Radiyah and Olivia live in Oldham and are best friends. They are 12 years old and met on transition day, when primary school students are introduced for the first time to their secondary school. They have been inseparable ever since. Olivia says one thing that binds them together is that they both love the colour purple. She thinks Radiyah is crazy and Radiyah thinks Olivia is crazy. “When she sees my brother at school she always says, ‘Hi brother,’” Radiyah says. “She never says, ‘Hi Radiya’s brother’. It’s crazy.” Olivia accepts that it is a bit crazy.
They help each other with homework. Radiyah excels at science and English. Olivia is solid at maths.
Olivia does not attend church, but Radiyah, like almost every Asian student in the school, goes to mosque. What does Olivia think of Radiyah’s culture? “They work so hard for what they believe in. They pray five times a day, they fast. I admire that.”
For her part, Radiyah confesses to some envy that white people are so “chilled out”. “Sometimes, if I’m in the middle of something, and I have to go and pray, it’s annoying.”
Last Ramadan, Olivia attempted to fast in solidarity with her best friend, but she survived about 15 minutes. “Maybe less,” Radiyah scoffs.
“Well, I can’t go for long without water,” Olivia explains. “But I try not to eat and drink in front of Radiyah during Ramadan because it’s unfair on her.”
Radiyah laughs. “I don’t know if I’d do that for her.”
Radiyah and Olivia’s friendship is the happy result of an experiment, although that is not a word anyone is prepared to use. You could say that it is an experiment in racial integration. But it is also a test for one of the most important theories about how to combat bigotry – and the results could change the way politicians in Britain tackle the problem of prejudice.
* * *
We all have an idea of some of the causes of bias and bigotry: divisions between racial and ethnic groups, geographic segregation and economic marginalisation, competition for resources between rival groups. And most people, at least today, probably share an essentially optimistic intuition about how to reduce racism and ethnic conflict, based on the belief that as people and communities get to know one another better – to interact as neighbours and co-workers and friends – their prejudices will melt away. This is a happy story, but is it true? After all, some of the longest and most violent conflicts in the world involve groups who know one another all too well – whose proximity, in fact, seems only to exacerbate ethnic tension.
Among the psychologists who study bigotry and ethnic conflict, this optimistic theory is known as the “contact hypothesis”. It was introduced by the Harvard psychologist Gordon W Allport, who published a book titled The Nature of Prejudice in 1954 – the same year that the US supreme court issued its landmark decision, Brown v Board of Education, which forced the desegregation of American schools. Allport believed that prejudice flowed from ignorance: people made generalisations about an entire group because they lacked information about that group. Contact with members of the other group could correct mistaken perceptions, improve empathy and diminish prejudice.
The theory has a beautiful simplicity and an instant feel‑good appeal. But it has also been also backed up over the years by well over 500 studies, of varying degrees of scientific rigour. Allport himself believed that contact would only help if it occurred under various conditions – for example, the groups had to pursue common rather than opposing goals. Nowadays, however, psychologists believe that almost all contact improves relations between groups, provided that it does not take place in an environment of intense anxiety or fear.
Allport’s hypothesis concerned how existing prejudice could be reduced. But other academics wanted to discover what the origins of prejudice were. Before the 1970s, the conventional wisdom was that it had two causes. One was competition: teams competing at football, families squabbling over land, nations fighting wars. The second was personality. Some people, the theory went, were more inclined to discriminate than others; prejudice was linked to traits such as authoritarianism, associated with a highly subservient attitude towards authority figures and an authoritarian attitude towards lower-status minorities.
However, in the 1970s, a social psychologist named Henri Tajfel began a series of experiments in Britain that would revolutionise how we understand the origins of group bias. He showed that neither of the two causes – competition and personality – was required for prejudice to emerge. All that was required was for people to be organised into groups in the first place.
In Tajfel’s most famous experiment, he asked a group of teenage boys to rate various abstract paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Tajfel then placed the boys into two groups: “Klee” and “Kandinsky” – and told them they had been grouped according to which artist they preferred. (In fact, they were sorted into groups randomly.) They were then given some notional money and told to distribute it among the participants in the experiment. They could not see or talk to the potential beneficiaries, who were identified only on paper by a number and by their group identity – Klee or Kandinsky.
