Back in the mid 1960s BBC radio had a Sunday lunchtime programme similar to the old Brains Trust which sought to answer listeners’ questions
Once they were asked: Is it natural for a person of one race to marry someone of another?
One panellist, whose name has long since vanished from my memory bank, said No, like should marry like – somewhat surprisingly since he had a liberal reputation
Not just that, but he started to get really agitated about it: People from Birmingham tend to marry people from Birmingham … people who have been to university tend to marry people who have been to university …
A fellow panellist interrupted, gently: Yes, people tend to marry people they have met
I thought again about this, one of the many thoughts prompted by the Obama victory
He has said that his story could have happened ‘only in America’. Actually, I believe that multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national, unions were more common in this country, at least up until the late 1960s
One reason was the long standing & well established system of students from Commonwealth countries coming here for their higher education, which combined with the wave of home grown students who were ‘first in their family’ as a result of the 1944 Education Act. This meant that young people might well feel they had more in common with a fellow student than they did even with their own family
Many, perhaps most, such couples left this country after graduation. Partly because this had always been the intention (we were training them to run their own countries, not ours), & the decade of independence was an exciting time for the young & idealistic, partly because they had no wish to expose their children to the kind of racism they experienced
And few, if any, sent their children back to England for their higher education. By then America seemed a much better bet
For me, the part of the Obama story – his educational opportunities – is the real Only in America bit
A system which allows a bright youngster to go from a small well established & highly regarded liberal arts college in LA via Columbia to the Harvard Law School in his mid twenties
In this country we attempt to get disadvantaged children in to Oxbridge at 18 – in effect persuade them to make the decision to take that academic & social leap & take that risk when they are maybe only 16 or 17. And then to follow a very narrow curriculum which many will not find an attractive proposition
There are few, if any, routes which someone can take to explore different disciplines, to build an academic career, no programmes for Oxbridge to take the brightest undergraduates from other universities, to gather the brightest for further courses of postgraduate study
