Is my best friend racist?

[Newnamefortouchysubject]

Visited my best friend today for lunch and had a conversation that has left me confused, so thought I'd bring it to the MN table.
We were talking about immigration, refugees and asylum seekers.
My friend says the issue is not the colour of people's skin, but rather their culture.
She has no problem with people who wish to settle here when they embrace the UK culture.
Her attitude is that multicultural societies are almost impossible to implement to everyones satisfaction because different cultures have such widely opposing beliefs and values and she believes it is unrealistic to expect to integrate many different cultures and values without considerable conflict between the different cultures.
Furthermore, she believes it is so difficult to integrate different cultures that people of the same ethnicity will inevitably gravitate towards each other and form their own social groups to the exclusion of other ethnic groups, so the whole idea of integration is pointless anyway.
We just end up with lots of different groups of people isolating themselves from other groups who don't share their ethnicity.
She is firmly of the belief that tensions that people describe as racially motivated actually stem from cultural differences, that she knows no one who has any issue with people of different races when they adopt the culture of the country they choose to migrate to, and that the tension is created by ethnic differences and their cultural differences.

I still say this is racism because racism also includes discriminating against people based on their ethnicity. She called me naive if I believe a truly multicultural society is possible when 'you wouldn't even tolerate a friend who has the same ethnicity as you but doesn't share your values so how do you expect to embrace someone's complete different way of life'.
I explained that the way other people choose to live their lives doesn't affect me. She called me naive again at this point and said when people don't have the same values, when they live according to different social rules, it affects people living in their vicinity who don't live like that.

Im not sure whether to raise the subject with her again, or let it lie because she seemed quite adamant and I'm not sure I could make her see this is still racist.

Now I'm wondering if I don't understand what racism is. Maybe I am naive.

I agree with your friend

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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!

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'.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What countries "insist on this"?

Yes, I have no issue with that, but they can and do also speak English fluently.

But I think these things are extreme. I have many Muslim friends and none were made to sleep with their uncles. Many would find it as horrifying as people here did. The fact someone insists that something is the norm in their culture does not mean it so, and it's pretty daft to stretch one person's warped thinking onto the whole community.
It's like if I saw a bad woman driver and said all women drivers are crap.

A lot of people are being radicalised and tend to left far right as they age, I wonder if it is not the selfishness of "I had my good time but now lets close the borders and get rid of them migrants", would be fascinating to see if someone already studies why that it.

A lot of people are being radicalised and tend to left far right as they age, I wonder if it is not the selfishness of "I had my good time but now lets close the borders and get rid of them migrants", would be fascinating to see if someone already studies why that it.

I don't think so - if you look at any of the images of left-leaning demonstrations, the backbone tend to be middle-aged women.

I do think that events have genuinely altered people's views over the last few years. I know the first crack in my staunchly left-wing viewpoint came due to the trans issue. And once you feel at odds about one issue, the other questions do creep in.

I think that many of the middle-aged leftie protesters are the ones who are closed minded, refusing to alter their viewpoints even as the situation changes drastically. For some people it's too painful, I think.

That sentence pretty much captures the dismissive attitude.
Disagree with me and your are not only wrong but so wrong that you need somehow saving (by what/ whom- you?).
No attempt to listen or reasonably debate.

Same. I don’t see why Labour inspires such loyalty anyway. It’s very embedded.

It’s not even that, I’m “too late” to save, and I am a long way from far right!

This hyper-polar world inhabited by those on both the far-left and far-right where those with different opinions are considered mortal enemies, worthy only of abuse and insults, damages our society.

I agree, it’s wrong to take an extreme example and apply that to a group as a whole. I’m not sure the poster was quite saying this, but if someone said “look, this Muslim man slept in the same bed as his 9 year old niece, aren’t Muslims such bad people”, I accept that would be Islamophobic/racist.

I think some of the posters who have been so forceful in their responses to me may have assumed this is my attitude…. but I’m not saying “look at the rapes committed by these Afghan men, isn’t is awful that Afghan men are all disgusting rapists”, rather I’ve said that certain cultures, such as the ones imported from places like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, are incompatible with the core British values (eg women’s rights, freedom of religion/speech, democracy etc.) that we all-too-often take for granted… and this leads to men in those communities committing sex crimes at a much higher rate than in the general population (though still a minority - most Afghan men are not rapists!).

I wonder if those crying “racist” at this would be happy if they lived next door to a hotel that housed white Norwegian men deemed to be 10-20 times more likely to commit sex crimes than average? Would they be unconcerned for their daughters?

Yes, I think middle-aged women are less effected by the surge in migration and its effects on society, especially for those groups that come from very different cultures.

They often have well-established jobs, are on the property ladder, and are at lower risk of sexual assault than a younger woman/girl…

For those brought up assuming that everyone starts off on the Left, it’s quite shocking how right-wing the younger generation is - there’s a reason for this!

Rebelling against the status-quo isn’t being a Che Guevara t-shirt wearing Trotskyite any longer, it’s going to mass on Sunday (incredibly, church attendance of 18-24 year old men has increased 4-fold
since 2018!). I don’t think many middle-aged lefties have a clue about this trend, still less the reasons for it…

Is that Australia? I think the largest percentage of immigrants are now from India in Australia.