A recording has surfaced of Robert Jenrick calling the Birmingham area of Handsworth ‘one of the worst integrated places that I’ve ever been to’ going on to say ‘I didn’t see another white face’. You can listen to the clip here. As somebody who ministers in an area of a town that is not altogether unlike Handsworth, I thought it might be worth parsing the comments.
The best thing one can say – I think it is worth starting with the most charitable bit – is that not seeing another white face may well be a genuinely true observation. I don’t think, in and of itself, it is wrong to observe reality. By comparison, it is not uncommon for me to walk through our area of Glodwick with its overwhelmingly Pakistani ethnic makeup and not see another white face. The vast majority of Glodwick is less than 1% white British (there is a small pocket of white Brits on Queen’s Road that jumps up to 25% only at one end of the street. This is mainly accounted for by a set of care homes). If Jenrick was simply observing reality – he saw no white faces on his walkaround and this tallies reasonably with the census figures – there is no problem observing reality.
Unfortunately, Jenrick went beyond mere observation of what he saw. He said it was ‘one of the worst integrated places that I’ve ever been to’ and linked that directly to the fact that he didn’t see another white face. Even being charitable, it is difficult to know how well Jenrick could possibly understand the integration of a place having only walked around it for an hour or so. What is worse, Jenrick appears to associate integration with whiteness. He comments that seeing only Black and Asian faces – many of whom are British born and bred – is itself evidence of a lack of integration. One might ask, ‘integration into what, exactly?’ But it is hard to escape the more obvious sense in which Jenrick has determined some are not integrated into Britain based purely on skin colour. At our most charitable (and perhaps stretching it to credulity) it appears he is suggesting the absence of white faces is evidence of a lack of integration and he seems to blame the ethnic minorities who remain in the area for it.
There are several problems here. Again, starting with the most charitable of them, leaping to ‘lack of integration’ as the explanation of the census figures is, minimally, simplistic. Jenrick, in his follow up interviews on this question, has insisted he wants to see a Britain where people live ‘side-by-side’. What he fails to countenance is whether the lack of white faces might be due to white flight from the area. Some questions worth asking are: Why was this an area that many migrants moved into? Did the white population move out of the area before or after their arrival? What led to those moves? Potential answers abound and, whatever they are, they cannot be known solely by looking at people’s ethnicity.
There are further problems with Jenrick’s own conception of integration. First, and perhaps most troubling, is the association of integration with whiteness. It is all well and good to observe that you saw no white faces (this may well be true), but it ignores the fact that there are areas of Britain where there are no ethnic minority faces. Jenrick gives the impression that he doesn’t think white people have failed to integrate properly, but only ethnic minority communities haven’t done so. This implies whiteness is fundamental to Britishness and closeness to white culture determines whether one has integrated adequately. It is also worth noting ‘white culture’ is ill-defined too. If white faces are supposed to represent a culture, it begs the question: which one? White working and middle class culture is different; white Northern and Southern culture is different. It is unclear which culture white faces are supposed to represent and to which minority ethnic people are being called to integrate.
Why is it for minority ethnic people to integrate but not white people? What are we supposed to do with the fact that many of the minority ethnic people Jenrick saw are, in point of fact, British? How much more integrated can they be than being born in Britain, holding British passports, having attended British schools and now working in British jobs through which they pay British taxes to support British public services, infrastructure and the rest? If exclusively white areas are properly integrated on this basis, why should overwhelmingly minority ethnic ones be considered different? If minority ethnic people are being judged by a different standard to majority white people, don’t we have a specific term for treating people differently because of their ethnicity?
Where there is a legitimate debate to be had is over a) whether we need to build community around shared values; and, b) if so, what ought they to be? It is interesting that the post-war liberal consensus largely answered the first question with a loosely held (or, arguably, deeply British) ‘probably not’. Or, at least, nobody particularly needed to define them. The concept of ‘British values’ was not really mooted until the early 2000s and is most likely traced to the vast increase in migration to Britain. These relatively newly mooted values centre on four broad western liberal principles: democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance (it can’t escape notice these are hardly uniquely British values – they are shared by most Western nations).
Such as we want to insist these things are specficially British values, we cannot avoid the contradictory insistence upon ‘integration’. If we believe as a nation in ‘individual liberty’, that might lead some to hold different cultural and religious views (these things are often linked). It may lead some to seek out multi-ethnic areas in which to live whilst leading other to areas of likeminded people socially and culturally. It is virtually impossible to insist on these ‘British values’ whilst simultaneously calling certain sections of society to conform to some sort of majority culture standard (it is unclear which) against their personal liberty. We either want to insist on conformity to set standards by which we can call people to integrate – in which case ‘individual liberty’ is not a British value – or we want to have our individual liberty and tolerance, in which case we have no right to insist upon integration. These are legitimate discussions to be had, but it bears saying, however we answer them, it is hard to imagine the absence of white faces being observed in a particular area during a short period of time being in any way relevant to any legitimate answer.
It is hard to avoid the sense that Jenrick’s comments are an overt dog whistle. He appeared to have no room for many of those Black and Asian faces being British. He overtly associated Britishness with whiteness. He insisted on ‘integration’ to set a of undefined criteria, overtly basing his assessment of a lack of integration solely on the colour of people’s skin. He is therefore linking Britishness, and your integration into Britain, with whiteness. He has no concern that almost exclusively white areas where no ethnic minority people may be seen have not themselves integrated or that they don’t live ‘side by side’ with people unlike themselves. He brings a standard to bear upon minority ethnic people that he doesn’t apply to white people. It is one thing to simply observe a lack of diversity in an area that is backed up by census figures, it is quite another to imply it is a problem whilst only considering it a problem when white people are the minority. To then have the cheek to insist on integration to British values which affirm individual liberty whilst denying that same liberty to a whole section of Brits based on skin colour can only be described one way: racist.
It is worth thinking about some of these same questions as churches. Do we expect other believers from other nations to integrate with our church or do we have room for different cultural expressions in our churches? Are we calling people to assimilate to particular values and, if so, are they essential gospel values or are they largely cultural ones? Is it the fault of church leaders in overwhelmingly white British areas that they find themselves with a congregation of exclusively white British people? Do we take the same view when we think of church leaders in minority ethnic areas without m/any white people in them? Do we presume churches without many white people are necessarily multicultural? Do we think white majority churches with ethnic minorities present are multicultural?
There are lots of other questions we might ask to tease some of these things out. But it might be worth thinking most about how our view of certain areas translates into certain views of the local church in those places. If we found nothing concerning about Robert Jenrick’s comments, what might that say about our understanding of the church in those same kind of places?