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

[dadi.livejournal.com]

It is the same here. Last Friday I watched an ugly scene of a fat Italian guy in a mercedes insulting a moroccan-looking man on his bicycle, without any apparent cause, he just shouted out of his window stuff like "bloody kamikazes, we should kill you all" and similar atrocities, all with a southern italian cadence. The "arab" though didn't stay silent.. he answered the invective of the fat guy in purest lombardian dialect, telling him to go home to his dirty south and thinking about his mafia down there instead of insulting people without knowing anything about them.
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 .

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

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

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

How awful. Three times?

But how admirable that she stays.

[qatsi.livejournal.com]

It's a "nice" area- upwardly mobile, and almost exclusively white

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.