Last week I had lunch with Trevor Phillips, head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and he told me how he had been haunted by a visit to a school in a poor black community in America. The boys, he said, were being shown by a teacher how to tie a tie.
I obviously looked puzzled. It's a guy thing, he explained: for most men it is their father who teaches them how to tie a tie, how to make a big knot or a small one. It is a rite of passage between a father and his son. That a teacher was having to show these boys how to do it was an unbearably poignant marker of the lack of fathers in these boys' lives. They were black and American, but the same deprivation was all too apparent in a predominantly white working-class school I visited recently in Manchester.
I happened to see Phillips on the day that John Denham, the communities secretary, launched a mighty tome called Tackling Race Inequality. In his accompanying speech he announced that Britain has become "a society which positively welcomes and embraces diversity as a strength". As a result, he continued, "it is no longer enough to make simple assumptions which equate 'race' with disadvantage ... instead we need to understand the ways in which race interacts with other factors - especially class - to shape people's lives".
Denham is relatively late to this party. Phillips, as king of the equality quango, has been banging on for a while about the marginalisation of poor white boys in our society; the only educational statistic where white boys win is the numbers of them excluded from school.
Only 6% of white boys eligible for free school meals went to university, while for other races in the comparable population it is 26%. The claim that race no longer puts you at a disadvantage in Britain is largely based on the success of Indian and Chinese students: 58% of boys of families of Indian origin make it to university and Chinese boys outperform members of all other races by a graph-busting 20%. It's not just in school; India and China are outperforming the rest of the world on the economic stage.
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What marks the two tiger economy peoples out particularly is the high value they place on hard work, education and family. We all know examples of this; my local newsagent scrimped and saved so that he could send his son to Westminster school. A Kumon maths teacher told me his clients were overwhelmingly Indian and Chinese.
There is a historical class element to this; the success of children of Indian origin in Britain is in stark contrast to those from Pakistan and Bangladesh (only 29% make it to university). This could be because Indian immigrants to Britain tended to be well-educated members of the bourgeoisie - many merchant types also sought asylum here when Idi Amin evicted them from Uganda. By contrast, many of our Pakistani/Bangladeshi immigrants came from poor rural communities to work in textile factories and were much more likely to be illiterate.
Their children, Phillips told me, continue to underachieve at school, often because the fathers do shift work and their mothers don't speak English. Educational achievement in such groups can be boosted by providing a homework club or English-speaking tutor twice a week. It is such specific, targeted measures that can make the most difference.
The underachievement of black boys has been well documented in Britain and there are now programmes to try to combat it, including Reach, which provides successful black male role models to try to raise aspirations. The problem is touchingly highlighted by the ordinariness of the mentors - civil servants, firemen, teachers - good blokes doing what to most of us look like unremarkable jobs. But again, being black is more complicated than that. If we look at the percentages of boys on free school meals who achieve more than five GCSEs graded A-C, for black African boys it is 56%, black Caribbeans 44.9%, mixed race 47% (for whites it is only 30%: Chinese 83%).
Again there is a historical class differentiation going on here; many black Africans came to the UK to study in the late 1970s and were more highly educated and middle class to begin with. They are more likely to stay married, have jobs and be part of a church (if you are poor and religious your outcomes are transformed because of the discipline and community support that religion offers).
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Black Caribbeans, by contrast, came here in the 1950s and 1960s to drive buses and work in the National Health Service. These earlier Small Island-type immigrants also arrived in a Britain that was markedly less "relaxed about diversity" (to put it mildly) so they tended to cluster together.
In many inner cities the Caribbean community and the white working class were settled on the new post-war housing estates together. On one such estate in Brixton, south London, one black man told me recently how his mother was given a flat alongside 70 other pregnant women, black and white. There, as in so many other places, the children grew up together in a shared culture.
In the Caribbean it was quite normal for a woman to have children by several different men (a legacy of slavery; slaves could not marry). With Britain's welfare state guaranteeing single mothers a flat and an income, and with the sexual revolution in full swing, white girls soon followed suit and their teenage daughters followed them along the "baby father" path.
Consequently, white working-class boys on free school meals, like their black and mixed-race peers, are overwhelmingly likely to be the offspring of young single mothers with all the attendant disadvantaging factors that poverty, fatherlessness, sink estates and crime tend to bring. The result is a society where there are no fathers around to show their sons how to tie a tie or go to work or support a family.
When Denham talks about "class" rather than "race" being a factor in determining people's life outcomes, he is talking in code about the underclass. Being born into "the recycling of disadvantage", as Phillips calls it, is more likely to damage your life chances than being born non-white. Ironically, the underclass is a triumph in terms of race relations: a seamless melange of white, black and mixed race with a multiracial patois and a multicultural fast-food diet of curry, chips, Chinese and pizza.
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An equal society is one in which it is possible to detach destiny from origins.Race used to be the anchor that tied people to the bottom. Now that anchor is being born into the underclass. The big challenge for all of us is tackling it.