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.

Surely you make friends with people that you come into contact with that you feel you have something in common with.

DD has a very diverse friendship group (they call themselves the United nations) as does DS. They both went to local grammar schools which are more diverse than the local area.

I'm mid 50s and have never had a non white friend. Looking back at school, university, jobs - most people there were white. Even at my DC's primary school most of the school gate mums were white.

The cities that I've lived in are described as diverse - Manchester, London, Bristol - but the pockets that I've lived in, not so much.

@MareofBeastTown, I just want to say thanks for letting me put a face to who this person is. I had vaguely registered a new memoir being mentioned but had not related it to the woman I heard on the radio a few years ago talking about changing her career from highly successful economist to trainee maths teacher. At the time I was very irritated and in the words of another thread thought 'aye right' because that is such a bloody over-priviliged thing to do. And of course go on the BBC to talk about and then to set up your very own pet charity. So you'll gather a fair amount of class resentment going on here. Also age regret on my part as she and I are the same age, from childhood I said I wanted to be a teacher but for various reasons (some economic some personal but all deeply based in the British class system) I never succeeded at even a modest level and have retreated to a life full of nothingness. So I was interested to see how she got on, had a quick read of a review which presents her as being approprately modestly mixed in results of her experiment and as you say one of her self-reported demerits is insufficient social racial diversity. I gather from the review she has had to face up to her own privilege and prejudices so bully for her but really what is the point? Successful woman succeeds some more? It is like this latest madcap BJohnson talk of 'levelling up' - nonsense. Not until the children of the super privileged are seen to be failing in heaps and feeling the consequences will anything change and that ain't going to happen. As she says she did not let her son fail as many of the kids she is teaching will fail.

@crapbuttrue if you want to know their heritage why don’t you ask that question? My friend is fed up of being asked where she is really from. She is really from London. What’s ridiculous is another friend who was born overseas but is white is never asked where they are really from.

@MareofBeasttown yes I do think it’s odd. Just from DS’s school I have made parent friends that are very mixed. I’ll agree with PP who say class is the biggest barrier and will admit that I don’t really have friends outside of my class.

I'm a Londoner (born in the 80s) & until I went to uni was never friends or friendly enough to know anyone who wasn't a 2nd gen immigrant but my area of London was incredibly diverse. But my friends from uni & work are 2nd gen immigrants so perhaps subconsciously you seek out similar?

I still live in the same area & it's very undiverse (?) now. My neighbours are 90% white & english & they probably see that in their work too. I have a young pair of siblings who recently became neighbours & were bought the property by their parents. They had a birthday recently & I was really surprised that out of 20 or so young people they were all white.

London as a whole is diverse, but some pockets of it aren't particularly.

I agree with this, the diversity is concentrated in certain pockets & I think soaring house prices have made communities more homogenous.

I 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)

You have managed to make loads of close friends after only a year and especially during the pandemic and lockdown? How did that happen? Can you explain? You must be some kind of phenomenon worthy of the Guiness book

You sound creepy OP

I live in rural Yorkshire and have 2 non-white friends so yes she's probably doing particularly badly to manage only 2 non-white friends in London!!

I think if you move to an ethnically diverse area in a different country as an adult and start making friends, it can be very different. You are far more open to making new friends as childhood/university friends are no longer available.

How many of the friends you grew up with in India are racially diverse?

Not until the children of the super privileged are seen to be failing in heaps and feeling the consequences

Why do you want children to fail? What an odd thing to say

I'm Scottish but lived in London in the 90s. My friends were all people i knew from uni or school who also moved to London or people they had met at work. Had one black friend who DH met through his work who was also the only born and bred Londoner. Worked in a very white sector (DHs friend was an outlier)
Didn't need new friends as had plenty!
I notice a difference in the diversity of London when I visit now just in the people I see on public transport, its noticeably less "white" now.
It would be different if I'd gone to school in London, even my small town Scottish children have more diversity in their friend groups these days.
You tend to make friends at certain points in your life and then the rate you aquire them slows down.

Most Asians here are on professional visas and that creates a social divide between them and people with post-colonial nationality rights

This is stereotyping and completely inaccurate. I have two friends, (second generation British Indian) that I met at work. Both highly educated and with successful careers. Same for another Indian friend on a professional visa also doing very well. So this 'divide' does not exist.

