Tag Archives: united kingdom

people don’t know how to treat you

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This article is from 2005.  I wonder if the family has noticed a shift in attitudes over the last five years.  And of course I’d love to hear from little Toni.  The bridge between them.  I like that part a lot.

HOW DARE THEY TREAT US LIKE THIS?

by DIANA APPLEYARD

JAN LLOYD, 45, has been married to Tony, 48, for ten years. The couple have a four-year-old daughter, Toni. They run a successful martial arts business, Fighting Fit, with gyms around South London, where they live.

photo by Jenny Goodall

Jan says:

PEOPLE have spat at me in the street, stared at me, jostled me and shouted at me — all because I fell in love with a black man. But unless you have experienced it, you are unlikely to have any idea of the racism in British society.

It’s terrifying, but it’s something I am aware of every day of my life. We were taking our daughter Toni to see the GP when she was only two years old, when I was spat at in the street. It was completely random — a white man in his 40s looked us up and down and then spat at me.

It was so disgusting — I couldn’t believe it was happening. I looked for support, but everyone looked away. They were embarrassed and probably disgusted too, but no one wanted to get involved. I was shaking and tearful, but angry as well — how could someone behave like that in a civilised society?

As I walk down the street, go to the pictures, eat out in restaurants or go to the theatre, I am frequently aware of a kind of coldness and embarrassment around me. The only way I can describe it is that it’s like being disabled — people don’t know how to treat you.

They don’t know what to say to me. You can see the thought running through people’s minds: ‘Why is she with a black man?’
When I got together with Tony, a lot of my friends melted away. They’d invite me to a party with my new boyfriend, but then, mysteriously, they’d never invite us again. Once, early in our relationship, I’d booked a table at a nice restaurant. When we arrived, there were lots of empty tables — but they put us at the back, next to the toilets. I was going to complain, but Tony told me just to leave it. He’s used to it. Our backgrounds could not be more different. I was brought up in a well-off family in Sussex and was privately educated. I met Tony when I took up aerobics and he was my instructor.  I thought he was nice, but our relationship didn’t progress until I was in a horrid road-rage incident, when a man hit my car and then bashed on my window. It made me realise I ought to learn self-defence and Tony also taught martial arts. Before I fell for him, I’d been out with City types, public-school educated white men, so Tony was a real change. I thought he was intelligent and interesting — I was fascinated by the fact that his life was so different from mine.

He was born in Yorkshire, but his family moved to London when he was three. He had traditional values and an old-fashioned approach to relationships. There was also a lovely warmth about him. He was successful and welloff through his business and he was a real self-made man.

We started going out and six months later I met his family. He’s one of six and it was so different from my middle-class home — they were so loud, so welcoming, pressing food on me and firing questions at me.

Tony told me he’d been badly beaten up as a child by racist bullies and that nearly every day he faced some kind of prejudice or abuse — it hurt him so much.

But it wasn’t long before I started to experience the kind of hostility he’d faced most of his life. Suddenly, being with him, I was made to feel like a freak, a secondclass citizen. It was bizarre. There was so much disapproval in people’s glances. There seems to be this attitude like ‘Aren’t white men good enough?’ when all I had done was fall in love.

We had been together only six months when we decided to get married and it came as a shock to my parents, who asked me if I was sure it was going to work given our cultural backgrounds. But they have since mellowed and little Toni is the bridge between us.

My parents are very traditional, and all they could see were problems in a mixed marriage.

We married on a beach in St Lucia. Both sets of parents came and it made such a difference being there — we were surrounded by welcoming black people, and my parents felt less uneasy.  Now they are very supportive of Tony and can see what a good man he is. Before, they — like so many others — had only seen the stereotypes.

After our wedding I joined Tony in his business, and Fighting Fit is now very successful. We live in a lovely four-bedroom house, we enjoy great holidays, scuba dive, ride horses and have a happy, middle-class life. Now when I get the looks, I ignore them and carry on. They can’t harm our life or family.

I did worry a little about our daughter and whether she’d face any prejudice at school being mixed race, but she’s totally accepted — she’s just Toni, with a big personality for a little girl, so sunny and confident. Everyone loves her.

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conditioned to the method of white superiority

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I’d love to see the show that this article details.  All whites are racist!?  I have a hard time buying that.  Prejudiced or biased, maybe.  I think all people are no matter the color.  Anyway, it upsets me greatly that the black father of the mixed-race girl doesn’t want to expose her “secret.”  Um…. how is she supposed to form a positive, all-encompassing identity if her black father is hiding from her white friends?  I wonder if this will be on BBC America.

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TEACHER: ‘ALL WHITES ARE RACIST’

29th October 2009 by Peter Dyke

DailyStarUK

A Bombshell new television show will tonight claim that all white people are racist.

An American schoolteacher and anti-race campaigner will conduct an experiment for Channel 4 to prove how prejudiced Britain is.

Jane Elliott, 76, whose nickname is The Bitch, travelled to the UK for the test.

Part of the show features former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made up as a black person and US President Barack Obama as a Chinese.

Elliott is given a group of 30 volunteers, of mixed age and race, and splits them into two teams based on their eye colour.

Those with brown eyes are treated well, but those with blue eyes are ridiculed, humiliated and insulted.

