Is my best friend racist?

[Newnamefortouchysubject]

Visited my best friend today for lunch and had a conversation that has left me confused, so thought I'd bring it to the MN table.
We were talking about immigration, refugees and asylum seekers.
My friend says the issue is not the colour of people's skin, but rather their culture.
She has no problem with people who wish to settle here when they embrace the UK culture.
Her attitude is that multicultural societies are almost impossible to implement to everyones satisfaction because different cultures have such widely opposing beliefs and values and she believes it is unrealistic to expect to integrate many different cultures and values without considerable conflict between the different cultures.
Furthermore, she believes it is so difficult to integrate different cultures that people of the same ethnicity will inevitably gravitate towards each other and form their own social groups to the exclusion of other ethnic groups, so the whole idea of integration is pointless anyway.
We just end up with lots of different groups of people isolating themselves from other groups who don't share their ethnicity.
She is firmly of the belief that tensions that people describe as racially motivated actually stem from cultural differences, that she knows no one who has any issue with people of different races when they adopt the culture of the country they choose to migrate to, and that the tension is created by ethnic differences and their cultural differences.

I still say this is racism because racism also includes discriminating against people based on their ethnicity. She called me naive if I believe a truly multicultural society is possible when 'you wouldn't even tolerate a friend who has the same ethnicity as you but doesn't share your values so how do you expect to embrace someone's complete different way of life'.
I explained that the way other people choose to live their lives doesn't affect me. She called me naive again at this point and said when people don't have the same values, when they live according to different social rules, it affects people living in their vicinity who don't live like that.

Im not sure whether to raise the subject with her again, or let it lie because she seemed quite adamant and I'm not sure I could make her see this is still racist.

Now I'm wondering if I don't understand what racism is. Maybe I am naive.

By your logic we should deport white people because most murderers and rapists in the UK are white.

They also don’t pay tax, which is a huge incentive.

What are your British values and how have immigrants not embraced them?

Saudi has a different model for finding government. They don’t charge anyone income tax. They do charge 20% corporation tax and they tax exports in line with OPEC.

I regard multiculturalism as an utter failure and one I hope that will be put right.

So what do you hope Reform will do then? Send immigrants and children of immigrants back? What will be your threshold for people who can stay?

That’s a ludicrously reductive question. You can’t reduce culture to a list of values. Culture is the complex and subtle interplay of shared heritage, practices, dispositions and social expectations. Most of it is unsaid. Anyone who has spent any time living in different cultures will have experienced putting their foot in it because they didn’t know the unsaid ‘rule’ and that’s just as true of people moving to Britain.

The point is, it’s a totally different model to most countries so not a valid comparison.

@pearcrumblee said other cultures living in this country ‘should embrace our British values’

I’m asking what those values are.

Why is that a ludicrous question? Did you also think @pearcrumblee ‘s comment was ludicrous?

Most countries is an overstep and it doesn’t invalidate the PP’s comparison. It’s wrong to only compare with other similar countries when looking for a global example that highlights a cultural difference, but you will still find cultural differences. They will just be more subtle because of shared heritage.

There are 48 Muslim majority countries in the world, most of which have social norms and laws that are broadly duppprtive of Islamic teaching. This includes varying degrees of restriction in clothing. Most of these countries have some form of autocratic government. Many have internationally competitive tax regimes that encourage inward investment. Few allow foreign nationals to naturalise as citizens base purely on residency.

Rule of law
Democracy
Individual liberty
Mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs

Under individual liberty, girls should not be forced to wear hijabs or made to have arranged marriages. There is still a lot of honour killings in this country.

Under mutual respect and tolerance - Language helps community cohesion and encourages shared experiences. We have so many people who cannot speak English fluently in this country and they end up living in certain geographic pockets within towns. This does not support social cohesion.

Also, it seems to me anyone can criticise Christianity but when we have criticism of some other particular faiths, there is anger and protest. This country was built on freedom of speech, this should be embraced.

As part of the Prevent program, the British govt defined British values as...

Democracy
The rule of law
Individual liberty
Mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs

What she’s said is true. She’s just stating facts. People do tend to stick to what they know. Hence the large British ex Pat communities abroad.

I think the term ‘British values’ is a weak one, but the idea that integration is necessary for permanent immingration to succeed is just common sense. There are only really two logical outcomes of inward migration: integration into the host culture or balkanisation. The latter, as we saw in the Balkans, leads to social tensions, reductions in civil liberties like free speech to try to control those social tensions, and can end in civil war. It’s possible to have high levels of culturally uninterested immigration if they are expats who go home and don’t put increasing pressure on the host population. That’s the model popular in the Middle East.

Most immigrants do follow these rules. And many white people don’t follow them.

And yet you are only picking on immigrants. Why is that?

It’s possible to have high levels of culturally uninterested immigration if they are expats who go home and don’t put increasing pressure on the host population. That’s the model popular in the Middle East.

Would those uninterested immigrants be offered tax free salaries? And how would that go down with the rest of the population?

These are extremely generic. Culture is lived daily. Highly abstract, universal western values are not enough to ensure successful integration. It’s actually indicative of a cultural mismatch we’ve had between our government and people in recent years. Britain has inherited a king tradition of grassroots-up practices, such as common law, a representative parliament that is very many centuries older than our democracy and which influenced our FPTP model, and even our philosophy. The British (and American) philosophical tradition is inductive. It prefers a form of logic based on accumulated experience. By contrast, the French (and broader European) model is based on deductive logic that uses a priori, top-down truths, just as it’s constitutional legal system is based on top-down laws or edicts, not common law. Our politicians have long had a love affair with the French way of doing things and have made all sorts of decisions that are antithetical to our tradition of government and jurisprudence. The idea that you can reduce British values to an abstracted list is one of them.

I agree with your friend Op, and I'm a second generation immigrant to the UK.

Expats in Saudi are offered the same tax situation as locals. By contrast, western governments tend to have higher taxes for their own citizens and preferential lower tax regimes such as golden visas for rich expats. The tightening of those rules on non-doms in the U.K., which limits the number of years they can benefits from such a tax regime, has caused ruffles. However Starmer has just signed a treaty with India which means British employers will not have to pay employer National Insurance (average 13.8%) on thr salaries of Indus national who move to the U.K. for their first 3 years here. That will create a high tax incentive to employ Indian nationals instead of British nationals.

Tell us you don’t have any black or brown friends without telling us you don’t have any black or brown friends.

You’re going off on a tangent here. The vast majority of immigrants pay the same taxes as everyone else.

You asked a question about tax. I answered it. The answer in brief is we do offer preferential tax regimes to immigrants.

Rich people tend to be given incentives. But the vast majority of immigrants aren’t on golden visas and pay taxes like ordinary citizens.

I agree with your friend

If I migrate to another country, I will make every effort to learn their language and to get involved in the community. It is far harder for the host country residents and less beneficial for them to learn my language and to alter their lives around me.

I have not mentioned anyone’s race. If we allow the worlds immigrants to flood this country without integration then we will become those countries they are fleeing.

The race card seems to be always used to shut down healthy discussions around migration.

Your friend is right. It’s actually refreshing that there are people out there who are realistic about this sort of thing.