In the 1950s, London Underground took an enlightened step in multiculturalism and opened a recruiting office in Barbados. Perhaps it was more self-interested than enlightened, since a combination of low wages and postwar full employment had depressed staff recruitment, but the underground did blaze a trail of sorts. A Jamaican high court judge, quoted in Christian Wolmar's recent Subterranean Railway, says, "I must give credit to London Transport because it was one of the first corporate bodies in England to reduce the barrier to promotion for immigrants."
Even without actually encouraging immigration, the underground has long been a popular employer for immigrants. The combination of reliable work, few skill requirements and fair wages—a job anyone can do, in other words, though you didn't hear that from me—makes it attractive to those finding their feet in a foreign country. Recent figures suggest 27 per cent of London Underground's staff are from ethnic minorities, about the same as the proportion of Londoners. This doesn't, of course, include the many Irish, other Europeans and South Americans dotted around the company, nor the African immigrants who do all the cleaning.
For the most part, everybody gets on. Well they have to, since an accusation of racism—or for that matter, sexual harassment—opens a Pandora's box of investigation and disciplinary action. People are well aware of what might happen if they get accused of acting or speaking in a racist manner, even jokingly. And according to LU policy, offence is purely in the eye of the beholder. This is a response to the—now thankfully bygone—days when black people, and women, could find themselves harassed for weeks at a time.
I was accused of racism myself, following a long and essentially absurd argument with another member of staff. I didn't even hear about the accusation for a couple of months, which prevented me following standard practice and inventing a counter-accusation of some kind. When I finally got the letter, it informed me that a manager from a distant part of the system would be leading the investigation. He interviewed me, my accuser and the witnesses, before picking a random bunch of my colleagues and asking them what they thought. After this haphazard procedure I was exonerated, but not before I'd considered bussing in some black friends for the disciplinary panel.?
Such a stringent policy drives things underground, if you'll excuse the pun. Among some whites, talk can be fairly loose. Unsurprisingly, many of them are unreconstructed; words like "spooks," "spades," "jungle bunnies" and the like pop up in conversation from time to time. A lot of this is what they call "transgressive humour"—no one, after all, likes to be told not to do something.
It doesn't, for the most part, seem to affect working relationships or take priority over personal friendships. People tend to take it in their stride. I once witnessed a slightly bizarre conversation between a white guy and an Indian about whether "wogs" liked living among their own people or not. At other times, however, it hints at a dark, unpleasant undercurrent.
After the accusation against me, some of the real racists came out of the woodwork since they seemed to feel that I must be one of theirs. I was casually having a conversation with a very friendly guy and he mentioned the charge against me. He followed up by saying something that sounded an awful lot like, "I'd like to put 'em all up against the wall and shoot 'em." I was so surprised I completely failed to reply.
Some time later I was getting a lift to work with another hitherto friendly chap, when he suddenly launched into an unpleasant and entirely unrepeatable tirade about what white girls were doing with black boys. The next day I watched him chat with his relief supervisor, a man of both gracious bonhomie and unimpeachable blackness, and the conversation was as nice as pie. When he left the room, he said under his breath, presumably for my benefit, just one word—"animal."
Almost all the real racism I have encountered has been anti-black; the Asians generally seem to get off lightly. This is entirely in contrast to my experience growing up in inner London, where Indians took the brunt of the abuse and the blacks, mostly because they were considered "hard," avoided it. Probably the main reason for the difference is generational.
There certainly is a race card, and it occasionally gets played to great effect. I saw one man's promotion rescinded and another's prioritised after what seemed to be rather hopeful shouts of racism. And promotions are where friction is most evident, as suspicions of covert positive discrimination abound. The constant refrain, among the whites, is how so-and-so didn't get promoted because "his face didn't fit." Certainly promotions on the underground never seem to have much to do with ability, but for most people it is just one more thing to moan about.