The result was startling. The children showed a consistent pattern of bias. Although there was no competition between the two groups, the boys donated more money to individuals who were members of their own group. Thus, a member of the Kandinsky group was likely to give more money to other Kandinsky group members than to the members of the Klee group. Tajfel had demonstrated that group bias will occur under the most minimal of conditions – mere categorisation. This result has been replicated many times since Tajfel’s first experiment. The implications are profoundly unsettling. It shows how easy it is to switch on discrimination: our belonging to social groups is fundamental to our social identity and we like to see “us” as better than “them”.
Tajfel taught psychology for many years at Bristol University. In the 1970s one of his undergraduate students was Miles Hewstone, who went on to become a professor at Oxford University. Hewstone is a kindly, cheerful, bespectacled, slightly disorganised professor who is always running late and usually one wardrobe malfunction short of debonair. When I met him earlier this autumn, he was wearing odd cufflinks because he had not had time to find a matching pair.
Miles Hewstone is the intellectual offspring of Henri Tajfel and Gordon Allport. Under Tajfel’s tutelage, Hewstone learned how quickly individuals from one group could come to scorn those in another. But, by temperament, Hewstone is much closer to Allport: he is an optimist. Hewstone is less interested in how rapidly groups can make enemies than how enemies can be turned into friends – or, more modestly, how former enemies can learn to tolerate one another. Over the past three decades, his work has taken him to the places where group conflict has seemed most intractable: South Africa, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Serbia.
As an undergraduate, Hewstone had come across the contact hypothesis as a core part of his psychology degree. He liked the optimism of the theory, but felt that it was flawed. It had little to say about the importance of groups in the construction of our social identity. In the mid-1980s, Hewstone gave the contact hypothesis a Tajfelian twist, one best illustrated with an example adapted from research he conducted with a collaborator, Rupert Brown.
Britons hold various stereotypes about Germans. As we all know, Germans are hard-working, earnest, technically proficient and that at precisely 6am they ruthlessly commandeer all the deck chairs on the nearest beach. Plus, they are humourless: a German joke is no laughing matter, as Mark Twain put it. Hewstone wanted to know whether he could break down these stereotypes. He had seen how easy it was to turn on prejudice; now he wanted to see how to turn it off. (His wife Claudia, born in the Black Forest region of southern Germany, had a personal interest in her husband’s study.)
Student subjects were split into two groups. They were told that there was a German behind a screen, whom they were not allowed to see but about whom they were given certain details. Half the subjects were presented with a German with stereotypical characteristics – he was called Heinrich, he was an engineer – and half had a German called Anthony, who had “unexpected” characteristics, such as studying Chinese literature.
Participants carried out cooperative tasks with the invisible “German” – and were then asked about their attitudes to Germans and Germany. It turned out that those who had cooperated with Heinrich were more positive about Germans in general than those who had worked with Anthony. Heinrich was so obviously German that constructive contact with him influenced attitudes to Germans in general. Anthony, on the other hand, did not positively influence attitudes towards Germans since he seemed so clearly exceptional – he was, in the jargon, a sub-type.
For contact to work, one does not want to put individuals through some kind of identity blender
The result might seem counterintuitive. Indeed, Hewstone told me, other academic experts thought their conclusions were “bonkers”. But as a disciple of Tajfel, Hewstone had always recognised the centrality of group membership to identity. These days, his findings are widely accepted: for group prejudice to be eroded, group identity has to be maintained. In other words, contact itself is not enough.
Positive contact between members of antagonistic groups will improve how members of these groups generally see each other only if the people involved are seen as representative of their group. For contact to work, one does not want to put individuals through some kind of identity blender, to produce a homogeneous group. The aim is that people can see other people precisely as “other” and then realise that other isn’t bad.
Having travelled around the world testing his contact hypothesis, a few years ago a rare opportunity to assess it again presented itself to Hewstone. This conflict zone was closer to home – a mere three-hour car journey north of Oxford. He heard about plans for a new school that would bring together two communities in the heart of one of Britain’s most racially segregated towns. For an academic in his field, it presented a unique opportunity.