What all of them have in common is that they are the nicest, kindest down-to-earth people. I can't imagine them getting worked up about any of this woke nonsense or trying to pick friends based on race.

The OP being a journalist and long-time expat may explain things. Where did you live before OP?

All the people I know who have been brought up as expats like the OP are very good at establishing new friendship groups quickly, much better than me!

@NiceGerbil

'Most Asians here are on professional visas and that creates a social divide between them and people with post-colonial nationality rights.'

Here in London? In the UK???

Are you entirely serious?

It's certainly a misconception.

2nd / 3rd / 4th / etc generation people of Asian heritage living in, say, Luton, Bolton or Bradford are clearly not waving high powered professional visas in the air. And I doubt that visa / immigration status is at the forefront of their minds as a point of separation from their black, British neighbours, co-workers or friends.

I could be wrong, of course. But everyone's perception is linked to their own experience and environment ...

What she's really asking is what's their heritage, what's their culture. There isn't an issue in wanting to know that. Once you know someone is Scottish or Welsh for example it sets them in a cultural background that is an important part (usually) of their identity.

Right, and its not like many brown-skinned people have talked at length about how racist and othering the question "where are you really from?" is.

If my friends want me to know about their "heritage", they'll tell me.

Also, whattthefuck on the "most Asian people are on professional visas" comment? Don't you know any British history?

I don’t think it’s shocking given her age.

My close friends fall into 4 categories: school friends, uni friends, work friends (from my training days at the start of my career) and mum friends. Clearly with school, uni and work there is the potential for massive class (and consequently racial, in this country at least) differences. LK went to a “posh” state school, then Oxbridge, then JP Morgan in the 70s-90s - they certainly wouldn’t have been racially diverse at the time she was there. And then mum friends - if you send your kids to private schools as she did it will be similar.

There are areas of London that are less diverse that what they were 20 years ago

Or little pickets of highly predominately white mc families who have been priced out of Blackheath. Dulwich, Wimbledon, Clapham and moved to Balham, Ladywell, Forest Hill, Tooting, Streatham, Brixton, Crystal Palace (this in sure has happened in other areas of London)

And schools in the area will reflect this. You will have schools very close to each other where the diversity levels are very very different

This impacts friendship groups

Little pockets ... not pickets

I suspect the pickets are assumed ...

I don't know the book or the author but it might be more proportionate than it sounds- perhaps she only has a small number of friends?

Never really thought about it much, but I think pretty much everyone I knew at uni was white. I'm not just talking about my friends, I'm talking about people on my course. The entire student body wasn't white, but the people in my immediate sphere were.

These days, the people I'm friends with, my neighbours, my colleagues - there's a lot more diversity there. I've never consciously made a decision to mix or not mix with people based on their ethnic background, but these days, I live in London. It's just more diverse around these parts, so naturally, the people you interact with end up being more diverse. It's just situational.

I think I have been misunderstood here: my remark about professional visas was in response to another poster about first generation immigrants (like myself) being welcomed into posh white country house society but many British Indians are not.

If your company move you, install you in a nice home in a smart part of London, and pay for your child to attend a prestigious school, your life and culture is probably quite different to someone whose great grandparents arrived in 1946 to work in a cotton mill and who’s remained in West Yorkshire ever since.

I did a bit of Wiki reading on Lucy Kellaway and she’s a state school teacher’s daughter who married the Etonian grandson of a Lehman Brothers founder. Straight forward social climbing and marrying well, so I called it from the beginning.

No, I didn’t study British history. Why would I if I grew up in other countries?

@mustlovegin

I 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)

You have managed to make loads of close friends after only a year and especially during the pandemic and lockdown? How did that happen? Can you explain? You must be some kind of phenomenon worthy of the Guiness book

You sound creepy OP

I've made loads of new friends over lockdown :/

What's creepy about that?

Edmontine

I went to s selective private school n London 80s and about 30 % of children were of Asian descent.

Went on to be doctors lawyers etc etc same as most of the school. (Not me though! Missed the memo!).

There've been stacks of highly educated professional people with Asian backgrounds here for yonks. In this area anyway.