An Oxford University student has investigated racial integration in Bermuda for her final dissertation.

Agatha Fox, 20, said the topic of her thesis was the extent to which the white and black populations of Bermuda are integrated. ?At the moment there are a number of economic disparities between the races,? she said. ?This inhibits assimilation. There are also divisions between Bermudians and non-Bermudians. A large part of the white population are expatriates, so there is segregation even within themselves.?

Ms Fox said she learned about ?hyper segregation? between black and white communities in the southern US in her second year at Oxford, and the subject is currently being examined between white and Pakistani or Bangladeshi populations in the UK. Ms Fox is applying geographer Nelson Gordon?s assimilation model theory to Bermuda.

Assimilation levels can be garnered by examining the racial make-ups of workplaces, schools and family make-ups, she said.

Immediate examples of places where she found more whites than blacks were the beach, sailing clubs and private schools.

?I wanted to bring it back to the surface and add Bermuda to the literature,? she said. ?I visited as the daughter of an expatriate. From my point of view I felt areas I visited were truly unrepresentative. For example, I went to the beach and 99 percent of the people there were white, but 52 percent of the Island is black. So, I asked where were the other 52 percent??

Ms Fox visited her father for a month last summer and used the time to explore whether Bermuda suffered from the same racial integration problems as other countries. She said her thesis is well on its way, but she is still in the process of analysing her results. Her first full draft has to be submitted this month and the final copy will be ready by January.

In order to gather information, Ms Fox mailed out questionnaires, passed them out on the street, gave them to school principals to hand out to students and even had a copy posted on the Limey in Bermuda website.

Her survey had 21 questions, including age, length of residency in Bermuda and whether the ancestry of her respondents would best be described as either Bermudian, British, West Indian, Portuguese, American, Canadian, other European, African, Asian, American Indian, or other. Another question dealt with what the local desirability was of immigrants from either the UK, US, Canada, Caribbean or the Azores and Portugal coming to Bermuda.

She asked whether any her respondents ever felt racially discriminated against and whether they preferred racially mixed, or racially homogenous neighbourhoods. She also asked what role the local media had played in race relations.

Ms Fox interviewed Minister of Community Affairs and Sport Dale Butler, Opposition Leader Grant Gibbons and the Shadow Minister of Race Relations and Economic Opportunity David Dodwell.

?I wanted to get a feel for it at the top,? she said. ?People influence it as well.?

Statistics were used from the CURE reports, she said.