Tina Fry and Ken Barnett, together 14 years, say they still encounter stares and discomfort whenever they travel outside Slough. Pictured with them are their daughter, Naomi, 7, left, and son, Ricky, 13, above. (By Janet Jarman for The Washington Post)

Last of three articles

By John Burgess
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 7, 1998; Page A1

SLOUGH, England – There were some awkward moments on the vacation trip that Georgina Coke and Gary Swanson took to the United States. One day they checked into a hotel, and the clerk took it for granted that Georgina was some kind of singer and Gary her manager – so naturally they would want separate rooms. Later, they had a fender-bender accident, and the people in the other car focused not on the damage, but on the fact that the two tourists with the strange accents seemed to be a couple.

They laugh about these incidents now, five years later. They like the United States, but are glad they live where they do, in Slough, a bedroom community 20 miles west of central London. They don't turn heads here. They are simply two halves of another interracial marriage – he a white man from southeastern England, she a black woman of Jamaican-African descent – in a country where British-born blacks may be five times more likely to marry whites than in the United States.

Race and ethnic heritage are important concerns for Gary and Georgina, but hardly the only ones. They are raising children, pursuing careers in aircraft maintenance and local government, spending weekends on errands and outings to fruit orchards or fishing ponds. Gary sums it up this way: "We're a married couple trying to get on with life."

Across Britain, acceptance of marriages like theirs varies by town and social station. Being middle-class in a generally tranquil community of many colors like Slough helps. But by many accounts, Britain at large is paying less and less attention to color differences between married couples as times goes on. "Society has grown up a bit," says Georgina.

In the view of some people, the many marriages like theirs will "smooth out" over time the racial tensions that remain as Britain has emerged as a multi-racial society. "It will take a few generations," says Liz Davis, a teaching assistant at a Slough school that has many interracial children. But eventually, she predicts, "the two groups will merge."

Other people hope that the blending will not be total. They worry about the possible eradication of some ethnic traditions if the ways of mainstream white society prove the more resilient.

The British experience demonstrates that the effect of laws and social programs and electoral politics on multi-ethnic societies can take a back seat to that most fundamental of human actions, falling in love and starting a family. What impact the British marriages will have remains unclear, but there are so many that whatever it is, it will be visible soon.

(The Washington Post)

The Empire Upside Down

Many of the inequalities of wealth and power that defined the empire continue, at times spawning inner-city despair, courtroom battles and outbursts of violence in the streets. But when it comes to the choices that go to form new families, it's often a different story.

A survey published last year found that about half the black men of Caribbean descent born in Britain who were married or living as married had paired with a white. About a third of black women of Caribbean descent born in Britain had done so. The rates were lower among British-born people whose forbears had come from India, but they were still substantial – about 20 percent for men and 10 percent for women, according to the study by the Policy Studies Institute, a British research organization.

Anecdotal evidence confirms the numbers. Interracial couples walk hand-in-hand at London street fairs, with no apparent concern for how people around them will react. In television comedies and dramas, romance routinely cuts across racial lines. Last summer, with globe-girdling publicity, inter-ethnic dating came to the British royal family, the ultimate seat of tradition and racial purity, as Princess Diana took up with Egyptian-born Dodi Fayed.

Finding analogous numbers for the United States is difficult, but those that are available suggest much lower rates of interracial marriage. For instance, two scholars who specialize in population studies, Douglas J. Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and Timothy S. Sullivan of Southern Illinois University, concluded in a study that in 1993 about 8.9 percent of black men who married in the United States married whites, while 3.9 percent of black brides married whites.

Britain's figures turn upside down the racial relations of empire days. The whites who went abroad for king and country were often obsessive in avoiding formal liaisons with the people they ruled – although the number of interracial children indicates that clandestine sexual relations, consensual or otherwise, were common enough. Twentieth-century British fiction has often featured plots built around people who dared cross that line – that's how exotic it was as material.

(The Washington Post)

Theories abound about why things are so much more relaxed at home. Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the Sri Lankan-born director of the Institute of Race Relations, a London study group, suggests only half jokingly that it's a "delayed reaction." Whites in colonized countries, adopting an air of superiority, steeled themselves against the scent of curry, the ties of extended family, the natural beauty of the people; now there is longer any reason to resist.

Another theory is that Britain is simply doing what it's always done. Despite its long reputation as a racial and cultural monolith, British society is in fact the product of thousands of years of intermarriage between locals and newcomers.

In successive waves from the European continent came Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans. No doubt some North Africans came in Roman times; in 1555, the history books say, London's black population was reestablished by five Africans who arrived to learn English for trading purposes. By 1596, there were sufficiently large numbers of them that Queen Elizabeth I tried unsuccessfully to expel them, on grounds they were not Christians and were taking jobs from her subjects.

In Britain, "there's a history of seeing people of different shades for a long, long time," said Herman Ousley, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, an independent agency that the government funds to oversee racial issues in Britain.

The final years of empire brought a new influx, from the colonies. After World War II, Britain was struggling to rebuild its economy and found that it could solve a severe labor shortage by opening its doors. People came by the shipload. Under a 1948 law, they arrived with full legal rights as citizens – in theory, at least.

In the postwar period, British cities became studded with mosques and Hindu temples. The newcomers brought music and food and ways of dress that began to transform Anglo-Saxon culture. Parts of London became home base for different ethnic communities – Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, Caribbeans in Brixton, for instance.

Britain is no stranger to incidents of racial violence. In Tower Hamlets and elsewhere, for example, Bangladeshis have been beaten up by skinhead gangs in attacks called "Paki-bashing." In South London, there have been random attacks on blacks. In general, nonwhite Britons complain of discrimination, of police harassment, of being excluded from the nation's intricate class structure.

Yet, on the whole, racial tensions on the streets of Britain seem low to American visitors. "I'm very sensitive to vibes coming from other people," Sivanandan said. But "I'm not on tenterhooks here anymore."