Race, immigration and cultural diversity in the UK

[annwfyn]

This comes from a discussion on someone else’s LJ, in which I found myself feeling quite surprised by some of the views that were being expressed about race, immigration, and cultural diversity in the UK.

I am, therefore, offering up a poll for your interest.


[Poll #974234]

One thing I've realised is that my views have changed over the last year or so, and slightly weirdly it is mostly down to LJ. A while ago I got into the habit of drifting around various LJ communities, and peering at them with a kind of fascination. Amongst those communities, I came across debunkingwhite and ap_racism, which I read for a while.

When I first starting reading them I found half the entries to be absurd, and bordering on the offensive. I mean, white people weren't like that. All these people were being ridiculous, and seeing race demons where they didn't exist. Or maybe things were like that in America, but they weren't like that in the UK.

I think I may actually have started refusing to read those communities, because they annoyed me so much. To a certain extent, I do think some of the things I've read there are ridiculous. I still vehemently disagree with the lunatic who wrote that "I've come to believe that White interferance in PoC communities will never be a positive thing, and the only thing we can hope for in America is peaceful segregation". When the hell did segregation become something that the anti-racist movement should aspire towards?

Yet reading these communities and just opening my eyes did begin to make me notice things a little bit more. I noticed the woman at Cancer Research UK, who bitched about 'all these foreign doctors' who were apparently the problem with the NHS these days because 'well, dear, these people just don't understand cleanliness, do they?' and the way no one in an office of five people even tried to correct her. I noticed the number of people who said things like 'well, there are a lot of black people in my area, and I just don't feel safe walking the streets at night'. Why on earth does that have to do with the black people? Say there's a high crime rate. Say you live in a pretty poor area. Why on earth is someone predisposed to mug you due to the pigment in your skin?

These days, I do think that maybe racism is more of a problem than I think we like to admit, and I think it is also something that lurks a lot closer to home than we realise. My final awakening came when I was sitting on a bus in America. A big black guy in baggy jeans, covered in bling, got on and sat down next to me. I tensed up. God knows why, but on some level I was nervous about this guy sitting next to me.

I think I kept glancing at him nervously for about five or ten minutes before he turned to me and said "am I making you uncomfortable?"

The minute he said that, I realised what a completely unreasonable cow I was being. Why on earth was I glancing suspiciously at a random stranger who had done nothing to deserve it. I said "oh, I'm sorry...no...of course not" (which was a lie) and he (bless his kindness) said "oh! You're British" and we wound up chatting for the rest of the journey, with my ignorance apparently being forgiven as some kind of odd cultural thang. He was a lovely guy. But I'd been afraid of him for no good reason other than my own prejudice.

Since then I've done my level best to watch my own stupid thought processes, and I've tried to prod and poke others. But I do think it's there, and I think although we wrap it up in a lot of different words and phrases, we are still carrying a couple of centuries worth of prejudice and preconception around in our heads most of the time.

Comments

[tooth-fairy.livejournal.com]

My answer for the last one is only if it is a statement based on statistical proof. If figures say that more crimes are 'black' related then that is a statement of fact. If however someone assumed that crimes commited were because of skin colour without looking into reasons then that would be recist.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

*nods*

Yes...I understand. And there are reasonable responses to there being higher incidents of crime in black areas, which is maybe to look at the economic crap that goes along with it, ask what is going wrong with inner city schools which keeps people uneducated and unable to break out of poverty etc.

Then there's the unreasonable response (which I read lately in the Times) which is 'crime keeps going up in black areas. Immigration is bad and multiculturalism has failed'. That vexed me a tad.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

Ah, someone got there before me :)

Goodo.

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

Same as.

[borusa.livejournal.com]

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

You appear to currently be showing up as the strong silent type on my LJ.

Or, in other words, this comment is blank, which I presume is unintentional.

[alasdair.livejournal.com]

I'd actually say that I am actively happy to live in an immigrant area. I love the fact that my local shops stock stuff that you can't buy in most supermarkets. I love the fact that there are fireworks going off in my area for great chunks of the year, as opposed to just on the 5th of November.

And I completely agree with tooth_fairy's comment above - literal quoting of actual fact is not racist of itself, but at the same time, but it could easily be made racist by context.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

You live in Tooting, don't you?

I'm frequently quite jealous of you. I really really miss living in an area where I could get decent fabric from a sari shop, or go poke at nice shalwar kameez type things, or just get a decent curry which wasn't quite as generic as the Anglo-Indian stuff that turns up in a lot of takeaways in London.

