Small town in Middle England in “racist” shocker!
April 14th, 2008 at 15:55
As a member of of the Guardianista liberal elite, I was under the impression that we’d beaten racism. I thought that everyone was on board the anti-racism bandwagon – I was even beginning to wonder if the racist Daily Mail and Sun readers who are our sworn enemies existed solelyin my head, much like how the Aryan utopia we had before the forrens arrived only exists in their heads.
But today I went to get my hair cut, and had to make conversation outside of my sophisticated degree-educated demographic for the first time in ages, and to my horror, it turns out that casual racism isn’t dead… it would appear to be rife.
I made the mistake of explaining to the woman cutting my hair that I’m a politics student. I really should have known better than to reveal this information. This caused either the man getting his haircut next to me, or the man cutting his hair – I’m not sure who as I couldn’t turn my head because my hair was being cut – to go off on one.
“I hate politics, politicians don’t do anything for us, they’re only looking after themselves”, he began. Somehow, he moved on to talking about immigration, as all idiots tend to do.
I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t have the courage to challenge them on their views, not least because they appeared to be friends with the woman cutting my hair, and I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of someone with the power to make me look like an idiot. I did obviously formulate a counter-argument to all of their bullshit in my head, in order to mentally prove to myself that I’m not a racist, and so that I could post a response to their arguments in due course, in a place they’re most likely to see it: on an obscure corner of the internet.
“They come over here, speak their language and spend our money”, he said.
“You go to London and you couldn’t even tell what an Englishman was, its all black faces… Leicester is mostly black now… I might move to Newcastle, there’s no black faces there”, he continued. I was hoping that someone else would challenge him. “Give it ten years…” the other guy said. Gah.
The clear implication was that black people are somehow a bad thing.
I should probably have said something like “What’s wrong with black people?” or “Isn’t a nation defined by the people who live there, so the definition of an Englishman would be transitive? Wasn’t it Benedict Anderson who theorised that the nation by its very definition an imagined community?”. Not to mention point out the factual errors. Leicester isn’t majority black – whilst the non-white ethnic minorities collectively outweigh white people about 60% to 40%, white people are still the largest ethnic group. And anyway, he never actually explained why this is a bad thing.
Just as I was about to despair at the world, my mood was lightened slightly when the topic of conversation moved on to where the other people in the Barber’s shop were going on holiday. Y’know, going to other countries, speaking English and spending foreign currency.
This said, I wish I had challenged him about his views – it’d make a better story, and its not as thought defeating someone who claims that they “go on YouTube and look for videos of car crashes” is going to be the biggest intellectual challenge.
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