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Race Relations
Our friend Khadijah (who is support worker with Social Services)was in Royton yesterday morning and three times she had guys crusing past in cars shout racist abuse at her.
Royton is the suburb of Oldham where I used to be a vicar. It's a "nice" area- upwardly mobile, and almost exclusively white.
Race relations are edgy round here at the best of times, but it looks like they've got edgier since the London bombings. Leastways Khadj has never encountered anything like this before.
She said she wanted to go up to the shouters and say, "Look, I'm a nice person. I'm doing a useful job here. What makes you think you can talk to me like that?"
Her boss would like to pull her out of Royton, but she doesn't want to go. "If I leave," she says, "they'll have won."
Royton is the suburb of Oldham where I used to be a vicar. It's a "nice" area- upwardly mobile, and almost exclusively white.
Race relations are edgy round here at the best of times, but it looks like they've got edgier since the London bombings. Leastways Khadj has never encountered anything like this before.
She said she wanted to go up to the shouters and say, "Look, I'm a nice person. I'm doing a useful job here. What makes you think you can talk to me like that?"
Her boss would like to pull her out of Royton, but she doesn't want to go. "If I leave," she says, "they'll have won."
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Apparently the cyclist was either just a very arabic looking northern Italian, or, like rather common nowadays, he had been living here for so long that he had acquired even the cadence and dialect.
Anyway, this rather funny event in itself made me feel sad thinking about it.. the bombings are truly drawing out the worst in everybody, re-creating regionally closed groups where we are supposed to live all in a global, super-european village. Discouraging .
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But, yes, it's sad. This town I live in is multicultural but- largely because of Council housing policy- everyone more or less lives in ghettos. Our house is on one of the few integrated streets- half Asian and half white- sandwiched between the Asian ghetto of Glodwick (up on the hill) and the white ghetto of Fitton Hill (down in the valley).
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No one knows who did it.
When the TV crew went out to interview the neighbors, no one would talk on camera. "It would be like drawing a target on my chest," one said.
No children are out in the yard anymore, and no one sits on their porches.
And it's random, apparently.
This morning, in another Knoxville neighborhood, a man looked out to see if his paper was in the driveway and found a woman's body.
Police are investigating.
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There have been two arrests. One man is out on bail and the other is "helping the police with their enquiries" (I love that phrase!)
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The murder victim was a model student and a devout Christian. His "crime" seems to have been having a white girlfriend.
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I'm not pointing the finger at Britain, by any means. Somewhat of the same sort of thing happened in the US post-9/11.
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But how admirable that she stays.
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She's married to a white British Muslim and the two of them get a lot of stick from (some) of their Asian neighbours.
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Is that the area that people were commenting on in particular after a round of BNP "success" in local elections a year or two ago?
This is a sad tale. I can see why she would want to stay, and why her boss would want to move her. At least that's two people trying to do the right thing.
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No- Oldham has always (just) avoided electing BNP councillors. I think the area you mean is over in Burnley.
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Or maybe it's just that we're taking more notice of them in the wake of the London bombings.