Change your tune, Robert Jenrick. For integration look no further than bhangragga

Thirty years ago, the Birmingham-born musician Steven Kapur - aka Apache Indian - released his second album, Make Way for the Indian.

- Kieran Connell

Like his first record, which was shortlisted for the 1993 Mercury prize, the album was a pioneering mix of Kapur's key musical influences: Jamaican reggae, dancehall and traditional Indian bhangra. Such was his success, both in Britain and around the world, a new term was coined to capture the hybrid genre he had invented: bhangragga was born.

Kapur had grown up in Handsworth, the inner-city area of Birmingham that, it transpired last week, the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick had briefly visited in March and subsequently described as “one of the worst integrated places I've ever been to”.

In the 90 minutes he spent filming in the area, Jenrick told a Conservative Association audience, “I didn’t see another white face”.

The unspoken assumption behind Jenrick’s comments was that because the faces he did see in Handsworth were not white, they must necessarily have been foreign. To be properly British, so this thinking goes, you must be white. The ignorance of such a view is obvious. Apart from anything else, most people in areas like Handsworth were born in Britain.

There are migrants, of course, but most are British, having migrated on UK passports from countries previously colonised by Britain.

Jenrick’s comments also expose a much bigger issue with how we talk about diversity and multiculturalism in this country. Too often, the subject is seen in polarised terms. White people are placed on one side of the equation, while everyone else is lumped on the other.