British racism is real but also substantially different. I lived in New York in the 1990s but, like, Jewish intellectual New York is not very representative (and I was a teenager with less of an eye)
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I hear you. The first time I ever witnessed overt, explicit racism was after I moved to the US in 05 and a Pakistani friend I made was called a potential terrorist by two old white ladies while we were committing the suspicious act of playing with toy lightsabers & pretending to use the force
Like I am fully aware that anti-Asian racism is present all over the UK but at the same time the pop there is well… there. 9/11 just put a massive target on a vulnerable demo in a culture already prone to violence
Also I’m guessing you’re too young to have seen the levels of anti-Asian racism in the 1970s and 80s. I saw the last bits of that and it was ugly. But it did get much better
Yeah I was born in the late 90s so by that point, at least to my young eyes, Asian communities had been “assimilated” to a certain degree. But like within three months of moving to the US my (frankly quite racist) mother had to give me the “this is what racism is” talk lmfao
There’s less British racism all in, it’s less violent (because the UK is just less violent across the board), it’s less specifically about hostility to black people & tends to get muddled/intersect with class issues. The middle American white animosity to black people isn’t going anywhere fast.
A HKer said, he was brought over 40 years ago to the UK by his parents when he was a kid. He had a great time going to school and playing with local children when he was young, but he realized as an adult that the British still held strong discrimination against him. Later, he chose to live in Asia.
That doesn’t really tell us much because for it to be relevant to this conversation we need a comparative example of an HKer in the US. Plus anti black racism in the US isn’t about immigration (for somewhat obvious reasons)
I saw “British racism is real,” and I shared this true story to agree with it.
Regardless of the situation in the U.S., it doesn’t justify the existence of racism in the UK or make it more reasonable.
The thread started on anti black racism in the US; that’s not really comparable to the UK because there’s no ‘essential’ racism in the UK. Racism in mainstream society in the UK is small beer (but it’s a major problem amongst committed right wing activists in a way it wasn’t in the past).
It’s mainly because countries like Spain, the UK transported those people to the Americas, rather than bringing them back to their own countries. From my conversations with some Asians living in the UK, it’s clear that what you said about there being no ‘essential’ racism in the UK is not accurate.
I’d add, as someone who worked in the US for a few years from the UK, I can believe that 1. it’s easier to get on as a first generation immigrant in Cal or NYC than the UK (there’s fewer unspoken norms to comply with) 2. maybe places like NYC ARE less racist than the UK. But NYC is still in America…
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Regardless of the situation in the U.S., it doesn’t justify the existence of racism in the UK or make it more reasonable.