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Oldham is a town of 200,000 people, a few miles north-east of Manchester. In the 19th century, it was the world’s biggest producer of cotton textiles, but the industry began to decline after the first world war – and from the 1950s, its collapse became inevitable. Today, Oldham is one of the most deprived towns in Britain, and one of the most segregated. These are conditions in which the contact hypothesis predicts trouble.
Oldham’s two largest minority communities are Pakistani and Bangladeshi – together they make up around 20% of the population. Immigrants from Pakistan arrived first, in the 1950s and 60s, and those from Bangladesh began to arrive in the 1970s. Many came from rural areas; some were illiterate, and many others spoke little to no English. They mostly worked night shifts, which were introduced in the 1960s, as the mills struggled to remain profitable. As the number of immigrants increased, and the night shift became the almost exclusive preserve of the minority community, contact between white people and Asians in the mills diminished.
The new arrivals settled into areas such as Glodwick, which is now mainly Pakistani. There is a well-studied phenomenon of tipping points in housing markets, in which individual tolerances for a certain racial mix – say, a white resident who does not mind living in a neighbourhood with a 20% minority population, but balks at one where 30% of his neighbours are non-white – can result in an area rapidly shifting from one ethnicity to another. That is what happened in Glodwick and other parts of Oldham. It is true that there were racist landlords and some evidence of official discrimination in social housing allocation, but there was no engineered separation. In Oldham, segregation was the result of tens of thousands of individual decisions.
And segregation was not only about housing. With the decline of the textile industries, jobs were scarce. From the 1990s onwards, many Asians who found work became mini-cab drivers or entered the restaurant business. Contact with white people was superficial, and sometimes hostile – as when Asian drivers took home drunk passengers on a Saturday night. The Asians played cricket in their own areas, went to their local mosques and socialised with fellow immigrants. The schools reinforced the segregation: if anything, schools were more segregated than neighbourhoods.
Still, few could have anticipated the violence that erupted on 26 May 2001. That day, a white teenager threw a brick at two Asian boys aged 11 and 14, who had been walking along a street that divided the white neighbourhood of Roundthorn from Glodwick. One of the Asian boys, along with his brother, gave chase. The white boy found refuge in a nearby home – and the Asian boys began to kick at the door. The white woman who lived there shouted racial abuse at them. She phoned her brother to tell him:“Some Pakis have kicked the door in.”
It was an unpleasant episode, but hardly exceptional. Yet it ignited a conflagration: by the evening, hundreds of Asian men had gathered in Glodwick, where they put up barricades and threw stones and petrol bombs at the police, who were now in full riot gear. The crowd attacked a number of buildings, including the office of the Oldham Evening Chronicle, a newspaper that some South Asians felt had cynically stoked racial tension.
The unrest continued for three nights. Britain had not witnessed race riots on a similar scale for 15 years. Radio and television bulletins all led on Oldham: Glodwick and other neighbourhoods were invaded by journalists. The town became known as “the race-hate capital” of Britain.
In hindsight, the seeds of the trouble should have been clear. The far-right National Front and the British National party had been agitating in Oldham for a year, having identified the town as fertile territory for recruiting. There had been reports that many white people had been victims of racially motivated abuse and violence. A few weeks before the riots, a war veteran in his mid-70s named Walter Chamberlain had been beaten by a 14-year-old Asian teenager. Chamberlain’s battered face appeared on the front pages of national newspapers, with hysterical headlines such as “Whites beware” (Mail on Sunday) and “Beaten for being white” (the Mirror) – despite the fact that Chamberlain’s own family insisted the attack had not been racially motivated. The BNP circulated leaflets alleging that parts of Oldham had become “no-go areas” for whites. The Asian community, meanwhile, felt it had been left unprotected by the police.
