'Patta Rattason' .....

[Robbo]

When I was a kid and moved from the Elephant and Castle in London to the Kent/London borders, I was ridiculed by the other kids at school for the way I spoke.

I realised I was different from them because every time they opened their mouths they sounded different to me, and just as importantly, to anybody I had really ever heard talk before.
Their favourite taunt was to shout 'patta rattasson' every time they saw me which allegedly equated to what they thought I was saying when stating my name.

It was a miserable few weeks as I recall but kids are resilient and I got over it and learned to deal with it; when I look back, it was all part of life, nothing more.

Some time later but still at the same school, we had a kid in our year who had the unfortunate circumstance of being most obviously poor.
He was unkempt, scruffy and his clothes were so terribly threadbare.
His nickname was Steptoe after a rag and bone man on a TV series back then, a modern-day scrap merchant I suppose is the best approximation I can think of today.

I used to feel really sorry for this kid because he was a victim in many ways not least because he wasn't the sort of boy who could fight and so had to endure the taunts until others had grown tired of handing it out, which in the case of some of the idiots we had at that school, proved to be seemingly endless.

The point in mentioning these two examples of taunting?
It’s coming I promise...
I was lucky enough to pass my 11 plus and I then went to a school which had an all white pupil attendance.
I don’t mean I was lucky in the fact the school was all white, I meant lucky to pass the 11 plus exam.

I think it was in the 4th year there when we had two Indian brothers come to our school, one was placed in my year, the other in the year below.

It didn't take long before a slogan was plastered across one of the school walls, 'Keep our school white' .... this provoked the headmaster to mention it during assembly, commenting that he ‘didn't want to see any further examples of this in the school’.

On top of the obvious indignation the two Indian brothers had to endure, some personal abuse was handed out also which I’m pretty sure must have made them feel terrible.
After a while, all the cr@p stopped and the Indian brothers settled in and were accepted.

Here is my question:-

First off, no taunting is acceptable, it all hurts, every single insult cuts to the bone.
I couldn't change the way I spoke, no more than Steptoe could put any more money in his dad’s pocket, or indeed, the Indian brothers change the colour of their skin ..... but why is race treated so differently??

If somebody is accused of being racist, it's almost as bad as paedophilia, leastwise you'd think it was from the rhetoric we all witness when it's in the news.
The politicisation of racism has gotten so bad and so out of proportion that it now discourages people from feeling able to discuss it.
It's as though the mere discussion of racism is as bad as being racist itself.

I am sure some idiots will look at this post and try to wrap it up in some sort of racist attack which of course it isn't, it's merely an observation pre-empting a question for this forum.
I also think it would be quite hard for me to be a racist being as my wife is Anglo-Indian.

And so, what is it about racism [as against any type of discrimination] that makes it such a no-go area?

I tell ya what I think it is; somehow, people have managed to over-politicise it ..... we've seen minor rumblings of similarity when it comes to fat people [fatism] or even old people [ageism] but none get close to how we treat the problem of race ...

Essentially, this type of discrimination, on any grounds, whether it be moral, social, humanitarian, whatever, is no worse than those I opened up with that happened at my school but what is different is the degree of political activism surrounding race.

Some sections of our society have managed to so highly politicise the subject of race that it is now close to be being beyond debate ... and so the question I now would ask is, 'was this the initial intention of those who begun this process?'

I somehow doubt it, mainly because even the most radical thinkers within that movement could never have guessed just how far-reaching it would have all become.

It is within human nature to discriminate, and the grounds for that discrimination are as varied and as irrational as a premenstrual woman being asked to explain her obsession with shoes and chocolate ..... [Yeah, yeah, I know what I just did J] ...

And so, very often in life, we have to frame human behaviours within the rule of law in an attempt to impose some form of control in what would otherwise lead to real societal problems; it is an integral and much-needed requirement of civilised peoples to do this but sometimes do we go too far?

And I also believe we have come so far in this particular arena, we have now nudged it out of bounds in terms of real and meaningful discussion.

What do you think?

 

[Tony Harrison]

I agree.

You can discuss anything with a reasonable person. The difficulty is finding a reasonable person.

What we are seeing now is a backlash.

I grew up in an area of Oldham known as Glodwick, which is regarded as a "no-go" area for white people and has now been featured on the National news twice because of the rioting occurring there.

 

[Robbo]

I agree.

You can discuss anything with a reasonable person. The difficulty is finding a reasonable person.

What we are seeing now is a backlash.

I grew up in an area of Oldham known as Glodwick, which is regarded as a "no-go" area for white people and has now been featured on the National news twice because of the rioting occurring there.

As an example of just how ridiculous things have become Jon, the text I have emboldened would be described by some as racist even though it might be completely true in practice.

