Race Relations

[poliphilo]

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."

Comments

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I've been reading about a murder in Liverpool Friday.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's right. I've just been watching the latest news report. Four white men cornered an 18 year old Afro-Caribbean student and hit him with an axe.

The murder victim was a model student and a devout Christian. His "crime" seems to have been having a white girlfriend.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Yes, the axe is just chilling. Well, the whole thing is, but that makes it clearly deliberate, and not just getting carried away.

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.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I read an article in the Daily Express this morning which said we should tear up the European Human Rights Act, and I was thinking, no- its things like the Human Rights Act that differentiate our system of governance from the kind of Islamic Caliphate the bombers would like to establish.