Friendship is colour blind and the answer to segregation

I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. There are lots of odd things about being mixed race. But perhaps the oddest I only discovered when I went to primary school: the notion that I should look at my dad and see a brown man, or look at my mum and see a white woman.

It never occurred to me that they were anything other than mum and dad.

To my best friend, Ben, my mum was just my mum. And my dad? Well my dad, to Ben, was Aubergine. Yes, Aubergine.

This is because my dad’s children call him Abagee, the Bengali word for “dad” and the first time Ben came to our house, he misheard when I said “Abagee”. It’s been a joke in our lives ever since.

When I first went to Ben’s house I also discovered they did things differently there.

Tea was a sandwich and they had dinner later, his dad bought little bottles of beer that we were allowed to drink on Ben’s 17th birthday – that would have never happened in my house. His life, in his all-English household, was different to the mixed race family which I knew. I did not react well when I was 13 and visited to find one of the Christmas tree decorations in his house was a Golliwog.

Life’s rich tapestry and all that.

I had the experience of seeing such an – to me – unusual decoration because my best friend was white. And my best friend had the unusual experience of thinking his best friend’s dad was called Aubergine because his best friend was mixed race.

It turns out Ben and I – best friends to this day – are pretty unusual. According to new research, just one in 10 Britons has a best friend from a different ethnic background.

The research was carried out by The Challenge Network, a national charity founded in 2009 with the mission to connect and inspire people to strengthen their communities.

Carrying out the study with more than 2,000 adults, the organisation discovered that just 10 per cent of British people had a best friend from a different ethnic background when they were at school and the same number had a best friend of a different ethnic background as adults.

The Challenge Network’s co-founder and chief executive Craig Morley said: “As UK communities become increasingly diverse, there is a very real danger 
they actually become more segregated.

“We need policies that actively promote integration, rather than foster segregation and ultimately lead to greater social isolation.

“We rightly celebrate the rich mix of people and culture in this country, but when you dig a little deeper you find that vast numbers are living parallel lives and interacting only with people very similar to themselves.”

This failure to mix with others who are “other” does not appear necessarily to be limited to a specific race.

Preveena Kulaveerasingam, a young woman who took part in the survey says: “During my time at school I tended to socialise with those who were the same ethnicity as me”. While a white British schoolboy, Frank Forrester, says: “At secondary school, it is quite hard to mix with people who are different to you. People generally stick with people who seem familiar, with race often playing a huge role in that.”

So why are we still so segregated? Apartheid South Africa is as far back as we need look to see that segregation is not a recipe for a happy society and despite what some of Britain’s contemporary leaders might have us believe, many people do not feel that multi-culturalism has failed.

Perhaps we just fail to take best advantage of it.

After reading about The Challenge Network’s research, I sent Ben, now a BBC journalist, a message. Were we really that unusual? I mean, Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson collaborated to make beautiful music as far back as the early 1980s when Ben and I were becoming friends.

And if we are unusual, what does it mean that he and I have a best friend of a different race?

“It means you order when we go out for a curry,” was Ben’s typically useful answer. That’s how best friends talk.

He did later add: “Maybe it’s because you’re Westernised? I’m not closed-minded? Maybe after all’s said and done, two people met young, liked each other and grew up together, sharing the whole gamut of each other’s lives along the way. Nothing more complicated than a very close friendship that’s endured.”

Seems about right. Race doesn’t even come into it. I’m one of the lucky ones.

[email protected]