Non-white, immigrant, religious... and the real threat to our society

I'll let you in on a secret... I'm not really English.  I was born in England but that means nothing nowadays, seemingly. I'm the daughter of immigrants.  You know the type - they come over here with their weird food and weird ways, stealing your jobs, using the health service, taking whatever they can get. I'm the daughter of a possible terrorist sympathiser.  I mean, everyone knows what those Irish Catholics are like.  If they're not in the IRA then they support the IRA.  Oh, sorry, forgot what year I was in for a moment then.  It's 2015 and things have moved on, haven't they?

Well, when I look at my Facebook and Twitter feed and listen to the discussions taking place around me, I realise that the only thing that's moved is the focus of the hatred.  It's not the Blacks or the Irish, it's the Asians, the Syrians.  It's not the Catholics, it's the Muslims.

My parents made sure I was aware of all the stories. About how there were signs in boarding house windows saying, 'No blacks, no Irish, no children, no dogs.' About the petition that was put together on the street where they were trying to buy a house. About the priest who said he would have refused to marry them. About the 'teddy boys' who abused them in the street. Enoch Powell and his 'rivers of blood'.

My dad told me that I would have to be ten times better than the white kids because everyone would see the colour of my skin first and judge me on that. There was a lot of racism.  I had to be careful. England had been responsible for the death of thousands in the Potato Famine. They'd stolen Irish land. They'd told my dad he could come and work and then treated him badly for doing so. So, support the West Indies for cricket and Ireland for football and gloat when the English lose. Study hard at school and become a doctor or a lawyer and prove them all wrong.

At school I was one of very few non-white children.  My dad had made the unusual decision to move into an area of London where there were few black families.  Most people go by the 'safety in numbers' way of thinking.  (That's why there are pockets of 'Little England' on the Costa del Sol - same language, same food, same culture.)  But not my dad. Maybe it was because he had a white wife.  Maybe he was planning for his yet to be conceived 'half-caste' children. I'll have to ask him.  Anyway, I was surrounded by the people my dad said I had to be ten times better than.  I was better than some, not so good as others.  I didn't buy my dad's line, I couldn't afford to. I quickly decided that my best would have to be good enough but I never truly felt accepted. Maybe my dad's words niggled away in the back of my mind. I definitely didn't feel accepted when a girl called me 'Paki' - my first taste of 'in your face' racism. I don't know what I was more upset about: the fact that she used a racist slur or the fact that it was the wrong one!

Life moved on.  I got my eleven plus and a scholarship to a grammar school which was a little more racially diverse; I listened to jokes about thick Irish people; I was laughed at for my religious beliefs; I got called a 'part-time nigger' by a girl at school; I got my GCSEs; I got my A-levels and I went to university. As I walked down Leytonstone high street with a group of white friends, a man in a pub doorway told me to go back to where I came from. I was too scared to tell him I'd only come from a few miles away.  I wish I hadn't been but I knew what he'd meant and it still hurts now.  It was 1993.

A couple of years later, I came up north. As I walked to my friend's house in Maltby a group of builders made monkey noises at me and laughed. I continued my walk, head down, face burning, in a daze.  Why would someone do that to someone they didn't know?

For the same reasons that people abuse Muslims in the streets.

But they were just ignorant builders. You wouldn't find such ignorance still in the hearts of middle-England, would you? Only if you count the time a young man, a university student with a posh accent to whom we affectionately referred as 'TLC' (Thatcher's Love Child) made a racist comment, turned to me and said, 'But not you. You're one of us.'

So finally I'm 'one of us'. But as I look at social media and the comments made by people in my community, people I've taught, my family and friends, I have to wonder how I can be. I realise that I'm only 'one of us' because now there's a new 'them'.
And I really feel for the new them because they have it worse, much worse.  Whereas 'black' was synonymous with violence and crime, and 'Irish' meant stupid and hot-headed, now 'Muslim' is synonymous with terrorism. And whilst we are fearful of violence and criminals and stupidity can fast-track you to celebrity, we are downright abhorrent of terrorists.

As long as we keep thinking in terms of 'us' and 'them', we will keep creating divisions and allow divisive groups to conquer. This is the real threat to our society. I am part of 'us' because of acceptance and integration.  Maybe I wouldn't be if I had met a few more builders like the ones in Maltby, men like the one in Leytonstone or girls like the one in junior school. Maybe if I'd bought into the idea of my race being a barrier I'd still be one of 'them'. I was lucky - I met enough people who enabled me to believe otherwise.
As long as we keep viewing strangers through the eyes of suspicion, they'll never become our friends. As long as we keep assuming the worst of everyone, it's all we'll find within humanity.