[sea-cucumber.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of racist stuff comes from not knowing enough about the different countries ethnic minorities come from.

I don't think it is racist to feel uncomfortable around people of a different race, it's just when someone doesn't know enough about whatever culture to not accidentally say something bad! It's the same in any social situation really, anyone would feel uncomfortable when in a situation where they don't know how to act.

I don't get it myself as such, I think having been to different countries helps a lot then you understand about people generally a lot better - but I can see how some people would find it a bit strange.

I will also point out I agree with the people above, a factual comment based on actual statistics is not racist, but assumptions/generalisations/stereotyping based on that is definitely bad...

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I don't think it is racist to feel uncomfortable around people of a different race, it's just when someone doesn't know enough about whatever culture to not accidentally say something bad! It's the same in any social situation really, anyone would feel uncomfortable when in a situation where they don't know how to act.

I suppose that makes sense - I think what I was thinking was a bit dubious, which I've seen in a couple of cases - is people using that as a reason why they don't like living in a certain area, or why they think immigration is a problem, and they say this stuff without even really trying to look at why they are twitching, or without trying to get on with someone from a different culture and that does bother me.

I think maybe it makes a big difference whether you say "Ok, I feel a bit awkward, but I'm going to try" (which is what I try and do in class situations where I feel uncomfortable - I come from this horrible middle class sheltered background and have a load of awful and snobbish instincts in my head) or just say "OK...I feel uncomfortable and so I shall now ignore and avoid these people and try and make sure I don't have them in my life" which does seem quite icky to me.

[silver-blue.livejournal.com]

I don't mind it, as long as they try and adapt to the British way of life. I get a bit uncomfortable with the women in veils, or the people talking in foreign languages all the time

Although I ticked the box, it's really the first part that I agree with. Women in veils, everyone talking in a foreign language, it's not really a major issue for me. But I do think that learning the language of the country in which you live is at the very least a desirable courtesy, and that developing a cultural and racial isolation is counter-productive to integration.

All of the definitions of racism that you point out in the survey are true to an extent. Not all of them are conscious racism or aggressive racism, some of them are issues that...well...just exist without necessarily a specific desire to do that.

I don't think that racism is a massive issue in Britain - though how much of that is because I'm viewing it from a relatively privileged white standpoint I don't know. I do think that a lot of the left-wing/liberal press fosters an idea of racial "victimhood" that is not particularly productive and actually is racist in itself.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Yeah...I always used to think racism wasn't a major issue in Britain, but of late (over the last year or so) I think I've begun to suspect that it's a lot easier for me to not see racism in Britain because I'm never affected by it.

I think on a low level there's quite a lot of it about, and I think when you get out of our comfortable middle class, university educated and economically quite privileged world it actually gets a bit worse. Jez used to come home from fundraising with some very depressing stories about the kind of thing his Asian fundraisers used to deal with on a day to day basis in some areas.

[kizzie.livejournal.com]

That last bit of the poll is awful, so I'm gonna clarify what I think a little.

It's not racist to say that there is a much higher crime rate amongst black males

--Only if the figures ACTUALLY reflect this however, it is racist to go around saying it without any actual evidence.

A lot of ethnic minorities trade on their ethnicity to get things done.

--Some people use it as a badge for why they can't do X Y and Z, rather than just ignoring the whole thing and getting it done. I remember someone I worked with telling me they wanted to go to uni, but coudln't because of their family the university woudln't let them in. Just utter crap. People's perceptions of what others think is often wrong but there is a lot of sensitivity based around it.

I think the first time I ever actually thought about racism was one time when I was about 14 and the teacher asked us all to put the class into the different "colour" (ethnic? country? who knows) groups. I just stood there for about 10 minutes trying to think about this entire thing, and it took a conscious effort to realise that one fo my best friends was actually not white (I don't know the politically correct term for this) then another 10 or so to work out who else in the class was. It was such a shock to have to think in those terms and something I had never done. For me it was just "That's Jasvier, she's my friend."

The second time was being screamed abuse and having things thrown at me (they were too far away for them to hit) when getting a bus home from work last summer. "White scum" were not allowed in thier area apparently.

One clarification:

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's racist to be uncomfortable around someone of a different race, as long as you make an effort to overcome it. I think I'm making a distinction between racism as views-you-hold and racism as instinctive-reactions-you-have.

