Dralon, Doilies and How Black Ambition Paid Off

15 Nov 2005
Evening Standard

It comesĀ as no surprise to me that a recent study has revealed that more youngsters from Caribbean workingclass families get professional or managerial jobs than the children of the white working class. For there was no group of people more passionately devoted to respectability and upward social mobility than the Caribbean immigrants who came to Britain in the Fifties and Sixties. A key symbol of respectability was their interior decoration. Every decent family had a "front room" kept for best. In pride of place would be a Dralon three-piece suite (usually in red), covered in plastic to guard against spills. And every available surface would be covered in large, beautifully crocheted doilies.

Carefully starched to make the frills stick up, they resembled a series of large lacy spaceships that had landed on the china cabinet and the radiogram. Journalists have often sought to caricature Caribbean immigrants as shiftless: only here to live off benefits, sleep with white women and smoke funny-smelling cigarettes. In fact, my parents' generation were largely Godfearing, hardworking and here because they were ambitious for themselves and their children. Yet for many of them, Britain turned out to be a step downwards. Rural folk, respected in their communities, with their own little piece of land (very important) found themselves living with the urban underclass. Brought up to believe that white people were superior, they were shocked at what they found.

So they invested all their hopes in their children. They were painfully ambitious for us. Education has been the ladder for Caribbean children and it was something all the adults around me believed in passionately. As a young woman I was regarded with suspicion by many Left-wingers. A real black person, in their view, was not supposed to have a Cambridge degree. Because they did not actually know anyone from the Caribbean, they had no idea that working-class West Indians' aspirations for their children were precisely that. Today, Indian children do even better than Caribbeans and the overall figures mask the worrying underachievement of many young black men. That is a result of complex factors - fractured families, a popular culture that denigrates learning and schools that fail black children. And it is a tragedy that some third- and fourth-generation Caribbean boys have been drawn into a criminal subculture a million miles from the values of their grandparents.

But I am proud to say that, although I never learned to crochet, I still call my living room the front room, and I and my peer group are proud to have done our best to live up to the aspirations of a generation who had to be braver than we could ever be.



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