The riots in Oldham sparked similar scenes in the nearby towns of Bradford and Burnley. The government and local authorities immediately commissioned reports on what lay behind this unrest. The reports, which were delivered before the end of the year, highlighted the role that segregation had played in fostering animosity between white and Asian citizens. The Cantle report, commissioned by the home secretary, found that white and Asian communities were living “parallel” and “polarised” lives. (Ted Cantle, the sociologist and local government official who led the inquiry, had said that he was very familiar with the contact hypothesis from his undergraduate studies.) The Ritchie report, which focused on Oldham specifically, concluded that “the major issue in Oldham town is the segregated nature of society”. Amongst the report’s recommendations was that “wherever possible, the rebuild of schools should create the opportunity for further integration of pupils”.
The reports were published three months after the 11 September terror attacks, at a time when politicians were becoming increasingly anxious about segregation and Islamic extremism. But tackling racial segregation is no easy process. For one thing, it is a notoriously complex phenomenon. In the social sciences, it is hard to think of a more contested arena – geographers and political scientists cannot even agree on how to quantify the extent of segregation. One difficulty is deciding where to draw the demographic dividing lines: changing the boundaries of a given area even slightly can result in a highly segregated area being reclassified as a mixed one, and vice versa. When you drill down into the figures, the complexities multiply.
That debate aside, even if towns such as Oldham are segregated, some might say: “So what? Isn’t it natural for people of similar cultural background – whether whites or Asians – to want to live and socialise with one another? Shouldn’t we be more relaxed about this?” After all, there is evidence that residential clustering can foster a sense of belonging and security. Charlie Parker, who was chief executive of Oldham council from 2008 until 2013, told the writer David Goodhart that segregation was a sign of people feeling comfortable with their identities.
But after the 2001 riots that position no longer seemed tenable. The received wisdom, at least among policy makers, was that segregation did exist – and that it was a disaster. So they took action – and that is how Radiyah and Olivia came to meet.
* * *
Until a few years ago, OL4 3NY was the postcode for an abandoned and derelict cotton mill. Now, in its place, stands an impressive red brick and glass structure. The corridors and reception areas are generously laid out, the classrooms pristine, the facilities first-rate. Welcome to Waterhead academy. Ted Cantle calls it “a unique school”. Miles Hewstone likened it to mixing a pint of milk and a pint of Guinness in a quart pot.
The idea for Waterhead goes back to 2007. It was designed to take advantage of the Building Schools for the Future programme, introduced in the last term of the Labour government, which set aside money to construct new buildings for Britain’s secondary schools. For most of the schools that received this funding, the new building or school was intended to symbolise a new educational start. But for Waterhead, it symbolised something more: the academy was created at least in part to bring communities together.
Waterhead was born from two turbulent parents. Breeze Hill was an almost entirely Asian school, Counthill almost entirely white. They both drew from working-class communities. They both had what educationists call “challenges”. Attainment levels were low. Aspirations were low. Both schools had serious disciplinary and drug issues. The idea was that Breeze Hill and Counthill would shut and their students be relocated to the brand new Waterhead academy.
Boys and girls play sport separately, there is a modest uniform code, and assemblies draw from many religious traditions
Before Breeze Hill and Counthill were closed in 2010, there was a consultation period. The proposal to create one large school of 1,400 pupils had caused consternation. Some of that was understandable resistance to change, but some Asian parents and teachers from Breeze Hill were nervous that their kids would be subject to racist abuse. Local whites in the lower-middle-class neighbourhood of Waterhead demonstrated against the merger. They said they were worried about the disruption that a big school would cause in the area. There was also an element of dog-whistle politics: one senior figure in Oldham’s educational establishment told me that many white parents in the area would rather send their kids to a failing monocultural school than a thriving mixed one. A teacher at Waterhead sheepishly admitted that his mother and brother had joined the placard-waving protestors: his brother, who was caught up in the 2001 riots, is a BNP sympathiser. (There was also a separate political strain of opposition to Waterhead: some of the placards said: “No to academies”.)
When Miles Hewstone heard about Waterhead, he was eager to see how it went: a perfect test of his contact hypothesis. Waterhead is what Hewstone calls “a natural experiment” – one that he, along with his two post-doctoral researchers, Katharina Schmid and Ananthi al-Ramiah, was granted access to study.