I might be uncomfortable around someone of a different race, or religion, or social class, not because I'm prejudiced against that race/religion/class but simply because I'm not familiar with its 'rules' (if I smile at them, will they take that as politeness or as overfamiliarity? I'm curious about whether that jewellery/clothing/other has any religious significance, but is there any acceptable way of asking? Do we split the bill evenly or according to what we each ate?). I don't think that's entirely avoidable, but I also don't think it's necessary for it to get in the way.

Re: One clarification:

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I agree totally!

hi

[reindeerflotila.livejournal.com]

I strongly draw a difference between two things brought up by your poll.

Racism Vs Prejudice, and Internal Privilege Vs External Action.

I really think it is important to draw a distinction between having a racist attitude and acting upon it. I firmly uphold anyone's right to think "bloody Paki's ruining the country" to themselves, so long as they don't actively behave in this manner, then they lose my vote.

I also think that discriminating against someone in a hiqab is not RACSIM it is prejudice based on RELIGION. I think this because you are not being racist if you behave prejudically against a white american Muslim.

I shall clarify why I said that I have been racist, I have a lot of Indian (high caste((brahmin)) Hindi in fact), friends and their attitude to Pakistani Muslims began to rub off on me for a while. To be fair, so did their attitude to low caste ( or 'patel's as they often just say). I got over it though.


just some thoughts...

Re: hi

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

When I was living in Nepal I used to spend my time entirely with high caste nepalis - basically - I was working in a school, and the teachers and their friends were all brahmin or chetri caste. They used to occasionally whitter about caste and how you could tell what caste someone was by looking at them, and how certain characteristics were pretty much universal in a caste. I looked brahmin, apparently, which they all said meant I was probably obssessed with money.

It took me ages to get that out of my head, especially when meeting folks from Asian backgrounds. I used to have the caste categorisations running through my brain, which really isn't OK.

On another note, jez used to have a posse of Pakistani Muslims working for him when he was fundraising. Most of them were surprisingly OK with the word 'paki' and said it was Indians who hated being called that. One of his fundraisers - a guy called Taran - used to say that 'paki' meant 'pure' and why would he object to being called pure. Not his problem if some idiot English guy didn't know what it meant.

[borusa.livejournal.com]

I think there's an important distinction between racism and racial prejudice. I believe everyone has prejudices - I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who claims not to - but the important question is how you act, and whether or not you're aware of them. I would be more nervous and uncomfortable walking in to a room filled with black men than a room filled with white men. I would it were otherwise, but that's a product of the environment and society I was brought up in. How I choose to act, however, in such a situation, is within my power. It is in the way we choose to act that we determine whether or not we are behaving in a racist way.

I also think that most people have probably said or done something racist or sexist in their life. I deplore the tendency to label someone as "racist" based on one comment or action - in many cases it's a question of someone acting on their prejudice, and it should be forgiven, but not condoned.

Like sexism, racism is not something that can easily be got rid of - it's ingrained in all communities and societies across the world - but it is something that can be made better, can be fought against - not in the expectation of winning, but in the expectation of reducing.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think maybe it is problematic that we don't really have any very good way of separating out different kinds of racism/prejudice. I do think that most sheltered white kids do probably have some racist or prejudiced ideas or behavioural tics in their brain.

I think the problem is that when the word 'racist' is used, what people think about is KKK members burning crosses, or obnoxious skinheads beating up black kids, or really really bad behaviour that no one wants to be associated with at all, and so of course everyone freezes up and gets defensive if their behaviour is described as 'racist', because what they hear is 'you're the kind of person who does this awful stuff'.

And that's sort of tricksy, because it makes it much harder to say "look - you're not evil - but that bit of your brain which says that those loud black people are a bit threatening isn't being nice or reasonable" which is what I think does need said a lot of the time.

[wildrogue.livejournal.com]

To clarify some of what I've said above, and generally add my tuppence worth:

I think racism is still a problem in Britain, possibly far more than we realise. I was utterly incensed a couple of weeks back to find a poster for the Arian Knights stuck up prominently on my way to work. I tore it down and spent the rest of the day being upset by it.

That said I think there are equally circumstances where we are too careful, and where there is too much emphasis on race. For example there has been discussion of American style 'positive discrimination' in job interviews, uni application and the like. My view is that this is absurd. By all means take someone's economic background into account - for example someone getting As and Bs from a school in a bad area is likely to be as bright as, or more than, someone getting straight As from a private school. Race should never come into it - these things should be done on pure ability and nothing else.

