This is a very hard thread for me to begin. I’ve been intending to do it for months but felt unable to do so. I was born in the UK but I am of south Asian origin. My parents and grandparents emigrated here. We are five generations British and counting.
I feel that racism and racial suspicion towards brown skinned people has absolutely gone off the scale since Reform gained a foothold in mainstream politics.
At first it was the little things - being subjected to an extended bag check when entering a museum when white visitors walked straight in or were casually asked to just open the large section which wasn’t really checked. This is especially the case at places like Kensington Palace and the Imperial War Museum. For reference, I am talking about a small handbag 15cm by 25cm probably smaller than their own guidelines state. At Kensington Palace, it actually got to the ridiculous stage where the checker was asking me to open more and more zipped sections down to a 5cm one until there was literally nothing left to open and she was effectively asking me to open non existent ones!
There is an incident every time we are out ( me and my teenagers). People loudly talking about us standing right next to us talking about how we are entitled just because we have been directed to the front of the queue by staff as one of us is disabled.
Yesterday, we got on a damned train with cold, vegan salads from m&s and it started immediately. A white couple complaining loudly about “the smell” when there was none because they judged us by how we look and decided our food was smelly upon that basis. Then, when the ticket inspector came round and we showed the disabled railcard, a running commentary on how we must have gamed the system to obtain that.
It is really wearing. I don’t feel like we can belong here anymore despite being educated and fully integrated here. I fully pay for private housing, healthcare and education and yet I may as well have just stepped off a small boat yesterday as far as they are concerned. I cannot fight random bigots daily when we are just trying to live our lives having low key, relaxing private family time.
It is simply fogging to get worse isn’t it? I honestly believe that Farage will be the next PM ( I am politically literate enough to gauge this for myself rather than buying into tabloid scaremongering. Zayn Malik referred to similar experiences in the song he released last week. We have similar colourings to him and never experienced racism ever before this. Perhaps they think we are Middle Eastern and are directing a particular type of hatred towards us. Perhaps it is a new racism because there were not many Middle Eastern people in the UK until recently.
I know that it is not everyone everywhere but it is now frequent enough for us to come to expect it every time we leave the house. Is this the equivalent of the Weimar Republic for the UK? Since there is no such thing as “stopping the boats” then the headlines will continue and the hatred towards brown-skinned fully fledged Brits too.
If I don’t come back to this thread immediately, it is because it is a massive thing for me to write this down and I will be reading and considering the responses.