Ethnic Summer Camp

The British government is at it again, this time suggesting something akin to "ethnic togetherness camps".

Ministers were urged yesterday to fund summer camps for white teenagers to mingle with their black and Asian counterparts after a survey showed that nine in 10 white Britons had no or few ethnic minority friends.

Would those be camps where "fraternization will set you free"? Whyfore dost thou make us intermingle so, and on what ground does Parliament maintain so racial politic a state that they have the country's youth cavort as in a zoo?

Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), said he believed US-style summer camp places should be established where 16-year-olds could mix with teenagers they would otherwise not meet.

Yo, Trevor. Aside from babbling Bab's attempts at ending the Middle East peace crisis we don't actually run Racial Equality Camps over here. We just let summer camps compete for kids and see who shows up. Everyone works a different angle so we end up with a vast array of different programs. It won't change the statistics, and kids rarely stay connected with a person they barely met over the summer during a game of water polo. Even having them room together through four years of college is no guarantee of any harmony, as we found out when former West Point roommates battled it out for years during the US Civil War.

His remarks followed publication of a poll by the CRE showing 94 per cent of white people say most or all their friends are of the same race.

Let's look at a few numbers on the UK population, from ye olde CIA Factbook.

English 81.5%
Scottish 9.6%
Irish 2.4%
Welsh 1.9%
Ulster 1.8%
West Indian, Indian, Pakistani, and other 2.8%

That comes to 97.2% white folks, meaning 97.2% of all possible friends are white. You'd think they'd have saved their money on the poll and just looked at the obvious mathematics on "Annie England's friends". Most people in the UK are obviously going to say that almost all their friends are white, except for the occassional racist crackpot who provides a unlikely ray of statistical sunshine, but only because nobody suspects that he's counting Irish as black, thinking they must've come from some homeland in Central Africa.

The CRE said this situation could leave swathes of the population open to believing the worst of different ethnic and religious groups.

More importantly, it might provide a nice source of funding and summer jobs so they can line up a bunch of strapping black males and have a black robed and tasseled professor point out their obvious similarities to everyone else on the planet, but only if the kids can keep from falling asleep. The obvious question is why any ethnic minority would show up for a zoo appearance. Just run summer camps and let any kids be kids, instead of conjuring up some scheme that will inevitably become the butt of endless jokes about a Scot, and Irishman, and a Sikh in a log rolling contest at summer camp.

More than half of white people said they did not have a single black or Asian person they considered a close friend, according to the survey conducted by YouGov.

The organisation asked 2,065 white and 808 ethnic minority people aged over 18 for details of their closest 10 or 20 friends in the internet survey. Eight out of 10 white people had no friends who were practising Muslims, and only one in 10 white people was close to a Hindu or Sikh.

Going back to the statistics, Britain is said to have 1.5 million Muslims out of a population of 60 million, or 2.5 percent. If eight out of ten white people said they don't have a friend who's a practicing Muslim then 20% of whites said they do. If they were listing their 10 closest friends then about 25% should've listed a Muslim (2.5% chance per friend), so the result is not out of line with an evenly mixed group of people. Collectively, Hindus and Sikhs number a million people, about 1.7% of the population, so you'd expect a slightly higher score. But then how do you necessarily know that your friend is a Hindu? The more troubling question is why they polled over 2,000 people and still only report the results as "eight out of ten" instead of listing an actual percentage. I guess their abacus didn't have enough beads.

Among ethnic minority communities, 47 per cent said white people formed all or most of their friends. The survey also suggested the situation might be hardening; while younger white people mixed more than older ones, the reverse was true of some ethnic minority communities.

Well at 97.2% of the population this result isn't too surprising either, and often young people in ethnic communities aren't mixing as much because they're in ethnic communities. Kids growing up in little Italy didn't meet many Cherokee, either.

The friends of 60 per cent of white people over 50 were of the same race as them, compared with 43 per cent for white people under 30.

But while 19 per cent of ethnic minority Britons over 50 had friends who were almost exclusively from ethnic minority communities, this rose to 39 per cent for those aged 30 or under.

That's a result of getting out of your little corner of London or Ethnicboroough and making more friends based on who you really like, instead of who happened to be working down the street.

YouGov said it was not possible to tell from a single survey whether this result was mainly because people made a wider circle of friends as they got older, or whether some younger, non-white people were less willing than their parents' generation to mix with white friends.

A future survey should ask how long they've been friends with the various people. If the greater diversity turns out to represent friendships established at an older age, then they'll have the answer.

Mr Phillips said he had been surprised by the extent to which the majority community still did not really know minority communities.

"When it comes to race and religion, this clearly demonstrates we are dealing with a difference of which most people in this country have no first-hand experience.

Now how did I guess that the British government would conclude that the rank-and-file British taxpayer has no first-hand experience in life, a situation which the British government intends to correct with a government program?

"Therefore, it is not surprising that they can be misled about blacks, gypsies and Muslims, and it is not surprising that for no apparent reason, they can become hostile and racist," he said.

There's no direct reason why lack of familiarity would cause racism, as made obvious by the fact that the British rarely decry Inuit, Somoans, Icelanders, Souix, or people from Pago Pago. Conversely, given the intricacies of the legal systems we've spent centuries becoming intimately familiar with lawyers, yet no great love and understanding has blossomed.

Let the UK set up their summer camps and then struggle with the fact that only 2.8% of the little troopers are ethnic. I guess each cabin of 35 insensitive and inexperienced white kids will have one token ethnic kid, carefully shared out, just to make fun of. The question is why any ethnic kids would show up at all for the second summer. Maybe Britain will have to recolonize a few select bits of the globe just to secure a supply of racial diversity for their government run camps.