To ask you to help me work out why this grates?

[DrSeuss]

MIL lives in an almost all white, all Christian area. We live in a much more diverse area with a sizeable Muslim contingent. The sight of a woman in a dupatta/ hijab/ niqab is sufficiently common for me to not really notice any more.

The last twice that she has visited, MIL has taken her to the park. Both times, she has returned full of the fact that there were Muslims there in hijab/niqab. Not in an aggressive way, more the manner of someone relating how they went to the zoo and saw some exotic creatures. Kind of, hey wow, guess what I saw! It just totally grates on me but I can't really say why. I just want to say to her, "So, you saw some local mums at the park and they belong to a different cultural group? And? You do realise that some of them may be teachers, just like a hijab wearer of my acquaintance, or doctors or nurses or anything, really, just like people from our cultural group or any group? Must you speak about them as if they are aliens?". But I don't, to keep the peace.

I just can't put my figure on why it grates. She is not being aggressively racist. I think it's the whole way it comes across, like the Queen watching local dancers somewhere in Africa and smiling graciously. I am probably being very unreasonable but I can't quite say why I dislike it.

Agree Bakeoffcake. Also someone mentioned nuns upthread. I don't know where you live but if there was even one nun let alone a flock of them in my park I am sure everyone would comment.

I do think this "othering" can be a way of saying "Those people are weird and not like me and not normal and if I constantly point them out I'll feel more secure". My mum and her husband do it a lot. My mum also does it about gay people even though one of her own DC is gay!

"We say two men in the park and they were HOLDING HANDS"

"Well the man turned up to mend the boiler and he was... BLACK"

Step dad even once said in a slightly miffed tone "There were no people in the park, just Pakistanis!"

He also once said "Well I wonder what the story is THERE!" in a cafe. I genuinely (I am not boasting about my "non-racist" credentials, but I've lived in several cosmopolitan cities) couldn't work out what was so intriguing until he pointed to a table where a black woman and a white women were having lunch. The "mystery" was that a black and a white woman were friends and eating together .

I do think it's a form of racism/homophobia etc. It grates (on me) because it feels like they're saying "Well I suppose we have to put up with all these WEIRDOS we're surrounded by, aren't we tolerant." Instead of being able to accept that "well, all of these people are human, perhaps I could get used to it." It's not like saying "I saw someone in a full veil in the park, I've never seen that before." There's an edge of outrage to it. And like OP it makes me want to say "So???!!!"

I do also get Orangevase's point and I think people can go OTT with the "look how not racist I am". But constantly remarking on the fact that you're not surrounded by white, straight people does get irritating.

It grates because you don't like your MIL.
I like the nun analogy, especially if they were wearing the old fashioned full length outfit with the white bib and veil.

I would find it annoying because it's very difficult to know how to respond. The first time you can have a conversation about cultural diversity. Perhaps the second and third time. After that there isn't really much to say.

Thats not to say that you shouldn't respond politely to your MIL but I can see why it would grate.

I think it would also grate if I lived near a convent and a regular visitor wouldn't shut up about the oddness of the nuns.

Cat and Psippsina, my Mother is like that.

"The man came to mend the boiler. He was coloured, but he was quite nice."

"The doctor was Eastern European, so I made out I couldn't understand what she was saying."

(The latter is completely baffling to me, as her grandmother was from Eastern Europe, as are several members of our family, who now live in UK.)

I'll tell you one thing which does strike me as strange. My son is married to a Turkish woman and has lived in Turkey for over 20 years. Turkey is a Muslim country and I have visited many many times. However, I have rarely seen a woman completely covered in burkah, niqab etc. a few wear headscarves but it seems to be a minority, far far fewer than in Birmingham or Manchester. Religious observance is usual. You hear the call to prayer from the mosque several times a day and every household has one or more copies of the Koran yet, on the whole, any oppression etc seems to be political not religious. My son lives in Izmir and is shortly moving to Istanbul. His 15 year old dd is as fashionable as her English cousins. She is less likely to go anywhere other than the cinema in the evening but can shop or go to the beach with her friends in a group. She seems very happy and safe and free from peer pressure.
I don't understand the generalisation of 'Muslims' as if they were all the same. It's like talking about Christians as all the same or atheists or any religious/anti-religious group. If there is a group generality it seems to relate to nationality not religion.

True merrymouse - it is difficult to know how to respond.