Her aim is to create a mock “apartheid regime” to make the blue eyed people experience prejudice, discrimination and racism.

However at the end of the experiment, set in an old warehouse and lasting several hours, the white and black volunteers end up in a bitter row.

Some even walk out. Many of the white volunteers claim that black people do not have the monopoly on discrimination.

A middle aged white woman says: “They think racism is just for black people. I’ve had comments made about me because I’m blonde and white.”

However one dad, who is black, reveals how he never picks his daughter up from school because her mum is white and he doesn’t want anyone to know she is mixed race in case she is taunted.

At the end of the experiment, Elliott claims the white volunteers have shown their true colours.

She tells the C4 documentary tonight at 10pm: “White people should feel guilty about their behaviour.

“You don’t do things because you’re white, you do things because you’re ignorant.

“We are conditioned to the method of white superiority from the moment of birth.”

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re:mixed race in the uk

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This is a sad story.  I’m not up on the politics of the United Kingdom, so I had to look up the BNP or British National Party.  Here’s what I found on Wikipedia:

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The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right and whites-only political party in the United Kingdom.

The BNP is not represented in Parliament.

According to its constitution, the BNP is “committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948”. The BNP proposes “firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home”. The party also advocates the repeal of all anti-discrimination legislation, and restricts party membership to “indigenous British ethnic groups deriving from the class of ‘IndigenousCaucasian’”. The BNP also accepts white immigrants that are assimilated into one of those ethnicities. The BNP asserts that there are biological racial differences that determine the behaviour and character of individuals of different races, although it claims that it does not regard whites as superior to other ethnic groups, and that preference for one’s own ethnicity is a part of human nature.

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Schoolgirl victim of racist bullying says tormentor’s sentence is ‘pants’

telegraph_co_uk_new[10]

By Nick Allen

The victim, a 14-year-old mixed race girl, was repeatedly insulted with racist terms for six months by a 15-year-old, BNP supporting fellow pupil.

Last month the boy became the first school child to be convicted of racially aggravated harassment of a fellow pupil following a trial at Lincoln Youth Court.

The conviction prompted questions over whether such racist bullying should be dealt with through criminal law or by schools themselves.

The boy could have been detained for up to two years in a young offenders’ institution but he was instead sentenced to a six month supervision order and made to pay £500 compensation to the girl, which will be paid by his father.

The victim, who tried to kill herself with an overdose of stress pills and painkillers, said she was “disappointed” with the sentence.

She said: “When my mum told me the sentence I just thought ‘Is that it? That’s pants.’

“He has got a slap on the wrists and been told he was a naughty boy – that’s all. He has not paid the price for what he has put me through and he will never have to suffer like I have.

“I want him to be out into a multi-cultural school where he is one of the only white pupils to see what it feels like to be in the minority. I want him to be in my shoes and see how he copes with that.”

The girl, who is of mixed white English and black African heritage, was called “wog”, “coon”, “nigger”, “gorilla” and “golliwog” by the boy. She also suffered abusive chants of “white, white, white is right, kick them out, fight, fight, fight” and was repeatedly told: “Go back to your own country, you don’t belong here.”

She wrote a suicide note and took an overdose on Jan 25 this year. She was then sectioned for six weeks in a psychiatric hospital before the family moved to a different part of the country.

After the sentencing her mother said: “…He bullied her to the extent she actually wanted to die but he had no remorse. When he was found guilty we were on a high and thought we would finally get justice. But now we feel we have put ourselves out there and not got anything back.

During the case it emerged the boy was a known BNP supporter who actively tried to enlist other youths.

The victim’s mother said: “It’s very sad and comes from ignorance more than anything. My daughter is British, she was born in this country and has a British passport. But they just think everyone living in the UK should be white and English.”

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mixed race in the uk

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I guess we’re the fastest growing group in the world, muah-ha-ha-ha! Just kidding. But I’m with you, Dani. We need to educate everyone about this group with rapidly increasing numbers.  I wonder if mixed race people are more likely to be victims of crime in the U.S.

Mixed race ‘fastest growing minority’

Karlene Pinnock BBC NewsBeat

“Best of both”, “pick and mix”, “Asian”, “half-breed” and “coloured” – they are just some of the names mixed race people say they’ve been called.

The mixed race group is the fastest growing ethnic minority group in the UK and is expected to become the largest by 2020.

Britain has one of the highest rates of interracial relationships in the western world.

If government watchdog figures are right, mixed race Britons will overtake Indian people to become the UK’s largest ethnic minority group within 25 years, reaching 1.24 million.

Seventeen-year-old Seeder is from Manchester. She said: “I actually expected mixed raced people to be the biggest ethnicity.

Listen to 1Xtra’s Mixed Race documentary

“Mixed raced isn’t just one race like me, English and Jamaican, there’s so many different mixes of so many different races.”

The latest official statistics available show mixed race people are more likely to be victims of crime than any other ethnic minority.

The risk of being the victim of a racially-motivated crime is also higher.

Dani thinks more needs to be done to educate everyone about the UK’s fastest growing ethnic minority group.

“I remember my teacher describing me as coloured and I was like actually not really fond of that one,” she said.

“We need to start looking at how we can make things more multicultural and I think the education system’s going to be a biggie.”

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