Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Segregation by class and race still a live issue

Donald Trump looks at the American flag at a campaign rally in Michigan on Sunday. Picture by Paul Sancya, Associated Press
Donald Trump looks at the American flag at a campaign rally in Michigan on Sunday. Picture by Paul Sancya, Associated Press Donald Trump looks at the American flag at a campaign rally in Michigan on Sunday. Picture by Paul Sancya, Associated Press

TRAVEL, it’s said, broadens the mind so a while spent living somewhere other than your birthplace ought to expand horizons even further.

An American year’s work exchange begun halfway through the 1981 hunger strikes was educational on segregation and racism, still useful now several surveys find Britain more segregated than ever, with America split about race beyond disguise, as demonstrated by the election campaign that ends on Tuesday.

In New Haven, Connecticut, the first jolt was how segregated by race this northern, East Coast city remained. Of 30 or so reporters, two were black.

The sole black photographer laughed with scorn to hear that this set-up gunked the newcomer. ‘Heard we were getting an Irishwoman – I hoped you’d be black.’

Irish-Americans were welcoming, hospitable, some thrown to discover the visiting reporter was Catholic married to a Protestant but keen on meeting, their first friendly encounter with a northerner of the breed.

Where hackles rose and conversation wobbled was over race. Not only with the Irish although others were better at hiding it from us.

Stay away from downtown, said one friendly guide after another. Don’t go into the centre if you don’t have to. Random violence there, dangerous even by daylight.

Belfast conditioning suggested this was exaggeration and said go and have a look. It turned out that downtown was, sort of, black.

Very black after Belfast. New Haven’s residents of colour did not reside in the newspaper district but they did trek in and out of the centre.

Yale, the city’s pride and joy (with starkly contrasting perimeter of low-income ‘projects’) was not in 1981 very joyous for or at all familiar to ‘minorities.’ Drugs and related crime, that was more of a ‘minority’ thing.

This caused a bit of culture shock after years reporting back home on ‘minority’, that is, Catholic disadvantage. We found no more mixing than at home, small sign of inter-race friendship.

Raise the subject on social occasions and you chilled the mood, checked the flow. In Irish-American company tempers bubbled up. How would we know anything about another race, this different society?

Years later, an otherwise open-minded editor in a British journal prepared, slowly, to print that a Troubles settlement might need to recognise Britain had left an uneven playing-field in the north of Ireland, a society split on sectarian though perfectly rational lines.

But he became ratty at incidental mention of a persistent divide in his own country. He was American of migrant stock, but dismissive of race memories.

He was shocked to discover how segregated Northern Ireland was in housing and schooling. He wouldn’t have it that so was the US. Racism was a faded problem, an old story.

The other day a (London) Times article by another senior staffer from the American’s outfit rued the lasting social effects of private education. Her children had begun to regret that they found themselves socialising at university, almost exclusively, with students from their own kind of schools.

The article began with a throwaway regret that the writer had been ‘forced’ to choose private education by the state of British education.

There was zilch recognition that choosing and thus maintaining private education might help to blight the system.

Segregation by class as well as race – at least we don’t have that. We do, of course. We call it the grammar school system, or selective education, a clue in the adjective.

At the height of the Troubles when British journalists arrived one vexation was their scorn for segregated education. A considerable number professed shock at our separate communities, but our schools explained that.

We were a prejudiced shower; no wonder we had Troubles. But many, like the lofty publication that hired the American - and the rueful mother of university students who only hang out with others schooled like themselves - matched distaste for our segregation with admiration for our grammar schools.

Maybe not enough of us relayed the downside of selection; secondary schools robbed of teaching talent, resources, self-esteem, the divide inside communities that came as children hit 11+. ‘After this exam some of you are headed for university and the rest of you will be digging ditches’ as a teacher in the late 1950s put it to a class of Belfast boys.

‘True, I never saw most of that class again’, says an academic high-achiever who went on to teach, then lecture.

Compulsory inter-marriage might be just the thing. Though the Balkans are a reminder that integration doesn’t always put division, and racism, to sleep forever.