When people make racist/sexist/homophobic or just stupid remarks to me - I hate it. And ususally the same people make the same comments over and over again. (There is a particular woman at work who believes that poor people bring it on themselves, (What all of them? Surely not!!), that worrying will give you cancer, (I know stress can be a contributory factor but that is not what she means!), that if Labour had got in we'd have Sharia Law, that living on grapefruit and protein shakes for a week is good for you etc, etc)

I have given up on the whole challenging and explaining lark. After years of trying to "educate" people I have realised that a) it doesn't work b) I don't actually know everything and c) it doesn't make me any friends!!

Now I just pretend I haven't heard and change the subject!

thegreylady - you make a very good point about people generalising.

I also have a number of Turkish friends. One of my very best friends is Turkish but has lived here since she was sixteen. She is Muslim, doesn't drink or eat pork and is relatively consevative in her dress but no more so really than many women her age.

She identifies far more with her age group, occupation, local area and social class than her religion. She now tends to keep quiet when she hears, (often the "non-racists") talking about Muslims as if they are all one hijab-wearing, oppressed, discriminated against group.

You don't have to confront her, but you could respond in a way that conveys that people from different backgrounds and dressing in different ways is normal in your area, and that is something that you appreciate? That you just notice the people and not what they are wearing? Mention that one might have been your friend?

But you could do it in a nice way. Maybe even exposing her to more of your friends and your local diverse community?

But this reminds me when my mother visited after DS was born and the black HV came by. When she left, my mother commented in a sort of patronising way, how well "they" were doing for themselves.

I think you have to all remember that if you are around 35 or under, you have gone through your teens and young adult years during the Tony Blair years which was the boom time for multiculturalism and immigration in the UK. You probably don't consciously remember a time when there weren't at least one or two women in hijabs and niqabs on almost every high street, but your parents do. Many of them are still bewildered at the apparent speed with which it has happened, and they are still becoming accustomed to it.

We have always had immigrants of course, but not that many, and not from such a huge variety of places. The few immigrants we did have tended to be from a handful of places only (ie. mostly commonwealth and the British Empire countries) and they tended to stick to concentrated areas in and around major cities, whereas now they are more disparate and more geographically widespread.

The Muslims who were here 20-30 years ago were almost all Pakistani and Indian whereas now they are Arab, African or Middle Eastern as well. It was extremely rare see a woman in a niqab in the UK pre circa 2000, unless you happened to be in M&S Marble Arch or Harrods when the visiting Saudis descended.

Now, not only are there many more non-white and/or non-British born people here in general but the more recent Muslim female contigent are far more likely to cover than those who were here perhaps 15 or 20 years ago. Even second and third generation British Muslim young women are starting to wear niqab or to cover the face and hands totally, when many of their own mothers and grandmothers probably didn't see the need.

What to you might seem perfectly normal and something you can't really remember not seeing, is something that for your parents' or grandparents' generation is still a huge novelty and the object of fascination and sometimes suspicion. Especially if they live in a very rural area, although I don't think there is barely a large provincial town in the UK that doesn't have at least a smattering of hijabs and niqabs now.

If you do feel the need to mention something (and I know I would!) you could gently ask your MIL to help you set a good example for your DD by reminding her about not making personal remarks about others and that drawing attention to people who are different is unkind.

I'm not sure who the 'we' is - in 'we have always had immigrants.'

As an island there have been waves of conquest and immigration. Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Romans, Normans. People seeking a more tolerant religious climate, (Huguenots, Jews.) People coming from areas wheere there was famine and/or poverty (Ireland) to places where there was more work. Diverse communities springing up in ports.

The 'we' is/has always been diverse.

I was talking about this over lunch with my partner. I am half-Celt, half European Jew. He reckons he is about 1/8th to 1/16th Engilsh - depending on whether a particular Norfolk ancester was or wasn't Huguenots.

It's a phony view of society and history to construct some idea of a homogeneous stable past, which is only now being threatened by 'otherness.'

The otherness has always been there. The only constant is change.

PIL are a bit like this, point out stuff that happens in their town that to them is out of the ordinary. Like the time MIL told us about the 'tramp' that had appeared, we were at why she was telling us, DH said 'is it a problem? 'oh no' she replied 'but we already have a tramp' in a highly indignant manner. we could barely keep our faces straight and its become a family joke now

Baltimore there may be more immigrants as a proportion, but that doesn't explain my mum. I'm in my 40s and when I was at primary school in West Yorkshire there were large numbers of Asian kids and families around. My mum is in her 70s, even if she once knew a time when she never saw a brown or black face, she's had decades and decades to get over herself. The same goes for homosexuality - she studied English at university, she must have heard of Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf.

It's not that it's all new to these people - or some of them - it's that they persist in an old-fashioned (and as Marianne says, never even true anyway) vision of some kind of basic pure Britishness that they belong to and that they feel is being encroached on.