TO HEAR Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, talking about the countryside, or read the news stories that proclaim that “most Britons don’t know anyone who is black”, you would think that racism had a stranglehold on British society. Yet beneath the soundbites and the headlines that hog the debate, the masses are giving a lie to this image of bigoted Britain.

They are doing so by coupling up. Walk down the high street and you’ll see an Afro-Caribbean man with a white Anglo-Saxon woman, an Asian woman and an Afro-Caribbean man, and an Anglo-Saxon male and an Asian woman. The latest census shows that 600,000 men and women in England and Wales are of mixed race; 237,000 of these are white and black Caribbean — and more than half of this group is under the age of 15.

This new tolerant youth found voice in a poll of twenty-somethings by The Sun this week. It showed that 84 per cent would marry someone of another race; 85 per cent of blacks and 84 per cent of Asians think that Britain is a tolerant society; and 78 per cent have a close friend who is of another race.

While their parents and grandparents mouth off about the “issue” of race, these young people are blurring the quest- ion until it becomes irrelevant. Already their work is being felt: until 2001, the national census did not even have a “mixed race” category — everyone had to tick a monochrome box.

How different from America, where there is still a stigma attached to those who break the colour barrier — especially between African-Americans and Wasps. Such couples, even among the young, are scarce. Their children may be considered exotically beautiful, but they also come in for abuse in the playground. The same is true in Europe. A marriage between a Senegalese woman and a Frenchman, say, or between a German woman and a Turk, are rare.

It is fashionable for the British to portray their Empire as an oppressive and racist regime, which has left a legacy of lingering white supremacy. Yet look at teenagers and twentysomethings and you will see a society that is growing more integrated and which prefers its colours mixed, not matched. With luck, they will do Mr Phillips out of his job.

Cristina Odone is deputy editor of The New Statesman

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