The one sensible post on this thread, that acknowledges it's a deeply complex issue and that the lack of depth to conversation is part of the problem. There are social issues that are made worse by cultural differences. We may not like this or want to acknowledge this but they exist.
Cultural differences can be about race or religion. But they can also be about class. Or the location of the local community you live in and what social change has been in that area and how that has happened.
We should be able to talk about these social change issues and how people struggle with them without racism being shouted because it's important to understand the history and why people feel threatened by it. This unlocks how to stop that fear.
Shouting racism immediately just creates this silencing effect which is amplifying discontent because people feel dismissed. That then creates racism due to resentment.
My point here is there has been a failure to manage social change. The pace of this change has been at different speeds in different areas. And the impact has been different.
And then there's been gentrification and social decay at play - and this is really important to understand as part of all this. The destruction of communities is a huge driver of these issues.
Middle class people have different social structures and expectations. They grow up in a certain area, move away to university and then move where work is. They have an identity that's based around this and is free from location. It's about their job and about their education.
More working class communities are very different. They value staying in one place their whole life, knowing all the neighbours, having their whole family living close by.
What we've seen in the last couple of decades is a rising middle class which has expanded and become much bigger. That's more mobility.
I live in a white affluent area in the North. There's a certain resentment from those who are 'local' and have lived here a very long time. They tend to be more working class and have seen people like them and their families priced out the area by more middle class affluent families. They get frustrated because the area had a community which did lots of local events etc, but people who move into the area don't want to get involved to do the work to maintain these but expect these things to continue magically. They don't want to participate in this community. They want to be separate to it. Equally the incomers can be insufferable snobs who look down their noses at those who have lived here a long time but they seem uneducated or uncouth because they don't holiday in the right place or they don't shop in the right place. We can talk about this community change and tension because it's in an affluent white area.
So what happens to all these from the area, who after several generations (or more in a lot of cases) are forced to move to cheaper less desirable areas? They are more exposed to levels of crime they havent previously experienced and they are now isolated and scattered from family. Remember they value these family and friends ties above mobility and education. (Think about the concept of if you have nothing at least you have your family). They feel like the world is getting worse. These are white British people who have effectively been displaced by other white British people.
And this process is repeating in various forms around the country, with the gap between affluence and poverty growing.
If you live in an area which the main industrial employers were decimated, your community changed in a different way. Anyone who could leave did. Often education was a way out. But training and education hasn't been accessible for many. The decline in apprenticeships and work based tracing and focus shifting to degree level education and entry is notable - jobs that you previously could have worked your way up to are now 'closed' unless you have a degree. The nature of that job hasn't changed, just the means to entry. So people who are educated are then viewed as 'traitors' for abandoning the key values of family and friends or 'the enemy' because they are the gatekeepers preventing opportunities to those from more deprived backgrounds. There's an increasing alienation from this point of view. No one wants to live in that area anymore. So you start to get people moving in who have been pushed out of other areas and perhaps are less desirable. Your crime goes up because of those antisocial problems. If no one cares about the area and there's no money to maintain it, it goes into terminal decline. This has been happening with white communities with white people moving to them.
Those people who moved to the above mentioned nice area are totally unaware of a lot of this. They don't share the same priority of the sense of community and being close to family and the friends you grew up with. Their value is people who have the same educational and career related aspirations and having the same leisure interests.
Now add immigration into the mix. I don't have an issue with immigration, but I can see why it would add to the above tensions. One of the key points being that you see trends of people moving to small areas because they have people from the same background who have moved there and there's a certain sense of safety in numbers. They've managed to build community because of this. Just as people who lived there previously have felt their own community disappear. Because they don't share those family or cultural ties those people feel excluded and alienated by those moving in. And little has been done to recognise or address this. It's easy to see why resentment has built up - resentment which also does exist in white gentrifying areas - it's not just about race. The differences might be amplified and more stark though due to language, existing relationships, and religion.
Middle classes who put values of education etc before local community don't understand why this is as important as it is to others.
We see this same divide internationally in voting patterns. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about another European country or America. The same thing is happening. There's a split between these fixed and unfixed demographics. And little work being done to help each understand each other. The mobile class is the affluent one who makes the decisions. The one that's fixed feels a loss of sense of power and a degradation to their community which is being accompanied by a degradation economically and socially. The mobile class is very often detached from this.
I understand why racial tensions and immigration therefore has been blamed and the far right has been able to exploit this. Because there's are elements to migration patterns that people recognise. But actually it's more about social and economic changes being poorly managed and hidden from decision makers who are detached from the levels of crime and poverty that has emerged. And it's easy for this areas to be written off as uneducated or uncouth because of these lack of shared values and understanding.
Racial tension is the result of decades of social neglect for certain areas and a dismissal of the effects of gentrifying areas. Middle classes are happy because they've got the nice houses and the good schools. Immigrants tend to be the ones either with an education before they came (and thus more middle class) or a skill (remember the decline of apprenticeships) or money (the means by which to move at all). Their mobility means they have more shared values with middle classes. And it's harder for them to be accepted by those in communities who value these fixed values of family and friends you grew up with because they are 'outsiders' (and would be treated like this even if they were white).
I think race and religion is an amplifier. It is worse because of them. And this goes in both directions. But it's not the underlying tension. That's along class and economic lines. Which is why we are seeing similar patterns despite different ethnic migration patterns.
I notice that different social classes increasingly seem to speak almost entirely different languages even in English because of these different values systems. And this is getting worse. And we aren't recognising this.
You fix racial tensions by understanding wider social and economic tensions and these differences in value systems and you make sure that people feel their values are understood as important. Stuff like helping people stay in their geographic location despite economic changes is important to a huge number of people. Because it's not about how convenient it is to work and house prices - it's about maintaining that day to day contact with your neighbour or relative. If that's your priority in life and the only thing that matters - not your career or lifestyle that's your whole world. Others who move willingly make a choice to improve their lives, we are talking about the reverse - people forced to move to the detriment of their lives.
Personally I think a lot more could have been done for housing schemes for locals but instead it was about developers making the biggest profits possible. And this has had massive social implications. We usually hear 'taking all the council houses' argument but actually I think it's about these movements internally in the private sector just as much as people migrating from outside.
I've lived on a 'mixed' estate before and actually I think there's a lot to be said for social housing being integrated with private housing for various reasons. There's a huge snobbery about it. And I've heard far too many people say they'd refuse to live there because of it or refuse to live next to a council estate. There's part of your issue right there - deliberate marginalisation of white working class by white middle class.
But it's easier to shout racism at people rather than look at the economic angle to this.
Remember black lives matter was originally a Marxist organisation but as it became mainstream and white allyship emerged it was stripped to purely identity related issues.
Why? And why does it matter? Cos it very very much does.