Racism in all its guises

Subject: FW: Racism in all its guises.

 

  

Is there a difference between being racially reserved toward people who don't look like you and arguing the case for limiting the number of people coming into the country.
The howls of protest even to suggest that we can differentiate between people in this way is now so persuasive, it takes a brave person, to claim you are not a racist and yet suggest that the wholesale mixing of people from wildly disparate backgrounds, brings  as many problems as it offers the rich diversity which is claimed.
The issue do I dislike a person simply because he or she is black or yellow is a racial one and has no place in a civilised conversation. But the question can a society absorb a set of cultures and religions which fly in the face of its own culture was never properly discussed.
Rather today the question is asked, "what do we call our own culture and how do we define being English", and the suggestion is that we practice a sort of exclusivity if we define an English person as being White, Christian and speaking English.
There is little disquiet in describing a Nigerian as being black or a Chinese person as having yellow skin. There are white Nigerians and white Chinese but they are in such a minority that to do so is unhelpful when describing the population as a whole but it's the case in this country, that the numbers, which were artificially swollen after the war and have been a source of cheap labour ever since are now so large that they have a competing claim as to their importance, and that, along with their customs and religious preference they demand some sort of equality. It is thought that diversity is a strength and that foreign customs are rich and add a variety to our ordered parochial  lives, we should therefore be grateful for the chance to see them at close quarters. Equally the religious traditions of societies based on the other side of the world would, in some way, reinvigorate our blinkered self centred society away from its historical isolation.
It's always interesting  how many of these societies, who are now entrenched on our soil  are not so forthcoming towards the indigenous society they found here when they arrived by trying to assimilate  more.  Of course the lack of assimilation was due to the negative reaction of white working class societies who bore the brunt of these unannounced people (our betters in Whitehall thought it unnecessary to explain and educate) and were invariably seen as stealing the jobs by being prepared to work for much less money.
The schism of religious belief and the importance of upholding their customs which they brought with them, makes it difficult for the white majority to acknowledge, on the one hand, their reticence to be welcome whilst on the incomers  side, to mix or learn the language.  Whilst the majority are constantly being pushed and harangued to make the necessary adjustments for everyone, the resentment gradually builds up and it does the attempts at harmony no good to hear the vitriolic challenges made by certain sections of the immigrant society on the media criticise, no matter how justified, the largely compliment society as a whole.
The white middle class professional who were isolated from the changes caused by the unfettered influx of people from the West Indies, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and now, Syria and Lebanon, it's a long list, and it's from their ranks grew the ghettos as people seeking  to find similarities in language and custom, turned already run down inner city areas into hot spots of dissatisfaction from both sides. The term no go areas became common as clusters of national awareness grew, not the nation state which had provided a new home but pocket sized equivalence of life back home. The charge of racism is also frequently heard from these equivalent societies, often articulated by the people who left the family behind and made their way into journalism and the media.. They are the opinion column journalists who spread their ideological cant about diversity and the one world view, whilst Trumpian reality seems to be embarking on a war which will soon be fought on just those lines of interpretive miscalculation we term racism.