I am aware that my opinions and my gut reaction don't always match. Like you I have been made unconfortable by big black guys and I always kick myself mentally for feeling that way. I don't think this is racist though - I think it's an unfortunate bi-product of stereotyping and sad truths. It is, sadly, true that a young black man is more likely to get involved in crime than a young white man because so many black people live in 'bad' areas. This is a dreadful situation and one that I hope I live to see remedied but I don't know what the solution is.

To throw a bit more oil on the fire I'll add that I sometimes despair of our tendency as a nation to try and apologise for our national identity and widen so called cultural diversity. I actually agree that Britain has a national identity and a cultural heritage and I do think that people moving here should accept that to some degree. This is not to say (before I am shot down in flames) that I think all Muslim women should give up the veil, or that people should only speak English, but if you like in a country you should make an effort to learn the language at the very least. My personal advice to anyone wanting to live in Britain would be: keep your cultural background, but learn about ours as well and accept that you are now a part of that. Britain is, after all, a nation of migrants and that has brought us some amazing things - adding to it can only be good as long as it is adding and not expecting the native British to change to someone else's culture to make them feel more comfortable.

I'm not sure I've explained that very well. Challenges/opinions/questions more than welcome.

[silver-blue.livejournal.com]

That said I think there are equally circumstances where we are too careful, and where there is too much emphasis on race. For example there has been discussion of American style 'positive discrimination' in job interviews, uni application and the like. My view is that this is absurd. By all means take someone's economic background into account - for example someone getting As and Bs from a school in a bad area is likely to be as bright as, or more than, someone getting straight As from a private school. Race should never come into it - these things should be done on pure ability and nothing else.

I think that positive discrimination/affirmative action is pretty clearly racist in itself. I'm pleased that it's illegal in this country, and I always make it a point to explain that (because it's a common misconception that positive discrimination as a policy *does* exist in the UK).

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Are you familiar with the implicit association test? It's a bit scary.

Basically it brings up pictures of people of different ethnicities and then asks you to decide whether a word is a positive word or a negative word. These words have little to no ambiguity as to which category they should go in. The idea is that when faced with a picture of, say, a black person, if you have trouble making a positive association with that picture, it will reflect on how long it takes you to to decide if the word is positive or negative. The overwhelming number of westerners show a bias towards white people over black people, including about 50% of black people who take the test.

There were a number of theories bandied around to explain this phenomenon, ranging from the seemingly obvious (conditioned social bias) to the outlandish yet still eeriely plausible (the contrast between skin and eyes/teeth fires an instinctive amygdala response resulting in intimidation). One quite telling and chance find was that people often responded with a positive association to black people on days following the televising of the Olympics, which features a large number of black people cast in a positive light.

Power of suggestion.

[anonymous-james.livejournal.com]

I don't think I can answer any of the questions of the poll. I don't know the answers.

I know that I don't feel I really know what the word racism means. I went to look it up and found out that they didn't really know what it meant either (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/racism).

I know that any sort of prejudice is bad, but I also know that it is the very essence of human nature to judge people and form an opinion in the first five minutes (or less) of meeting them.

The dangerous thing, I feel, is cultural stereotypes. Are cultural stereotypes racist? Do they promote prejudice? The answer to the second question is probably yes. However they are a generalisation, but quite often they are based on some degree of truth. What IS wrong is when a minority of truth forms a stereotype that isn't even vaguely reflective of the real situation.

I have more to write, but I'm at work....

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Also, do you ever notice that sometimes you completely fail to recognise someone as being of an ethnic minority? They can be very visibly black/indian/iranian/whatever, but for whatever reason you fail to flag them up as anything different?

There's a book called Self Made Man, chronicling a female journalist's attempts to live as a man, and pass herself off as such for three months, taking part in male-only activities, environments and workplaces. To begin with she relies heavily on cosmetics, pseudo-stubble and the like, but eventually adopts masculine mannerisms so well that she doesn't need them, and as soon as she meets people, they peg her gender as male, and once they make that first assumption, all the absent adam's apples and tiny hands in the world don't challenge it.

There's a certain amount of cultural crossover and association with it, definitely. When was the last time you felt irrationally intimidated by a black guy dressed in a suit, or wearing something that could have been picked out by Carson from Queer Eye? One stereotype overrides another.

[kathminchin.livejournal.com]

Memory lane time here; to explain why I don’t think it’s racist to have thought processes that may look as though they are racist.

