James Baldwin, the African-American writer, says that he will never know whether he has to wait for the lift because the liftman is white or just busy. The current controversy over the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry in Britain and the death sentence passed in the United States on the perpetrator of a particularly grisly killing highlight extremes that can be put down through diligent policing and deterrent punishment. But between black and white are to be found subtle shades of grey of the kind Baldwin had in mind where, as a Caribbean student in Manchester says, people 'look at you in a certain way', and which lie beyond the pale of legislation and executive action in most societies. Britain might turn out to be the exception for it has displayed extraordinary courage at a certain level in grappling with deeply entrenched cultural conditioning. This is perilous ground to tread for experiences conflict and while many Indians are bitterly critical of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, many others deny the existence of any prejudice. Call it what you will, the crowd of London East Enders that gathered round B. De of the Indian civil service when he took the wife of his colleague, B.L. Gupta, and two of her daughters to see the Tower of London in what was slumland in the late 19th century more than looked in a certain way at the unknown apparitions. When the peering and the prodding became too much, De asked the East Enders to move back whereupon the cry went up, 'They can speak! They can speak!' Similarly, an urchin once wonderingly felt the long hair that floated about the shoulders of Sarojini Naidu (then Chattopadhyay) as she moved about London in her gaily coloured silks. This kind of incredulity still underlies many British perceptions. The same Manchester student told The Guardian that whites would often rather not sit next to him on a bus, or shuffle away from him in the street. The occasion was the publication of the 335 page report of the Lawrence murder inquiry presided over by Sir William Macpherson, 27th chief of his clan and retired high court judge. The victim was a black 18 year old A level student with a promising future. Lawrence's 1993 death, as he and a friend waited for a bus in south London, was cold-blooded racism, and the simple stone memorial put up on the site has repeatedly been desecrated: white paint was poured on it even while the Macpherson report, which has drawn the wrath and sneers of many conservatives, was being hotly debated. Over the years, I have watched attitudes change and borders fade while movement from both sides - the one absorbing much of the immigrant lifestyle and the other confident enough now to assert its own identity even while coming to terms with the national ethic - grinds slowly, very slowly of course, towards a cosmopolitanism that might be all the more effective and enduring for not being planned consciously. Traces of the surprise that surrounded De were to be found in the effusive courtesy of the early Fifties when I first got off the boat train at Tilbury. There was then a residual memory of British India, and a smattering of army Hindi could still be heard. But my victory in all the students' union elections I contested was due to what my English friends called an 'inverted colour bar'. No wonder an old lady boasted when the West Indian influx began a few years later that she deliberately shoved immigrants with her handbag on buses and in the tube so that she could then apologise profusely and smile sweetly. Anti-British rhetoric at Hyde Park Corner by stalwarts of Fedind (Federation of Indian Students' Associations) and the phoney Indian Workers' Association was guaranteed to draw white applause. The portcullis had been lowered and surly native guardians of Anglo-Saxon culture stood on watchful guard by the time I returned some 10 years later to live in London for a while. Through deft questioning, both Enoch Powell and my private doctor in fashionable Hampstead satisfied themselves that I was on a posting, based in and paid for from India, and not settled in Britain. Even if the suffix 'illegal' was dropped, immigrant in the late Sixties was synonymous with someone who manipulated the social welfare system to take maximum advantage of health, housing, unemployment benefit and all those other facilities towards which he had not contributed a penny. Now, of course, surveys prove that the British are more familiar with pakodas and naan than with roast beef or suet pudding. The extent of this assimilation struck me when spelling out my name over the telephone to an English lawyer I had not even met. When I got to 'K-i-s-o-r', he pronounced it right as Kishore and not phonetically; when I expressed surprise, he expressed even greater surprise. Later, I was to see municipal notices in Bengali, Urdu and Gujarati even in a small town like Hertford. But atavistic prejudices die hard too. When Matthew Parris, political columnist of The Times, called the dead boy 'Stephen the blameless', he came as near as he dared to minimising cruel and brutal bloodshed and defending the racist thugs. No less telling was Peregrine Worsthorne's reference in The Spectator to 'the truly appalling New Britons' (read Afro-Asians) whom he sees as enemies rather than aliens and with whom he is glad to feel no affinity at all. 'Even the grunting and slurping language they speak, which to my ears does not sound like English, or at any rate proper English, jars unbearably.' So much, then, for Bhangra rap from the Midlands, or that rite of Caribbean passage, the Notting Hill festival. Some thought that even the home secretary, Jack Straw - who commended Macpherson's report for opening people's eyes 'to what it's like to be black or Asian in Britain today' and promised a thorough overhaul - was playing to reaction when he also mentioned 'bogus asylum seekers' who were really 'economic migrants' (read Tamils and Sikhs). It will not be easy tackling such implicit positions. But when the first Race Relations Act was mooted in the late Sixties, the argument was that if something was illegal it would ultimately cease to be acceptable. That is only one prong of the reform fork. Another is the objective of creating a black middle class, originally underlined by the Conservative party's Michael Heseltine and reiterated by Lord Scarman in the wake of the 1981 Brixton riots. Meanwhile, no one denies the case for further institutional reform. Thanks to a built in bias in the police, blacks are five times more likely than whites to be stopped and searched. The police complaints mechanism does not inspire coloured confidence. In Scarman's time, blacks accounted for only 0.7 per cent of the Metropolitan police force. Straw wants a statutory minimum of seven per cent (ethnic minorities comprise about two per cent of Britain's population) and more in areas of immigrant concentration. But numbers alone will achieve little. African-Americans already account for 40 per cent of the American police where there are also a number of black chief constables. Neither has wiped out racism. Even Macpherson admits that 'how society rids itself of such attitudes is not something we can prescribe, except to stress the need for education and example at the youngest age, and an overall attitude of zero tolerance of racism within our society'. But if his 70 recommendations - including the revolutionary proposal to allow trial twice for the same offence - are implemented faithfully, it would have the effect of turning institutions and procedures inside out. Faced with the debris of empire, the plucky little island with which it is easy to find fault might yet evolve a harmonious multicultural ideal that puts the rest of the world to shame.