories. The day ended
with a general discussion of how the officers might improve their awareness
of diversity.
I'm not sure if Rob Pulling - the North Wales police recruit who likes parading
with a pillow case on his head and thinks that Hitler was a regular guy -
ever attended a diversity day. But it's difficult to know what it could have
done to his prejudices - apart, perhaps, from confirming them.
But, then, for all the rhetoric, diversity training is not, and never has
been, about combating racism. The irony is that the whole diversity industry
has sprung up just at the point at which Britain has became noticeably less
racist. The release of Winston Silcott this week was a reminder of what racist
policing used to be like. Back then you didn't need a hidden camera to expose
racism in the ranks. In 1983 the chairman of the Police Federation went on
TV to defend his officers calling black people 'niggers'.
Diversity training is really a PR exercise, a way of projecting a positive
public image. 'Diversity' has become a brand, a kind of Benetton shorthand
for cool, liberal modernity. And any organisation that wants to brush up its
image signs up. When the BBC wanted to shake off its fuddy-duddy image, it
replaced its logo of a spinning with shots of wheelchair-bound dreadlocked
basketball players and Indian classical dancers. When the Arts Council wanted
to become more relevant it launched its Year of Diversity. When Ford motor
company was revealed 'whiting out' black faces on its ads, it responded by
instituting a glossy, multi-million pound diversity programme.
Even the BNP are at it. Over the past few years, under the leadership of Nick
Griffin, the BNP has attempted to rebrand itself from a party of street thugs
into a democratic organisation defending 'English culture' and 'white identity'.
According to its website, the BNP's 'moderate, commonsense position' is that
'races are neither equal nor unequal, but simply different'. 'Fortunately',
it suggests, 'increasing awareness of the scientifically established reality
of such differences is undermining the old egalitarian dogmas and making it
ever easier for those of us who champion human genetic and cultural diversity
to win the argument.'
I met Griffin in a pub in Mixenden near Halifax on the day when the BNP won
its fifth council seat in a local bye-election. It was a surreal encounter
- a decade ago I might have come to a pub like this to beat up people like
Griffin. Now I was interviewing him for a Channel 4 documentary. But more
surreal was Griffin's patter. 'There are two kinds of diversity', he told
me. 'The diversity of nations in Britain - the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish
- and on global scale, all great traditions and cultures of the world.' It
was a racist bigot talking as if he'd just been on the same diversity course
as me.
Griffin remains the man who, in 1995, wrote in the BNP magazine The Rune
that the party should be 'a strong, well disciplined organisation with the
ability to back up its slogan "Defend Rights for Whites" with well
directed boots and fists.' He has learnt, however, to translate this racist
project into diversity-speak. The BNP takes the sense of abandonment and resentment
felt in areas such as Mixenden and wraps it in the language of identity and
victimhood. Other ethnic groups are allowed the promote their identity, so
why not the English? Why has English heritage been abandoned? Why should white
identity not be included in the multicultural map? And so on. It is perhaps
the biggest indictment of the contemporary celebration of diversity that it
allows someone like Griffin to turn racism into a cultural identity.
The unthinking pursuit of diversity not only gives legitimacy to the likes
of Nick Griffin. It also helps divide communities far more effectively than
racism. Take Bradford. From the beginnings of mass immigration in the 1950s
racism has helped create deep divisions in the city. But it also helped generate
political struggles against discrimination, the impact of which was to create
bridges across ethnic, racial and cultural fissures. In response to the militancy
of these struggles, the local council in the early eighties rolled out its
multicultural programme, including a 12-point race relations plan which declared
that every section of the 'multiracial, multicultural city' had 'an equal
right to maintain its own identity, culture, language, religion and customs'.
Council funding became linked to cultural identity, so different groups began
asserting their differences ever more fiercely. The consequence has been not
simply to entrench the divisions created by racism, but to make cross-cultural
interaction more difficult.
Today, cultural segregation in Bradford has become so profound that the local
education authority has started bussing children from all-Asian schools to
all-white schools, and vice versa. The so-called 'Linking project' aims to
break down barriers between children, many of whom have never interacted with
a child from the other community.
I travelled with a group of Asian 10-year olds from the all-Asian Farnham
Primary School in Great Horton as they visited their white counterparts at
the largely white St Anthony's Catholic school. For most of them it was their
third trip. 'What was it like the first time you visited St Anthony's?', I
asked one of the children.
'Nervous', he said.
'Why were you nervous?'
'Because I didn't know what they'd be like. I'd never met them before.'
'You'd never met white children before?'
'No.'
'Do you know any white children apart from those at St Anthony's?'
'No.'
Could this really be Britain, 2003?
'I've got a present for you.' That's how my teacher introduced me, as a six-year
old, on my first day at school in England. It was the era of Paki-bashing
and Powellism, when black people were still viewed as exotic creatures and
treated with fear, hatred and condescension in equal measure. Thirty years
on it's almost impossible to imagine how inward, looking, parochial and racist
Britain used to be. Mass immigration has opened up British society, transformed
its culture and created a nation far more vibrant and cosmopolitan than would
have seemed possible three decades ago.
But diversity has become more than simply a way of describing the expansion
of our experiences. It has also become a dogma about how we should live that
has become as stultifying as old-fashioned racism - and often as divisive.
The dogmatic pursuit of diversity means that there remain schools in which
seeing someone of a different skin colour is as exotic an event as it was
to my white classmates three decades ago. Half a century ago the American
authorities were forced to bus black children to break the stranglehold of
racism in the schools of the Deep South. Did anyone ever imagine that local
authorities in Britain would be forced to follow suit in 2003 to break the
stranglehold of cultural segregation?