Clive Davis

NOT HELPING ANYONE

An excellent item on Newsnight about how well-meaning officials undermine integration by funding translation services. Sometimes the debate about multiculturalism can be maddeningly vague. Mark Easton's report was frank and hard-headed:

Islington's NHS primary care trust in London is providing a Turkish woman who has lived in the UK for five years with one-to-one sessions to help her stop smoking translated into her own language.

Speaking through a translator, a Bangladeshi woman who has lived in the UK for 22 years and does not speak English questioned this spending. She said: "When you are trying to help us you are actually harming. Even before we ask, all we have to do is say hello, they are here with their interpreters. We just sit here doing nothing and we don't need to speak in English at all.

Refreshing to hear human rights lawyer Zia Haider Rahman make a passionate case for encouraging people to learn English. He gave New Labour minister Phil Woolas such a hard time that El Paxo was reduced to the role of bemused onlooker.

MINSTRELS, N-WORDS

The David Cameron spoof on Bob Spicer's Piper's site may not be the worst example of racism you'll ever come across, but let's just say the black-and-white minstrels joke is surprisingly insensitive. His fellow-bloggers will be discussing his misdemeanour on 18 Doughty Street tonight. It's a shame Piper is getting all this bad publicity, because his site is generally a fun read.

To be honest, I'm not that shocked he made his faux pas. After all, the etiquette has become so hazy. Take the American stand-up Reginald D. Hunter, who's currently playing the Arts Theatre. He's been making lots of grumpy noises because ads for the show  - which I reviewed last week - are banned from the London Underground. Why? Because it's called Pride & Prejudice & Niggas. Hunter is a thoughtful, comic whose goal is to try and take some of the angst out of the discussion of race. Definitely a worthwhile goal. But I'm surprised he can't see that, whereas nobody batted an eyelid about the poster at the Edinburgh Fringe - a place where anything goes - different rules apply to the Tube, where we're all ultra-sensitive about our personal space, not to mention our sanity. In an interview, Hunter makes a bid for martyrdom:

"I can only speculate that this is a time where race is more of a heightened issue, because of war, immigration and a sense of 'let's not rock the boat; let's call people by their proper names so that nobody will bomb us..."

That sounds more like cynical, let's-put-bums-on-seats PR talk to me. It's simple, really. A poster saying "Niggas" is an intrusion 200 feet below Tottenham Court Road. Some people would take it in a jovial, post-modern spirit. Many others wouldn't. So the best policy is to err on the side of caution. Given the pace at which language changes, it's quite possible that "niggas" will have completely lost its sting five years from now. For the time being, however, we're stick with all the historical baggage.

VERY MUCH A MINORITY

What's it like to be one of the very few brown faces in the "least ethnically diverse area" in Britain? Some encouraging findings in Sarfraz Mansoor's dispatch from deepest County Durham:

They are happy to think their children will be more British than their relatives in Bradford and Birmingham, who are attending schools that are overwhelmingly Asian... Hardly anyone I talked to reported any racism at their children's schools. Jas, a 10-year-old Sikh who attends a local Catholic school, did admit that a white boy had called him a "paki" once. I asked him what happened next? "I called him a white freak."

SPEECH CODE

As the dust settles after the racial tirade by Michael Richards [seen here in the "butter shave" episode, in case you thought you were hallucinating] Christopher Hitchens admits that even he - fearless Hitch, destroyer of taboos - has been known to tread warily around the N-word. As well he should, of course:

It was while giving a speech in Washington, to a very international audience, about the British theft of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as "niggardly." Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved—having felt the word hanging in the air a bit—to say "parsimonious" from then on.

HOT AIR

Somehow, I managed to read all the way through A. Sivanandan’s Guardian attack on the new ethnic manifesto launched by Pickled Politics blogger Sunny Hundal. Do I get a prize? Sivanandan, head of the far-Left Institute of Race Relations, has been turning out polemics like this for more years than I care to remember. I was always amazed that people took him seriously back in the Eighties. To discover he’s still around and still droning on is quite comical, really.

