Mn used to be horrendously racist. Oh, they’d quickly feign horror if someone said the N or the P word, but the following threads used to be at least weekly -
complaining about the poor English skills of foreign nurses or midwives
their toddler commented that a black person looked like chocolate or had a ‘chocolate face’ (some jumped the shark with this and chocolate was boosted to monkey, I remember the first time mn actually took a thread down on this basis.)
Some are even in classics
threads about why I wouldn’t find a black man attractive or AIBU not to want to date a black man
Enid Blyton books with dogs named N i double G er and darkie defended as lovely childhood memories
wonderful thread several Christmases ago with mixed shock and amusement at a black santa in a department store.
is a corker of a thread here “is Meghan markle black? Can’t say I’ve noticed” (because if you don’t notice someone’s colour, that’s the actual height of non racism, so nonchalant, chilled.)
Oh they’ll feign horror over Emmett Till, Stephen Lawrence, they cried at To Kill A Mockingbird, they really reeeeeally aren’t racist. But mn historically was both white and middle class. White middle class people aren’t racist. No indeed. I mean, if they’d gone to St Andrews instead of Durham, or Bristol or Edinburgh, Kate could easily have been one of them. There’s no offence in William choosing her. And they party hard in London in their twenties but then once the children are school age move out to the Home Counties.
Someone on the place for mums where they ... talk ... complained racism was everywhere - you can’t even say you have a white cat. Let’s try and break it down for the idiots a bit.
Racism is a sense of superiority. It is not ignoring someone’s race altogether. Historically, white people enslaved black people. Now while this might seem light years away for you and for me, actually, in historical terms, it is not. In historical terms, it is recent.
Some slaves were horrendously treated. Some were actually treated very well, even better, than some poor white people. Why - well they were worth something. Just as you wouldn’t deliberately mistreat your house or car. Some of the southern plantations in America genuinely held the belief that freeing their slaves would not be in their best interests. Of course, the primary motivation was money but there was a concern that stretched beyond this.
Emmett Till was murdered in 1955: that is only about twenty or thirty years before most of us were born FGS. And Mumsnetters bloody love to be high and mighty about the Daily Mail but I’ll remind you now they were the only paper to challenge Stephen Lawrence’s murder. That nice middle class Guardian didn’t, did they?
I genuinely think a lot of people have these attitudes ingrained into them. I also think more people are waking up to them which can only be a good thing.
It doesn’t surprise me at all to see what took place on that website and what continues to do so.