I'll tell you what will kill the forum......

Morgan Freeman says “ The way to stop racism, is to stop talking about it”.

 

Why would it be obvious I didn’t live in an ethnic mix?

I’m appalled that a person of mixed race would not be seen as a whole person but expressed as decimal point.

I expressed why I thought such a person might go along with it and why at that time it might been somehow excused.

I see no issue in querying this…..I’ve not told anyone to change their post or leave the forum etc.

The older I get, I see the harm done where men of a certain age are never challenged, I include me in this, which is why I’m happy to reply and discuss.

 

A brief Google tells me the context around the quote was deliberately omitted.

 

See racism was part of our youth. In primary from 5 my best mate was from Barbados. He used to tell us stories about swimming in the Caribbean sea and the beautiful sea and anenomes etc. None of us had any concept of race at that age.

Then aged 11 years old in 1975 my father, who was a dyno tech at Vauxhall in Luton, got a job commissioning a new dynomometer and room at an iron ore mine in Liberia.

The family moved out to a company bungalow 300 Kms into equatorial rain forest complete with house boy and garden boy!

It's the way it was but both those lads engaged with us kids, taking us into the bush and doing stuff like showing us how to grow ground nuts and taming brightly colours grass hoppers in closed fists.

Back in Luton at 14 for schooling and I missed the transition from primary to secondary. My initials were everywhere, painted on subway walls and graffiti all over. NF.

The black kids had formed insular groups and my old best mate now resented me for being 'colonial' due to having what they now saw (and rightly so) black servants.

I got Marmite for that at Stockwood. And Stockwood (it's now South Luton High) had just 2 classes that were 'segregated' from the rest of the school. These were the non English speaking Pakistani children and sadly lunchtime sport was @hailfrank ban me please bashing.

My best mate, and we are still very close 45 years on, was Pakistani. We played cricket together at Luton Town CC and rode our scooters all over the country. Proud mods and then scooterists we were part of that tribal culture that existed then where black folk fought Pakistanis and skinheads fought everyone else. In the scooter scene the bond was the culture not skin colour.
But at school he told everyone his dad was Turkish. And to conform he also got involved in the daily chase around the grounds persecuting those who were different. It was the path of least resistance.

He's a Muslim, as an adult has completed a pilgrimage to Mecca, and is very protective and proud now of his heritage. A gentle, highly educated man.

My point is that it's experience and education that form people's attitudes. From a very very early age!

I'm firmly of the opinion that everyone is a little bit racist. Well almost everyone, there will be minor exceptions. By labelling people by their colour, race, religion it happens automatically without conscious thought.

This has been the situation with humans ever since we became the top predator. What is changing? Perhaps it's more to do with the development of social media and the quite rightly outing of people who can't or won't accept those that are different to them as being simply that...different?

However in our new enlightened world try telling that to the IDF and Hamas or the Chinese and the Uigars or the Pakistanis and the Indians who it seems epitomise the problems of oppression and non acceptance in so called educated humans.

 

Killer reply, thank you for putting time and thought into it.

I think a lot of our ‘wiring’ was survival…..we all, when encountering a new person, will run through a subconscious set the of questions and one of them is colour of skin….so logically we all identify differences.

However, survival isn’t really the agenda these days….in the uk you might not thrive if you lose everything, but I think you’d be really having to do something reckless for it to endanger your life.

People need to think more, check each other more….it’s not thought control….it’s consideration.

As we aren’t literally fighting each other for a dead gazelle, we should do this in my opinion.