In case you didn’t get the gist, Sunny, the message of every Sivanandan essay is, and always has been:

(a) you other bourgeois bastards aren’t as left-wing as me

(b) up the revolution

(c) there isn't a (c)

MICHAEL RICHARDS' LENNY BRUCE MOMENT

As a Seinfeld fanatic, I’m not sure which is more painful: watching "Kramer’s" rage-fuelled meltdown during a stand-up routine or the halting apology he gave later on the Letterman show. When you see Richards start spewing abuse at black hecklers in the club audience, and then start digging himself even deeper into a hole, you wonder if he’s somehow going to turn it into some ingenious, post-modern critique of the N-word. He almost manages it, in fact. But he can’t. Who could? (BTW, I'm not sure it's correct to describe Richards' targets as "hecklers". From his own comments on the tape, I get the impression it was their chatter that irritated him. But I could be wrong.)

I hope he's forgiven in the end. In the meantime, all those deeply irritating pundits and bloggers who like to complain, in that irritatingly faux-innocent way of theirs, that white people aren’t allowed to use the N-word ought to watch this little episode just to acquaint themselves with real life.

The last time I saw a comedian flirt with danger so brazenly, and still get laughs, was Johnny Vegas. Before he was famous. Belly-achingly funny. Last time I saw him on TV he was being paid to be crude and stupid for the Friday-night, post-pub TV audience. Not funny at all.

RACE RELATIONS UK

I've just been digesting the manifesto that Sunny Hundal, Dave Hill and others have published in the Guardian. It's a dense read, long on aspiration and short on detail, admittedly. But, for me, this is the key para:

The struggle for equality and better access to public services is a struggle for all Britons not just ethnic minorities. White working-class families also face problems with deprivation, injustice and demonisation. Their concerns should not be ignored or blamed on other groups.

As just about everyone agrees now, one of the biggest mistakes of the past 30 or 40 years has been the institutional neglect of the white working class. This passage from my friend Michael Collin’s book, The Likes of Us, puts it in a nutshell. Just the other day, a report brought more data showing how wwc boys have fallen to the bottom of the pile. Since I have a foot in both camps, demographically speaking, I have all the more reason for not wanting to see the social divide grow any wider. But I don't see any sign of trend being reversed just yet.

BARACK

Maybe he'll turn out to be just another flavour of the month, yet there's something compelling about all the attention that Barack Obama has been attracting. (Freudian slip time: I started typing Colin Powell's name just then.) Rod Dreher is definitely tempted:

Obama is, of course, biracial, and literally embodies the racial reconciliation men of goodwill long for... We need at the present time a leader who can speak to our need for a renewed sense of common purpose. Whether Obama is that leader or not I guess time will tell. But the fact that people are going ga-ga over him probably tells us more about us than it does about Barack Obama.

There's no point trying to draw explicit parallels with Britain, because the historical background is so different. Still, I can't help noticing how much more relaxed Britons are, nowadays anyway, about the mixed-race issue. When I was at school, we were a freakish minority, usually "tainted" by lower-class origins. John Conteh, the boxer, was about the only role-model I can remember. Today, Zadie Smith is all the rage, and almost every ad I see has a mixed-race child in it.  Cosmetic, perhaps, but it's still progress.

NOTEBOOK

I started writing about what I was feeling, and I got some pieces included in small publications. I wanted to start developing a body of research towards a book, because there's not the research that would give us any statistics that are really useable. Then I hit on this issue of us really being invisible people. We are Ralph Ellison's invisible man.

-- Larene LaSonde, Decatur, Georgia.

Lise Funderburg, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race & Identity.

BOOK OF NUMBERS

Worthwhile profile of former Tory Minister George Walden, whose new book argues that excessive immigration is bad news for Britain's underclass. (At this point in the conversation I always feel the need to add that my father came here from Jamaica and my wife from Kenya.) Sensibly enough, Walden goes out of his way to emphasize that he's no Enoch Powell - "a romantic nationalist of a malevolent disposition."