Is anyone else getting quite tired of being called a racist?

[Peppatina]

I know it can't just be me.

It doesn't matter what carefully thought out reasons a brexiter has for wanting to leave (I've seen some very articulate and reasoned ones on mn itself) we are still all getting lumped into a stereotypical group of closet racist idiots.

And Lord forbid any of those reasons might just involve any concern over levels of eu migration!

I've been told that I'm essentially imagining the three week waiting list for my GP or that this is nothing to do with eu migration. If I say I know it is because of the names being called out I become the equivalent of Enoch Powell.

The same goes for a certain local estate very much being a no go area, especially for young girls. After braving this street once with my children and being spat on and shouted at by a group of very hostile Romanian men/boys I've been told I imagined it.

When I had my son a few week ago my I was the only English speaking person in my ward. A polish man was shouting and being very aggressive to staff as they were struggling to find an interpreter.

I absolutely know that not every migrant is aggressive and that they should build more schools and go surgeries but I believe I'm right to be concerned about a high number of migrants who are not intergrating with their local community and the unsustainable strain on services.

I'm sick of being told that my experiences don't matter. That to even mention that this is what life is like in our town means I am a racist or little englander.

Ha ha! You are on amusing form today!

I don't think there has ever been the ejection of a begging EU migrant in the history of the EU

You are seriously naive

I'm absolutely serious. Why don't you shop them?

How else do you think illegal immigrants get removed from the country? We don't have a Big Brother police state in the UK and so if you feel strongly about illegal immigrants you shop them. What's stopping you?

beaky there is simply no infrastructure to do so. The processes don't exist.

Irish dad - your comment is utterly offensive to the many of us who also find Farage's advert completely inappropriate.

This casual use of "racist" utterly demeans the phrase in itself

How about you grow up irishdad.

Stop being so deliberately inflammatory.

If there's no infrastructure to deport illegal immigrants, then what's the point of leaving the EU exactly?

Lose billions of pounds as the economy tanks, then spend money we don't have on building a police state?

Irishdad fuck off, we're having a good conversation here.

The charge of racism is a way to discredit Leave. I am afraid that shutting down debate is a prevalent tactic amoung the Remain camp. They are basically using negative labelling as they have no real answer to the problem of immigration. This tactic of policing other peoples thoughts has been one of the reasons why such resentment has built up in the first place. We are not allowed to mention that we may have different views without being shouted down. Incidently, before anyone labels me a racist, my husband is Chinese! Its the superiority of many of the Remain supporters that gets up my nose, and if by chance they do lose, it will be because of the underlying attitude of superiority and continual virtue signalling. Heaven forbid that the white working class should dare to speak up about their problems, get back down where you belong.

my brown family are voting leave

I guess they are racist against brown people that are a different brown shade to them

Leaving the EU won't fix any of the problems caused by immigration. In fact it won't even reduce immigration one jot.

Leaving the EU won't fix any of the problems caused by immigration. In fact it won't even reduce immigration one jot.

A milllion times this.

People are determined not to believe this though.

Calling someone a racist has become the modern equivalent of calling someone a witch.

The charge carries so much weight in our culture that it makes everyone freeze, and the innocent are automatically guilty by default.

Part of this problem, like the old charge of witchcraft, is that a modern charge of racism is pretty impossible to disprove. The law now states that someone just has to perceive an action to be racist for it automatically to be racist -- so if I call my Irish neighbour a "feathery turnip rabbit", and he says that's racist, it is racist and therefore a hate crime.

Honestly, the whole thing has become bizarre and, to my mind, it's been engineered that way to prevent people seeing real bloody racism. People throw their hands up in racist horror if someone refers to a Pole as a "cabbage", but when really rather horrendously racially-motivated decisions are made say, like dropping bombs on thousands of Arabs for a made-up reason -- somehow it's all about the "meh".

One thing I cannot get over is that Nigel Farage, and I don't particularly like the guy, has never been responsible for the deaths of anyone with a different skin tone. How many people in the Remain campaign can you actually say that for? Yet somehow Farage is the "racist".

Fuck me, if them's the rules, then I'd rather be a racist than have placed a vote to bomb thousands of Iraqis -- cos you know damn well those votes wouldn't have been cast if Iraq was a European country. You only need to take a look at the fumbles, arguments and hesitation over intervention in Bosnia to see that.

Honestly, people, when did saying "I don't like them cos they're foreign" become worse than dropping a fucking bomb on someone's house cos they are foreign and can't bomb you back?

I completely agree, Werks. One of my dog-park friends, a proper Labour-establishment type, spoke with admiration about how well Blair had done on some referendum talk (I wish I knew what it was) and later mentioned that Boris Johnson was racist.

Naturally, I found this astounding (but remained schtum). Even assuming every single Brexit campaigner would like to see the UK scrubbed free of anyone other than indigenous Brits, their hands are still squeaky clean compared to Blair.

big difference between witchcraft and racism: the former doesn't exist, the latter does.

Boris Johnson has many flaws, but I really don't think he's racist.

big difference between witchcraft and racism: the former doesn't exist, the latter does.

But you can't prove the former doesn't exist. Which makes the analogy pretty sound.

Well, no. Everyone accused of witchcraft is by definition innocent, even though they can't prove it. While among people accused of racism, some will be guilty, some will be innocent (but can't prove it).

The problem with the analogy is that it suggests that all the people accused of racism are innocents who can't prove their innocence. True in some cases, but not in others.

(maybe a better analogy would be McCarthyism?..)

"Racist" is frequently used by ignorant people when they really mean "prejudiced" or "discriminatory".

I'd say that "prejudiced" and "discriminatory" are more general terms, they can apply to gender, age, race, any minority characteristic really.

Precisely.

If I, as a white British person, object to the presence of non-British white Europeans in the UK, I am not being "racist". I might be being "prejudiced", or "discriminatory", or "nationalist".

Werkz for your eloquence and sense.

BoboChic - or "xenophobic", which is the more precise "prejudiced against other nationalities or ethnicities" term.