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It’s not just black men who get the clutching handbag treatment in public places these days, my mate Kris found out, though he’d long ago discovered how his black friends can open up crowds like Moses parting the Red Sea whenever we’re out shopping or simply walking down the street.
Being Eastern European, he’s also a little too dark to be English to most members of the great British public, so he too gets tarnished with the same ‘dangerous-looking foreigner’ brush. To say that things have got worse since the war on terror and the London bombings would be an understatement, he was on the phone complaining to me recently, but I am getting sick and tired of getting sick and tired of suspicious looks from English people whenever I ride the tube or buses. Some may say that they are afraid of all young people these days but that’s far too simplistic a response, and I’m no spring chicken, he said.
I am a university lecturer, a Polish man who has lived in the UK now for over eight years, and during that time I have learnt who to be afraid of on the streets of Britain regardless of race, colour, religion, nationality or class.
The problem with a lot of white English people is that they look without seeing; see without looking, and since all foreigners still basically look the same to them, we might as well all be a bunch of dangerous extremist Jihad suicide bombers, as far as they’re concerned.
“Amen!” was all I could say to that…”Blimey, mate, welcome to my world!”
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Even some of the senior citizens I worked very closely with (and who liked me) in Lambeth sometimes gave me a wide berth in the street! Indeed, they don’t look at you. (To be fair they might have previously had a sharp “What are you looking at?” Did some of us not train them not to stare - and “don’t touch my hair”?) Who do you tell about these very personal experiences?
Why don’t you have a syndicated column in several papers? Letters from London. I mean, you are famous now. You have been on The Weakest Link!
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