The merger between Breeze Hill and Counthill was handled with caution. Between 2010 and 2012, the schools continued to operate on separate sites, and the children were brought together for particular classes or activities. The new building was opened for business in September 2012. Like many of her colleagues, one former Breeze Hill science teacher, Faizal Ahmed, who now teaches at Waterhead, was afraid that “there were going to be clashes every single day, there was going to be uproar; we were going to be in the papers.”
The newly merged school had to carefully navigate various multicultural sensitivities: boys and girls play sport separately, there is a modest uniform code, and assemblies draw from a number of religious traditions. Halal meat is available, but so are bacon sandwiches. All these issues seemed more prickly in anticipation than in practice. And remember that according to Hewstone’s version of the contact hypothesis, contact works best when British white children see British Asian pupils as being in some sense typical of their culture, and vice versa.
Radiyah was one of the students who were apprehensive about Waterhead. The school had not been her parents’ first choice. There were lots of menacing rumours, Radiyah said. “I thought, because I’m a different skin colour, people might say things to me – racist things. But, first day, second day, everything was perfect. The rumours weren’t true.”
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Radiyah’s friend Olivia also loves the school. Their friendship offers anecdotal evidence that, in terms of social cohesion, Waterhead has been a resounding success. But Hewstone does not believe in drawing conclusions from anecdotes. He is a social scientist, and he likes to stress the second half of his job title. He collects data and subjects it to rigorous analysis.
Over the past three and a half years, he and his team of half a dozen post graduates have amassed an enormous amount of data. As well as surveys tracking changes in attitudes and values, Christina Floe, a doctoral student working with Hewstone, has painstakingly gathered statistics on friendship networks at the school. She asked every student in several year-groups to list up to 10 of their closest friends, and monitored how their social groups evolved over a two-year period. The data Floe gathered was then uploaded onto a computer program, which turned the information into diagrams that look like they have been drawn by an inebriated spider.
Floe also studied friendship groups in Waterhead’s cafeteria. Her aim was to chart who sat next to whom at lunch. It was important that the pupils did not know what she was checking for, so she needed a cover. Floe approached the students in the canteen to hand out food-satisfaction surveys. Underneath the surveys on Floe’s clipboard she had a map of the room, with all the tables and seats marked up, and as the forms were filled out she quickly scribbled the appropriate acronym for the relevant seat – AF (Asian female), AM, WF or WM.
The findings show that each and every year trust and liking between pupils from different ethnic groups improve
Depending on your viewpoint, the results of some of these studies are either positive or positively depressing. The observational data from the cafeteria shows that whites and Asians overwhelmingly eat in their own ethnic groups. As for the network study, shortly after the pupils first arrived at school, only 2.5% of the close friends of white students were Asians. Even by the end of that year, close friendships remained almost entirely segregated – Asians accounted for just 7.5% of the friends of white children. Still, there is some cause for hope: Hewstone’s team has found that each year is slightly more integrated than the one below it.
But the survey data – which begins from the period just before the schools physically merged in 2012, and is based on following up the same sample of hundreds of students year on year – is much more impressive. The aim was to investigate attitudes towards members of the rival ethnic group over time.
It asked the children, for example: “When you meet white British/Asian British boys do you feel nervous?” And the children rated their answer on a scale of one (not at all) to five (very). Another question, on the same scale, was: “How much do you trust white British/Asian British pupils?”
Hewstone says that he is completely “blown away” by the results. The findings show that each and every year the positive variables – trust and liking – improve. And each and every year, even more dramatically, the negative variables – anxiety and nervousness about the other group – decrease.
So, on the one-to-five scale, the negative attitude of Asians to whites from 2012 to 2015 dropped from 3.078 to 2.583. For the white group the drop is from 3.572 to 3.183. Maarten van Zalk, another member of the team, who performed the data analysis on these statistics, says this was “much better than expected”. And it looks like the improvement just continues with time. He is excited to see the next set of figures in June 2016.
Hewstone is very upbeat, even about the less than spectacular friendship stats. As he points out, the context in Oldham was not auspicious, which led countless people to predict disaster for Waterhead. Had there been no school merger, then chances are that 11-year-old white students, rather than having a few Asian friends, would have had none at all.
