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Peter Knight's avatar

I feel absolutely zero self-loathing. In fact I like being white!!

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Ray Rivers's avatar

I'm a '59 model. Grew up in Reading. In the 70's, Reading's "claim to fame" was that it had the largest Barbadian population outside of the Island itself. The secondary school I went to had a large contingent of black lads, Gordon Greenidge was in my older brother's year.

I played football, cricket, rugby, allsorts alongside black lads, went out "on the pull" with them, attended parties at black families' houses, developed an enduring love of Funk, Reggae and Soul music, Jerk Chicken with rice and peas.

A lot of the families were practising Christians, out in their "Sunday best" on their way to church every week. The lads I knew talked about strict "churchy" grandparents back in the Caribbean.

Out of all the white people I met, there was possibly, maybe 1 or 2 per cent that were racist d1ckheads, and if you ran into their parents, you'd see exactly where that came from.

When I married in '82, our fist house was in a terraced street in West Reading, and it was properly multiracial. There was a West African sit-down restaurant on the Oxford Road (the main thoroughfare) , fish and chip shops, Chinese takeaways, Indian takeaways and sit down restaurants, the Indian sweet shop, independent bakeries, a well priced Caribbean takeaway, a proper pork butchers, where the owner used to do a meat auction every Saturday, in his straw boater and red stripey apron. The local pub during the summer months used to do a reggae disco in the garden, complete with barbecue, but none of your burgers, bangers malarkey. Caribbean food. Jamaican patties. Mmmm.

Racial tension, Zero.

The West Reading Carnival, a tradition reflecting the Caribbean heritage still goes along the Oxford road to this day, as far as I know.

I moved away from Reading, post divorce, had business up there this year, so I took a drive along the Oxford Road for old time's sake.

There is a great big mosque there now. OK, so it is just a place of worship, but the effect of it being there has changed that area completely. That part of West Reading is now virtually monocultural.

Gone are the things I described above.

The grandkids of the lads I went to school with have stronger inflections in their accents than their forebears, don't talk about the Caribbean much, but of "Mother Africa" instead.

They look at me differently, as a white bloke, not grandad's old mate.

It's nuts.

"Race relations" have certainly regressed over my lifetime. It's not my opinion.

It's my "lived experience".

How did we get here? For me, we go back to the racist d1ckheads mentioned above, or more precisely, their family upbringing. The parents.

Racism, like all sorts dogma, is learnt. Taught.

The difference between the racist then and the racist now is that post modernist thinking has infiltrated our education system.

"Chips" are being carved on the shoulders of young people, and particularly since the George Floyd thing, race grifters are getting large social media profiles and a very good living gleefully pour salt into that "chip", enabled and encouraged by hard of thinking celebrities and woke corporations.

Racism went from the fringe to the mainstream.

"Well it's racism, Jim, but not as we know it".

Until we purge our education system, from primary to tertiary, we're all in big trouble.

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