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RaceYeah. I wrote something. No, this is not going to involve deep social insight. Just a few points. First, and most important to remember : Britain does *not* have the same racial mix as America. Stop right there. Really. I'm still bloody remembering the time some Americans accused JK Rowling and the Harry Potter films of being racist because there were so few non-whites. Us : 'Um... did you *miss* the twins?' Yeah. Anyway. Rule of thumb. For the most part (outside the cities and big towns), what you'll mostly see is white people with a few asians and a couple of black people. The mix changes depending on the town. There's more immigrants in the south-east and the midlands than, say, the south-west and Wales, because the midlands had jobs and the south-east is our main landing point if you're coming from the mainland, so it has more of everything. In a lot of Cornwall it's not uncommon to have the only non-white faces being the ones that run the chinese takeaways and the Gurkhas stationed at the local barracks, and conversely, in parts of London, it's difficult to find anyone over the age of twenty with an English accent (the kids will normally have the local accent). Anyone with even slightly pigmented skin with a British accent? Grew up here and will not appreciate you commenting on it because, amazingly, and I know several americans find this hard to believe, but we are not all lily white. Nor do we all speak either like the Queen or like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. All I'm asking you to do is check. Because it varies from town to town, and the population shifts. For instance, in the town I grew up in? Our main immigrant communities are Irish, Polish, West African, and Pakistani. Which is not the same as the next town over. Our racial issues are not your racial issues. We may have run a large part of the slave trade and we may have conquered/massacred a lot of people with darker skin than ours in the process of building and maintaining the most-far reaching empire in the world, but because we didn't have a lot of slaves here or see the effects aside from war and goods that ended up here, white folk don't tend to have any guilt or even think about it unless we're watching Gandhi. Same goes for any lasting effects of the Empire (everything from the state the Middle East is in to the opium trade), because it wasn't in our face. Class is far more important an issue. If you want info on the attitudes *then*, go read the literature written at the time. Especially the stuff aimed at kids and adolescent boys. Couple of pointers : Asian - Indian sub-continent. Everyone else from Asia, we say 'oriental' 'far-east asian' or (far more likely) Chinese/ Thai/ Japanese/ whichever country the person looks like they come from. And it's mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Thai. Not that many Koreans or Vietnamese unless there's a specific community in that town. Muslim - will get used as shorthand for those of the Middle-Eastern persuasion. African - only gets used as a term in conversation if said person is first generation and still has an accent. It used to be the case that if you saw someone black, they were almost certainly of West Indian (think Jamaica) descent. These days, not so much. And black people did exist in the UK (mostly in the cities) pre-1900 (the next big influx being in the 1950s/60s). It's just that for the most part, they bred out. Hispanic - if you say this, we think you mean someone from Spain. or Portugal. Or the Spanish-speaking part of the Mediterranean, and then wonder why you feel the urge to have a label for someone from the Mediterranean that only refers to one bit of it - and seems to exclude Greece, Turkey, and Italy, and we'll give you *really* puzzled looks if you try to refer to them as a catch-all race term. Seriously. 'Latino' means *nothing* unless you're talking about the music. If they're from South America or Puerto Rico or Mexico, they're Brazilian, Argentinean, Chilean, or _insert country here_. Immigration is a big issue. The papers are obsessed with it, as are the politicians. As far as the rest of us are concerned, it's just part of our daily lives and why yes, the new barman is Polish. So? For the most part, we try to pretend it doesn't exist, and we're far happier when everyone isn't making a song and dance about it. Of course there's racism. It's less than America, definitely less in-your-face than America, and as with most social unrest issues, tends to only blow over/spill over when the area has high unemployment. (in my town there's a running joke that everyone's racist, the immigrants are far more racist about the other immigrants than the locals could ever be, but we're far too busy making money to have the time to indulge. And even then we all sneer far more about the people from the mostly poor white sink estate to the south.) Even the most racist BNP member has his favourite curry house. The most overt racism tends to be towards Middle-Easterns and Asians because there's more of them and they have their own distinct culture and way of dressing. Chinese and Japanese, not so much. Mixed race couples? Normal. There is no such term as African-English. Or Pakistani-Scots. There are, however lifted eyebrows if you try to use anything PC. And before you ask, 'Spook' means 'member of the Secret Service', and you only hear the term 'gook' as a racial epithet in films about the Vietnam War. |