There are several surprises and nuances in the data. You might assume that the most popular children would be the most outgoing ones, and that they would be most likely to make friends across the racial divide. In fact the reverse is the case. The popular kids have the fewest number of cross-racial friendships. (A plausible explanation is that humans can only cope with a few close friends, and the friendship quota for popular kids is more rapidly filled; having many friends makes people less inclined to seek new ones.)
How long the beneficial impact of contact lasts is open to debate. Once their education is over, many pupils will return to segregated neighbourhoods and their separate lives. But Hewstone likes to quote Thomas Paine: “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” He argues that a dose of integration acts as a kind of inoculation for life – a permanent booster of tolerance and understanding.
There is a fly in the ointment, however. None of the more extravagant fears of racial conflict at Waterhead has come to pass. But, ultimately, for the school to succeed it has to improve academically. The latest Ofsted report, following an inspection in November 2014, makes demoralising reading: “Leadership and management – Inadequate”; “Behaviour and safety of pupils – Inadequate”; “Quality of teaching – Inadequate”; “Achievement of pupils – Inadequate”. In December 2014, the school was placed under special measures. That means Ofsted will make regular inspections and if the poor performance continues the school may even be closed.
In September 2014, Colette Macklin, a new head with a no‑nonsense reputation, was appointed, and the governors are convinced that they now have the right processes in place to turn Waterhead around. Headteachers at Waterhead, however, do not seem to survive very long. Macklin is the third in five years. And this year, Waterhead ranked in the bottom 200 schools in the country for GCSE results. It would be naive to expect too dramatic an improvement in results, given the social and economic context in which the school operates. Almost half of the children at Waterhead qualify for pupil-premium funding – additional money to help schools cope with the most disadvantaged children.
All the problems aside, an extraordinary fact remains. In the year since Macklin became head of this extremely deprived school, in a town with a long history of segregation and tension, there has not been a single racist incident among her pupils.
* * *
In July, the prime minister made a speech on extremism that ended with a call for action to tackle ethnic segregation: “It cannot be right … that people can grow up and go to school and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from other backgrounds and faiths.” He mentioned two cities where segregation was particularly marked. The first was Bradford, the second was Oldham. Cameron was careful not to lay the blame on any one community. Housing was an issue, he said, as was education.
The speech tackled sensitive issues around segregation and extremism, but in one respect it was gutless. Faith schools tend to exacerbate segregation – but Cameron defended them. Challenging the power of the faith schools and their (often middle-class) admirers was clearly an electoral risk too far. Still, taking the contact hypothesis theory seriously would require confronting the faith-school lobby.
More broadly, taking the contact hypothesis seriously demands directing resources – in a way that does not create a backlash – towards bringing segregated groups together, whether this be in education, housing or leisure. It means helping people become proficient in the English language and making public spaces attractive to all communities.
Back in Oldham, Radiyah and Olivia could serve as poster girls for Cameron’s integration agenda. At school their cultural differences – of which they are aware – seem small compared to what they have in common. Olivia is joking about Radiyah’s purple pencil case, and her obsession with all things purple. Their rapport has an infectious quality. Even so, it is more complex than appears at first sight. They have never visited each other’s homes – they do not even know where the other lives, though they regularly talk on Skype after school. That is not unusual for cross-racial friendships at Waterhead – the friendship checks in and then checks out again at the school gate. As they stream out of school at 3pm, the Asian and white kids go home to separate neighbourhoods. Radiyah and Olivia live less than two miles apart – though the psychological distance between their two neighbourhoods is substantially greater.
This, then, is a slow, incremental evolution, not an overnight revolution – and one susceptible to setbacks. As for the two girls, will they be best friends for ever? Olivia thinks so, but Radiyah is less convinced. “Maybe not forever, because sometimes she’s really annoying.” Olivia looks momentarily pained. “But I like it that she’s a bit annoying, because I don’t want boring friends.” And with that, they are off down the corridor, nudging each other and giggling.
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Source:The integrated school that could teach a divided town to live together