White Guilt

It will be 55 years this December since one of my heroes, a lady, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a man. It’s 40 -odd years since the sufferers of the religion of White Guilt imported a distorted version of the Civil Rights campaign, of which she became an icon, from the United States and began the great shaming of white England as one condition of the founding of a new social equality. The other condition was, of course, the shaming of non-white England into sharing the ridiculous and totally unfounded belief that somehow the colour of their skin made them incapable of competing in society on the same level as the white majority. Frederick Douglass had it about right a century and a half ago: What did he have right?

On a recent post by Araminta, my attention was caught by this:

why we may have more of a problem with assimilation than younger democracies.

and this:

with goodwill and determination on both sides

These quotes raise a number of questions. What is this ‘problem with assimilation? Historically the United Kingdom, more specifically, England, has ‘assimilated’ immigrants from all sorts of cultures. When groups of people have been at need, the UK has opened its doors, if not entirely its arms, and invited them in – the last such (large) group I can think of being the Ugandan Asians chucked out by Idi Amin. That group of people ‘assimilated’ without too much trouble – yes, some of them suffered discrimination in some cases, but they sucked it up and got on with it. What is the problem with assimilation?