Is it normal to live in London for 60 years and not more than 2 non-white friends?

[MareofBeasttown]

I am Indian and new to the UK. I was reading Lucy Kellaway's new book Reeducated, and mostly enjoying it ( am a fan of her work). But then rather thrown by this paragraph where she says she has lived in London all her life but never had more than 2 or 3 non-white, non Oxbridge friends! Find this incredibly strange, especially as I have only been here a year and already have friends of all races ( perhaps because I have been actively looking and can't think of anything more boring than sticking with your own race). I do find that well-intentioned people are constantly recommending Indian things and Indian clubs to me. I didn't come here to stick with my 'tribe' though.

oh @careerchangeperhaps your experience would be bound to be different because you live in Devon, I guess.

Quite possible depending on what social circles and where you live in London. Fortunately the PC stazi haven't gotten round to ensuring I have a diverse mix of friends yet.

Sigh. I would think a journalist would be interested in meeting people ( I am also one). Nothing to do with PC stazi.

I still think it is a bit odd that she never met anyone else ( maybe from the schools of her 4 children?)

Ah, now - she didn't say she never met anyone outside her narrow stratum of society. She said she didn't have friends 'outside'.

She might have been on good terms with her foreign nanny / au pair. She almost certainly would have engaged in friendly conversation with other school gate parents - but never have invited them home, except perhaps to pick up their small children after a party. She would have regularly passed the time of day and asked after the unseen families of her local corner shop / deli / dry cleaners / car servicers / caterers - many of whom would not be white. But she wouldn't have invited them to stay in Tuscany with her, skied with them, spent New Year's Eve with them. And she wouldn't have carefully cultivated their friendship with one eye on her children's emergence into adult life.

There's a difference.

Oh yay, we're already at 'Britain is a white country really!" and "so I have to be friends with brown people even if I don't like them!" and "PC Stazi". But we live in a post-racial world, yo! I don't see colour! My black friend said I'm not racist!

@Edmontine hmmmm... interesting.

I also think the world is flatter now than when Lucy was growing up because the internet has removed a lot of cultural differences. Everybody is now listening to the same music, watching the same shows, and reading the same books but that wasn't the case when she was growing up. I am a generation below her. And ofc my son is two generations below.

I dont find it that surprising. Although I dont have many friends - so two or three would be = 50% or so. My kids go to a fairly diverse school, but the parents dont mix across class / job / education lines much.

It's not normal to me. I can't imagine a workplace in London which isn't diverse. If I look around at my team now it is more than 60% non white people, and about 1/4 of people don't speak English as their first language. I consider that to be very normal. I don't class all those people as 'close friends' but would still socialise with them outside of the workplace regularly (COVID excepting) which makes them friends in my books.

If I look around at my friends from outside of work it is less diverse and the majority of them are white (like me), with a few non white friends. I think this is because my friends are from sports, and the sport itself isn't particularly diverse.

So overall, I can see how you might have a less diverse cast of friends outside work, and maybe once you retire you lose those working connections. I don't think most people in London live that kind of segregated life though, especially if they have hobbies that bring them into contact with a cross section of London society.

Great Britain is still a majority white country and it's not racist to state that fact.

Who said it was @OdetoMyFamily ?

Regardless, the majority doesn't matter. If you take a cross section of society, around 13% were non-white 10 years ago, and I bet that number has increased. In London, 40% of people are non-white.

When the proportion of non-white people is so high, you really have to be going out of your way to not have many of them as friends.

I am Indian as well, although here since I was 16 and married to a British Indian. Also living in London.

Lucy Kellaway (of whom I was a huge fan when she was at the FT) occupies a strange position in the English class structure, I think. There are many, many older British whose background is state schools and whose family heritage is quite humble but free education (as it was then) at grammar schools and Oxbridge have allowed them to enter previously privileged white male Establishment environments. They have tried to assimilate into that culture and not do anything that compromises or questions the new posh identity they have acquired. Boris Johnson’s past is a bit like this too.

I can’t speak for privileged Africans but if you as an Indian person who could afford to educate your children in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, you would have been moving in another cultural milieu too - that of the global rich. (Many assume I am of that ilk but actually my father worked for a MNC which paid!) Many of our friends are English white upper class, but they don’t have a chimera they need to preserve for personal or professional reasons.

I lived in London during my teens, 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. I've had colleagues, bosses and friends from all ethnic backgrounds.

On the flip side, my Dad came over to London from Ireland in 1970 and lived here nearly 40 years before returning home. He only ever had two non-Irish friends, both also immigrants (Jamaican & Pakistani). He never made a single white British friend, although he was on polite, friendly terms with English neighbours, colleagues etc.

