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【英文原文】
摘要：人们常说美国是个大熔炉，能熔化移民到美国的各个种族和民族。据本文作者介绍，英国简直也是一个种族和民族的熔炉，现在的新生儿，每五个中至少有一个是黑人和白人的混血儿（俗称chocolate baby“巧克力宝宝”）。种族主义并未销声匿迹，而是随着经济形势的好坏时起时落。作者预计50年后英国少数民族的特性大部分将会丧失。作为一个“对自己的文化根源深感自豪的民族社区”，英国华人能保持自己的民族身份吗？
I find it easiest to look forwards by looking back, to the "Great Labour Migration" of 1948-55, seen at the time as a matter of black guests coming to a white host. It's a quasi-imperial perception that has shifted since the 1970s, but the social problems and deficiencies it engendered dog us still.
It's highly questionable whether Britain is an open society even now. Against the upward trend in the 1980s of ethnic minorities breaking into the professions and the media must be set objective evidence of a very racist society. Since the Stephen Lawrence affair the government has at least been talking about the existence of racism, but it's always the case that racism diminishes in times of prosperity. When the economic going gets tough, people want someone to take their feelings out on.
The social landscape seems to me at a surreal crossroads. Britain fosters images of itself as homogeneous -to be white is no longer the central defining feature-but there remain various kinds of "Britishness". So I can envisage the future in two very different ways.
The first is broadly the way Britain is at the moment: a mosaic of communities -Bangladeshi, Afro-Caribbean, Chinese or Jewish holding fast to a strong social identity, but lumbered also with a whole raft of benefits and disadvantages, most of them defined in economic terms. It's possible that will still be the pattern in 50 years time, but not very likely.
