ABSTRACT
A condensation of all the relevant sources-popular and scholarly alike-would produce the dazzling insight that Asians are exclusive yet excluded, ethnically assertive yet racially oppressed, economically deprived yet commercially successful. One may be excused the thought that we are witnessing the birth of a new social category, the bourgeois underclass, a group of highly successful failures. (Aldrich et al. 1983, p. 1.)
Although this passage is a deliberate caricature, it nevertheless captures the Janus-like qualities of the British Asian, who appears simultaneously a victim of racism and an upwardly mobile over-achiever destined to follow in the ‘rags-to-riches’ footsteps of British Jewry (Rex 1973). According to Billig (1978), even the working-class racist finds difficulty in slotting Asians into the customary pigeonhole of racial and cultural inferiority. We suggested that this rather schizophrenic reaction on the part of British observers
stems from the fact that Asian Britons are simultaneously identified by both race and ethnicity…. Ethnicity is the identity which members of the group place upon themselves, race is a label foisted on to them by non-members…while racial identity may be a crippling disability, ethnicity acts as a positive force for the protection and promotion of group interests…especially where cultural consciousness and fraternal solidarity are as powerfully developed as they are among the Indian and Pakistani groups of Britain. (Aldrich et al. 1983, pp. 2-3.)
Until quite recently British geographical analysis of Asian residential segregation tended to concentrate rather one-sidedly on ethnic choice and to play down racial constraint, presenting residential segregation as a form of self-assertion on the part of minority groups anxious to preserve and promote their ethnic identify by maintaining strict social distance from the white majority (Kearsley & Srivastava 1974; Robinson 1979a,b, 1981; Peach 1983). Such an approach inverts the classic logic of minority-relations analysis. Normally we assume inner-city residential segregation to be a racist institution, the means by which a dominant white majority excludes a subordinate black minority from equal participation in the housing market. Residential segregation is imposed on blacks
by whites. In the case of Asian Britons, however, the laws of social gravity are suspended-or so we are asked to believe.
