At least, that's what I thought. And if you're a white, working-class person of less than a certain age (and I don't want to start being ageist as well so I'm not being more specific than that), I'll bet you wouldn't admit it readily out loud but you thought that too, at least until you were in high school. Racism was when someone was beaten up because of their ethnic origin, or using the N-word to a black person or the P-word to an Asian person. You sang 'hold my hand if you're yellow, black or white' at the end of a primary school play. And be honest, you thought that song was a great weapon against racism.
It was a slow, very gradual progression towards the dawn as I realised that I'd been living in an odd little microcosm of whiteness and weird attitudes, and as this writer explains (albeit from a far more extreme original stance), it's often somewhat of a perhaps self-created minefield once you try to do things right.
The real wake-up call for me has been in falling in love and getting married. My husband is not only black, but he wasn't born in the UK, though he has been here since he was a child. Suddenly I had someone 'different' as a huge part of my life, which had previously been largely made up of people who looked pretty much the same as I did. Race was brought home to me in a way that I don't think it could have been under other circumstances.
At first it was witnessing other people's reactions to my partner-then-spouse. Mostly people were well-meant; occasionally they were asking for a smack. The worst thing for me, however, was knowing that there was once a point in my own history when the well-meant remarks wouldn't have even registered as deeply offensive.
As I said, speaking as a person from the main perpetrating race, I think some racism is actually accidental and down to ignorance more than hatred, though we all know that is also out there. But (God-willing), one day I could be the mother of mixed-race child. Publicly, on TV and in the press we may be very PC and inclusive but on the ground level we are only making snail-paced progress. That we have come a long way since the 1919 riots against mixed marriages is not a sign that we can let up on our self-re-education. If it's wrong to use certain phrases in the press, it should be wrong in the pub because if it isn't wrong in the pub, it won't be wrong among the little ones in the schoolyard.
The real wake-up call for me has been in falling in love and getting married. My husband is not only black, but he wasn't born in the UK, though he has been here since he was a child. Suddenly I had someone 'different' as a huge part of my life, which had previously been largely made up of people who looked pretty much the same as I did. Race was brought home to me in a way that I don't think it could have been under other circumstances.
At first it was witnessing other people's reactions to my partner-then-spouse. Mostly people were well-meant; occasionally they were asking for a smack. The worst thing for me, however, was knowing that there was once a point in my own history when the well-meant remarks wouldn't have even registered as deeply offensive.
As I said, speaking as a person from the main perpetrating race, I think some racism is actually accidental and down to ignorance more than hatred, though we all know that is also out there. But (God-willing), one day I could be the mother of mixed-race child. Publicly, on TV and in the press we may be very PC and inclusive but on the ground level we are only making snail-paced progress. That we have come a long way since the 1919 riots against mixed marriages is not a sign that we can let up on our self-re-education. If it's wrong to use certain phrases in the press, it should be wrong in the pub because if it isn't wrong in the pub, it won't be wrong among the little ones in the schoolyard.