He only really mixed in Irish pubs & clubs, went to Irish cultural events, worked in construction with a load of Irish guys and married an Irish woman.

When the proportion of non-white people is so high, you really have to be going out of your way to not have many of them as friends.

I agree with this. It isn’t simple racism though. It’s class prejudice, too. She was making friends with upper middle class people to “get on in society.”

I have not read Kellaway’s books so this could be nonsense. I am just speculating. She is of a type and I may be guilty of prejudice too.

In my profession you'd have to try quite hard to only have 2 or 3 non-white friends. And I've spent the last 5 years in both Oxford and Cambridge, both me and DP work alongside a high number of oxbridge graduates! I have lots of friends from many ethnic backgrounds, through work or university or sports clubs.

No one is saying you have to go out of your way to make friends with non-white British people, but surely you meet people from non-white British backgrounds all the time and so by chance at least some of these people will become your friends?

The country has definitely changed a lot in the last 50 years. Certainly the sort of upper middle class people you are talking about moved in circles where people would make friends at a good school, oxbridge, work in a posh company and so on. They would live in a fancy part of London with other wealthy families who would probably be white too.

It was the case for my mum who is now 70 and not from such a posh background, she is very much not a racist but just didn't meet many non white people, she came from a small Sussex village went to grammar school in a local town and a reasonable uni and teacher training college this was in the 1960s and she had no non white friends I know of when I was growing up even though we moved around the country quite a few times. When she retrained as a nurse in the 90s and started work in the NHS is when she started to meet a lot of people of different ethnicities and make friends with them. We now live in a nearby area to where my mum grew up and my dd has a number of non-white friends from school and I am sure she will meet a lot more people from different ethnic backgrounds at uni. So there has been a big change in those 2 generations.

I live in south London and am the author's age group and find it hard to imagine having only white friends. I have been used to a mix of ethnicities all around me both as colleagues and neighbours, as well as the mothers of my children's friends. Equally both at home and work, a mix of classes is normal.

but surely you meet people from non-white British backgrounds all the time and so by chance at least some of these people will become your friends?

I don't think it's uncommon for people to not really add to their friendship circle once they reach their mid 20s. The majority of my friends are either from school or university.

I can see how that happens though, although I would never actively seek out oxbridge, upper middle class friends. I started off in a City company only populated by those people (they used to joke I was their tick box diversity person - yes I didn't find it funny at the time either). And now, 20 years later, I find that all of my close friends are white and middle class, even though I live in a very diverse part of London.

My children go to diverse schools, but as they have got older, I've also seen their friendship groups get whiter. They know this has happened, and blame the selective (which definitely has reduced the number of non-white children at the school) nature of the 6th forms they go to

I'm 50, in London (North), born and bred.

In primary school we didn't have any non-white kid. In secondary we had 2 black kids and 5 Asian kids. I was and am still friends with one of the black kids.

I've got a wide circle of black work mates but we are like family more than friends and due to the work I do we don't see each other outside of work.

Both my kids went to diverse schools and have friends from all backgrounds.

So yes. Its more than possible.

@drainrat I don't think Lucy is racist, or I would have said so. I am far too new to the country to judge that, but I just found it a little odd perhaps, but then the posts here have pointed out things I have not considered. DS, 17, has friends of all races who have actually invited him over to their houses ( he is wary bcos of Covid so prefers to meet outside) but he is sporty and I expect that is the great unifying factor for teen boys! Harder to make friends later in life.

I went to school in London in the 80's and they were very diverse. Had friends, well still do, that came from a multitude of backgrounds
The school in the sticks I went not at all diverse.
As an adult friends range from working class to mega loaded, from a variety races.
I don't go seeking people out.

The UK has always been diverse just look at the history well before the 1920's.

I was privately educated, and about 10% of the pupils were non-white, split between Caribbean service brats and Hong Kong Chinese. Our cadet squadron commander was Asian and took no bullshit. Uni came as a surprise, as it was whiter than school and much more racist.

I don't have many friends, but the non-white guys at work are all Geordies by speech and culture. Where we lived before there was a far higher proportion of BAME people, but little social mixing.

I agree this is weird. Although DH's cousin is the same - she is from and lives in London and at her birthday party a few years ago there was 1 non-white person.

I have loads of friends from different ethnicities and am in the north west. It is odd

There are many forms of racism though, @MareofBeasttown and one is definitely profiling people with different coloured skin as unworthy of attention and unlikely enhance your prospects. It’s the Pretty Woman shop prejudice in professional life.