Is my best friend racist?

My cousin's city, no in the UK, has had an enormous level of immigration over the past 10 years.Currently about half the population were not born in that country. Most are Indian.

There have been all kinds of previously unheard of incidents of sectarian violence and also discrimination in workplaces, because of people bringing their fights and prejudices with them from home. Stuff that has never been seen there in 100 years.

Some diversity can work well, but not all groups are equally able to integrate, and huge numbers like 50% can change a place significantly.

Well I still read and subscribe to the Guardian but I refuse to eat muesli and wear sandals. Life long Labour voter. I'm 64 and people still want and need me.

Spot on.

I’m another former card-carrying, Guardian reading pinko liberal leftie who has been mugged by reality. I just find it impossible to continue pretending that ‘diversity is our strength’ etc etc when I see the evidence of appalling abusive misogyny, patriarchal repression, refusal to integrate & sectarian religious divisions with my own eyes every time I go into my local city.

There are a lot of people in Northern Ireland and Wales where Irish and Welsh is their first language. So what? I love hearing different languages being spoken in this country.

Absolutely this. I too have moved on from my leftie years, where I was a paid up member of the socialist workers party and celebrated diversity from the roof tops. You get to a point and an age where you realise that reality is not matching up with what you're being told; that multiculturalism is perhaps not enriching communities but dividing them. There are huge swathes of 1st generation immigrants who've lived in the UK for decades yet STILL can't speak English. How on earth is integration possible when we don't share a common language? Esol provision was plentiful, especially in the 90s, so there can be no other excuse other than no drive or inclination to participate in wider British society. So, yes you're right - for many of us, the scales have well and truly fell from our eyes.

You are already captured. Beyond saving. Fill your boots.

They don't even have to travel to Somalia to be mutilated. The laws are so ineffective at protecting these children the UK is regarded as a safe place to 'cut'.

Your friend is not racist.
I'm an immigrant from the Caribbean and was educated in the UK. My social circle consists of Brits, foreign nationals and other immigrants from my original country.

The most Racist comment I've ever had, came from a 'friend' who felt that after living here for 40+ years I should have abandoned my original culture by now.
I'm integrated, not converted ffs!

Yes, such views are racist. Sadly, too many people are racist and don’t want to admit it (I.e. don’t want s we themselves that way or don’t want to stop being racist). So they’ll come up with more racist nonsense to justify their views “I don’t mean all migrants, just a certain type of migrant…blah, blah, blah”.

Stuart Hall was a great author on the subject of cultural racism.

How much is Farage paying you, because you’re doing a great job of pushing people towards Reform with your contemptuous attitude. And I say that as someone who’s not a Reform supporter!

Respectfully you are a the rear end of a dog's backside. Nice bollocks.

Respectfully your post appears to me to be dismissive and to my mind it’s a similar attitude from those in Government that is making people turn to parties like Reform.
Most of us are pretty much aware of the stats around rape and violent crime and that mainly white men will have committed these crimes as Britain is a majority white country.

I do think that people who assume that humans are fundamentally about the same are a bit naive. Somali girls suffer FGM at 99%. Almost all of them are put through this barbaric mutilation and torture.

I'm sure that this is something a British mother would literally die to save her daughter from.

And unfortunately, simply living in the UK isn't enough to save many of these girls, who are taken back to Somalia to have the procedure.

I agree with your friend

If integration was not a problem you'd expect an even distribution of races and cultures all over the UK, however, there are many cities over the UK which have names like "Chinatown", "Little Germany" etcetera.

First generation immigrants will group together with people of their own culture because they struggle to integrate and this is how these small pocketed communities come about.

It takes several generations of social mobility to get away from this, but the hub for new immigrants is already there and will always be its own "culture within a culture"

Completely agree!

i think you’re missing the point. My children are also in a school with others from different backgrounds, and they get along very well. I believe other cultures can and do enrich us….

But this is about those cultures in the UK that don’t integrate and share common values (democracy, women’s rights, freedom of speech/religion etc.), in particular how their extreme patriarchal and misogynistic cultures create significant risks for women whose lives overlap with theirs (the Rotherham grooming gang being just one example.)

I’ll champion the right for women to be safe from sexual abuse any day over pressure to be politically correct and pretend that there are no issues with certain cultures in this country.

I think very many of us can recall the moment we first started to wonder. This thread really suggests scales are falling from eyes at quite a pace now, I can't imagine the conversation being like this even a year or two ago on MN, a famously 'leftie' forum. I think people are starting to suspect that 'diversity' is not always our strength, and that all cultures are perhaps not in fact equal.

And once again, go to any credible data agency and they will tell you they can’t work with a sample size of 19. The number is too small.

You can, although the result will be much less robust than a larger data set.
But as I've said, we've got data from a variety of European countries, so are not confined to such a small dataset.

Interesting that you whine about another poster being rude to you when you make remarks like this...

Interesting that you’re criticising me yet have ignored your comment to me that I was responding to which was ‘Oh dear. Though I suppose it's better that you just don't understand…’

What you’re basically saying is that you can say whatever you want and are not rude, but me saying the same thing to you is rude. Can you explain the double standard?

And once again, go to any credible data agency and they will tell you they can’t work with a sample size of 19. The number is too small.

But oh dear, it’s clear you won’t understand this either.

Interesting that you whine about another poster being rude to you when you make remarks like this...

Despite it being explained to you in painfully simple terms, you continue to demonstrate complete ignorance of even the most basic statistical concepts. Whether this is intentional or not, I have no idea. Though I suspect.

You are obviously and demonstrably wrong in both your reasoning and your conclusions.

You are, however, entirely correct that there’s little value in continuing to engage with someone who has to resort to silly insults when they find themselves unable to formulate a coherent argument. If your strategy is to shut down discussion by being so consistently and tiresomely obtuse that people lose the will to continue, congratulations. I’m out. 👍

Plenty of people in our own culture who think women are second class citizens citizens and who rape women

I'd happily see the back of them too if possible. To somewhere deserted so they're not inflicted on anyone else.

Quote an assumption, when the vast majority of the foreign assault convictions are from non-Muslim countries.

Plenty of people in our own culture who think women are second class citizens citizens and who rape women. Would probably happily have multiple wives if the laws allowed. Instead they just shag about.
it’s not a culture thing. It’s a fundamental beliefs system thing and that can vary as much within a culture as between cultures

I can’t quite believe how the Left are sacrificing women on the altar of identity politics, first gender, now culture (dressed up as race).

I used to be very much one of them. What started my change of mind was the Cologne mass sexual assult incident on NYE 2015.
And between then and now, I've seen more and more people come to the same realisation.
I wrestle with this, as I also know and like people who are immigrants to the UK and are Muslim, who would never do this or break any other law for that matter, and I worry how things will be for them if there's too much of a backlash. It's for the sake of decent immigrants as well as women and children generally, that the government needs to get a grip of this. Instead they seem intent on censoring, gaslighting, and inflaming tensions. It feels unsustainable.