<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/07/racially-tolerant-britain-wrong-racism-far-right>
"When my dad went to school in the 1970s, the kids used to pretend he was
invisible. Every day he would try to make conversation and play with the other
children, and every day he would be ignored. One night it got so bad that my
grandma found him crying himself to sleep, unable to process, as an
eight-year-old, why no one would want to talk to “the brown kid”. This kind of
social exclusion was sadly all too familiar in postwar Britain – my white
grandma had endured her own share of abuse ever since she fell in love with my
Sri Lankan grandad in 1966, committing the family’s original sin of interracial
marriage.
When I heard these stories as a child, they felt like terrible tales from a
different time – one of National Front marches and street battles, shot with
big bulky cameras on black-and-white film. Growing up at a multicultural school
in south-west London in the 2010s, I certainly had a different childhood to my
father’s – the notion of being an outcast because of the colour of your skin
was nothing short of laughable. Now, though, it doesn’t seem quite so funny.
Just a year ago, in the aftermath of the Southport killings, towns and cities
up and down the country were hit with what can only be described as attempted
pogroms. Hordes of men in Middlesbrough stood at intersections checking the
skin colour of drivers; family homes were vandalised with racist graffiti;
rioters in Rotherham tried to set fire to asylum seeker accommodation. As I
turned 19 in the midst of the chaos, I was being taught an important lesson,
one that much of my generation has had the luxury of forgetting. For the first
time I learned what it really means to live in fear because of the colour of
your skin, and it has never left me since.
This is all a far cry from my own laissez-faire childhood, which reflects many
of the experiences of young people of colour who grew up at a time when racist
attitudes were in decline. In 1993 almost half of Britons said they’d be
uncomfortable if their child married someone of a different ethnicity; by 2020
that number had fallen to just 4%, a stunning drop. Likewise, the percentage of
people saying that you have to be white to be truly British has fallen from 10%
in 2006 to 3%. While British society has always been far from perfect (many
have rightly taken aim at the continued prevalence of institutional racism and
unconscious bias) a consensus seemed to have evolved that racism was itself a
fundamentally bad thing that was on the way out."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