When I was about 12 – 13 I fell off a horse and smashed my elbow. I was taken to hospital and was waiting for my family to whiz over to come fetch me. I was in serious amounts of pain because they hadn’t given me any painkillers; and had moved my elbow all sorts of ways to do the X-ray (why they sent me home that night out of plaster and left me like that for the weekend I’ll never know – the consultant I saw on the Monday was horrified.) At the time I was not in a good state; and the doctor who was doing the rounds was black – as in ebony skinned, I’ve not seen anyone that dark often – and spoke with what I now know to be a really heavy Nigerian accent – and without my mum there, and with no one listening to me scream and offering a solution I was terrified of him. And I caught myself thinking “please God not him, don’t want to be seen by the black man.”

I immediately felt massively guilty, and so quietly acquiesced to his every suggestion and didn’t complain when I got told no plaster. Looking back on it I don’t think I was racist; I was reacting irrationally to a guy who was “alien” to me – and seeing as I didn’t scream “not the black man” out loud.

Other experiences I have with my current job – we deal with a lot of economic immigrants from both the EU and elsewhere. Most of the time they’re fine to deal with – but I get really annoyed with the Nigerian pharmacists who seemingly deliberately misunderstand the criteria for the policies in order to try and save money; and refuse to actually listen to a female on the phone telling them that if they qualified in 2000 they aren’t entitled to the First Year Qualified policy even if they registered in the UK for the first time in the last 12 months – but if we pass it to the men in the office it suddenly becomes crystal clear. There however I think it’s partly culture clash and partly the fact that the Nigerian accent is one of the most terrible ones to understand over the telephone. Seeing as the pharmacy profession is massively filled with different races though I do get to see the most amazingly blatant prejudices and “isms” on both sides; and I can safely say that racism is racism, and the Blacks / Asians / Orientals are as guilty of it as us Caucasians.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's a point.

It could be argued that I'm racist because I don't like talking to people with heavy accents; some people in the past (an Asian doctor I saw once springs to mind, though I can no longer remember the context in which I saw him) have obviously thought I was taking the piss out of their accent, the amount of times I said 'Pardon?' to the same simple phrase.

But that's not racism, it's deafness. Anyone with a heavy, unfamiliar accent will get the same response from me; it's just that I'm familiar enough with most of the UK accents to make the necessary adjustments. I also get much worse at understanding people when I'm stressed or nervous, presumably because I'm too anxious to make use of all the cues I normally rely on.

So if given a choice between speaking to someone who looks foreign and someone who looks distinctively English, I'd probably speak to the distinctively-English person, simply because I don't want to end up with one person annoyed becuase they think the piss is being taken, and one person anxious and frustrated because they can't understand.

love people with loud, clear, distinctive voices :)

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

I actually really miss the lack of ethnic diversity in Tokyo - and London is almost shockingly multicultural in Japan, not in a bad way, but because it is so, so different.

I ummed and ahhed about the full veil question. I will be very honest and say I do find the sort where you can only see the person's eyes, or not see the person at all extremely disconcerting, because I feel lost without the usual visual cues. I wouldn't think the person was a bad person, but it would certainly make it harder to interact with them, for me. But then if I lived in an environment where I encountered people wearing the full veil more, I would be more used to and therefore comfortable with it, I guess.

[xambrius.livejournal.com]

Middle-class neighborhood.
Smith lives in first house.
Second house is empty.
Jones lives in third house.
Black man moves into second house.

Smith thinks, "A damned nigger. There goes the neighborhood." He tries to convince the other whites in the area to help him make the new black neighbor feel so uncomfortable that he will put the second house back on the market and move.

Jones thinks, "A damned nigger. There goes the neighborhood." He does nothing to help Smith in the shunning campaign, but he sincerely hopes that the shunning campaign succeeds, and he admires Smith for leading it.

Who is being racist?
Smith and Jones?
Smith only?

"OK to think/feel but not OK to act" assertions ring rather hollow to me.

--
Tim Harris
The Seeker
Time Lord

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

You've got a really good point there.

I think I agree. I do think there is a difference tho, between the active racist and the one who at least is aware that some of their twitches are unreasonable and irrational and are trying to stop it, whilst not being able to control all their responses.