 

[Bolter]

There is acceptable discrimination also. Personally I have to smile at people who still have to comment on me having ginger hair and how funny it is, or how disgusted they are. To this day, I still get taunted by seemingly everyone regardless of my feelings (im fine by the way sniff sniff)

Ive had people feel like they should "stick up" for me when ive had a group of people giving me ginger jip! lol

Its just the way people work I guess

 

[Tony Harrison]

As an example of just how ridiculous things have become Jon, the text I have emboldened would be described by some as racist even though it might be completely true in practice.

You're right.

http://www.asianimage.co.uk/columnists/8109468.Your_vote_is_worth_more_than_a_cold_samosa/

This is a link to a column in the Asian Image website and newspaper by a guy named Ziggy, who gets a lot of stick for what he writes.

But he's right all the same.

 

[Tony Harrison]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldham_Riots

And this is a link to the Wikipedia entry for Glodwick.

 

[Buddha 3]

Interesting question...

Could the aversion to racism have anything to do with history? Given the behavior and dominance of the white man over other races throughout history, could it be that, in these more enlightened times, there is an underlying sense of cultural guilt, which makes Eurocentric cultures even more uncomfortable around this subject? Throw in the ultimate act of race based violence, the Holocaust, and you have fertile grounds for such feelings of guilt, even if they are not based in the cognitive.

I've travelled quite a bit and it seems that racism is frowned upon far more in western European countries and North America, than it is in other areas. And these happen to be the countries that were responsible for the oppression and enslavement of many peoples, or countries that were created by such acts. Very few people in these countries are openly racist. Their actions can be VERY racist, but they sometimes don't even see it, let alone admit to being racist. Everybody has at some point met somebody that said "I'm no racist, I have a black colleague and he is a great guy!" Hey, if you know exactly how many non white people you know, you are at least a bit racist...

In countries that have no such history of oppressing others, racism seems to be far more open. This is in part explained by unfamiliarity. A country with a history of colonisation will inevitably have a large minority of people from the old colonies and consequently will be more familiar with these "strangers". A country with no such history will most likely have far smaller groups of minorities, let alone people of a different colour. Sad as it may sound, if you grow up amongst nothing but white people and you see a black person for the first time, or vice versa, I can imagine you'll be surprised.

I see the above happening on a smaller scale as well. I'm a city boy. Born and raised in Amsterdam and I have always lived in one of the major cities here in Holland. Seeing ethnic minorities is nothing new to me, I was born in a time when mass migration was normal, so I have no memory of the first foreigners arriving in my street. In my world, they have always been there, I grew up amongst them, became friends with many of them and paid no mind to the ethnic background of my friends. We were from the same block, that's what mattered.
However, my roots and consequently a large part of my family, are in the north-east of the Netherlands. A land of agriculture and small villages. Very few foreigners moved there, mostly because that's not the area where jobs were to be found, so you don't see many non-whites in that area to this day. And as a result, the people there aren't as familiar with different ethnicities as they are here in the big cities. Strangely enough, it's always the people from the "white and rural" areas that complain about the "bluddy furriners". These people vote for the parties that want to keep the non western immigrants out, the parties that want to forbid the construction of every new mosque, yet these people live in an area where there is no mosque to begin with, no neighbor that celebrates Id al Fitr. So why be against them? They don't know if these people cause trouble or not, so what's the problem? Unfamiliarity, fear of the unknown would be my guess.

 

[Robbo]

Frikkin 'ell Jay, what a post mate, it got me thinking after the first few sentences in and as I read thru the rest of the post, I was making mental notes as to what focus on in the next read thru so I could have some chance of a credible reply.

After I had finsished reading, there seemed to be soo much I had to think about, none of it facile, not one bit.

I'm off to Brigthon with the wife today so she can unburden my wallet in buying nine pairs of shoes, five handbags and eat four metric tons of chocolate; on the way down, I will be thinking about some of this and will answer when I get back mate .... hmmmm...... it's gonna be one helluva task I think, great post mate, a corker!

 

[Robbo]

Just one thing before I reply, I don't really want this to become an intellectual volleyball macth between me and you Jay because it looks a bit indulgent even tho I'd really like to see which way it all came out, and on that note, I think I am gonna ask Missy and Baca to have a say coz thier input is also gonna be kinda interesting to read.
Of course anybody else can sling in a reply, in fact, the more the merrier ....

 

[Buddha 3]

Don't worry about it becoming a volleyball match, I'm not claiming that what I posted is the truth or fact. I can't say for sure whether the connection between "unknown" and racism is causal or merely one of correlation. So any argument against it is one I am quite open to.
It's just something I observed over the years, I always found it funny that the most open racist people in Holland are those that rarely run into minorities.
Also, the most openly racist country I've been in is Suriname. This former Dutch colony is populated by a true mix of ethnicities, but they all talk sh*t about eachother.