However, I do think you're totally right in saying that it's not OK, just because you've not actively done anything to push your more racist views, especially if you're not actually doing anything to challenge those views around you. That is a kind of tacit support of racism which is totally not OK.

diversity

[mangochutney04.livejournal.com]

sorry haven't read all the comments as rushing on lunch hon but did do your poll. Coincidentally I have just completed a conference on diversity and equality which was really fascinating to research although a b*gger to produce as no one has really achieved true diversity in their firms yet to be able to talk about it - hence why I've ended the week up knackered. No one is yet confident their firm is diverse enough.

Just a few thoughts, Singapore works really well on cultural diversity and I think we can learn a lot from there.

I found your poll really interesting because I definitely don't count myself as racist but I do feel uncomfortable when I see women all veiled up (there was one woman in Singapore where she literally couldn't see in front of her). For me it isn't a racist feeling as I have friends of all races and two of the people I am closest to at work both in London and in Singapore are Muslim so I do understand a lot about their religion (Chutney and I were even able to know to keep Puppy away from our removal guy recently because he was Muslim and we know they can't touch dogs). And I do know some women choose to do this but I really just think my discomfort is caused by my feminist beliefs rather than any racist tendencies, if that makes sense, because that's what concerns me - the individual woman's welfare - rather than that this is somehow to my country's detriment.

Re: diversity

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

*nods*

I know where you're coming from. I have these really mixed feelings about women in the full veil, which I totally don't have about women in a headscarf or something.

On one hand, I don't want to be dismissive of their culture or religion, but on the other hand I do kinda feel a bit uncomfortable with a conversation with someone where I can't see their face, and I do worry that it is a rather visible symbol of a cultural attitude towards women that I don't feel entirely OK with. That, and I worry if I say "oh, it's just their culture" I am being racist, in that I'm sort of saying that it's OK for Women of Colour to be treated in a way that I wouldn't find acceptable in a western context.

I think I lied on your poll

[omentide.livejournal.com]

Because, on reflection, I can think of two points in my life where things would have been different if I'd been of another ethnicity. I wouldn't define the outcome as 'better' or 'worse'.

One was the job I failed to get because I'm too white to counsel ethnic youth

One was failing the first year of my teacher training for being an unsuitable personality to teach and a second generation immigrant.

[windzswept.livejournal.com]

hmmm... I got a corker today...

"You're only giving me a 0 Miss because I'm Black, Mr **** wouldn't give me a 0 because he's asian and not white."

My response:

"I'm giving you a 0 because you haven't handed any work in, that has nothing to do with whether you are pink with green spots, black, asian or white. If you hand nothing in you get nothing because I have nothing to mark."

So yeah...

[raggedhalo.livejournal.com]

It's not racist to say that there is a much higher crime rate amongst black males

I agree with this, with the caveat that it's largely due to structural inequalities putting young black males at the bottom of the educational and socio-economic ladder, and an increased rate of arrest and conviction for black males comparative to their white counterparts.

You just need to look at the success of the BNP to realise racism is still all too alive and well.

[ulaidhan.livejournal.com]

I can't even start the poll, because while I was working for the Commission for Racial Equality up here in Scotland, the most common complaints of racism we received were from whites discriminated against by those who identified themselves as Scots. The complainants were almost all Irish and English, in roughly equal quantities (with one of Ukrainean descent).

There was a considerable legal debate around the time as to whether or not it could be defined as racism when, particularly in much of Scotland, it would be extremely hard for anyone save a bigoted fool to identify a firm Scottish ethnicity distinct from both English and Irish... but the predominant bigotry up here is against the wrong sort of white, not the wrong sort of skin colour.

Most of the figures I've seen show that it's got worse in the last generation or so - but the only reason I became aware that I was English / Irish and that it mattered was because local Scots made it painfully obvious to me that it mattered to them and was something to be held against me.

[eladriell.livejournal.com]

Sorry Colinton boy, no matter yer descent yer a native now. so there :P

[eladriell.livejournal.com]

It does depend on yer definition of race, as mostly its the aspects of culture that caue problems. I've lost jobs to cheap immigrant labour (Poles) entirely because they were going for cash in hand and were cheaper to employ. They were also excellent at the job, and yet you can see how that causes tensions.

In the UK where Cultural makeup is the difference (and by god theres some big differences) between the "white" groups that make up the nations, where Asians are lumped together as one group be these people Indian, Pakistani etc, when our ability to look at someone and be able to rely on a stereotype in order to know how to act and react is confused then we become uncertain, off-balance and worried.

Thats always gonna lead to trouble.

It's late, im not up to this level of thinking atm.