As the ripple effect of last Thursday's referendum result spread across the country, you may have noticed a sudden uptick in stories about alleged racist and/or xenophobic incidents. There was that one in west London, where the police were called to a Polish cultural center to investigate "allegedly racially motivated criminal damage"—graffiti a spokesperson for the center described as "really unpleasant." [...]
This all may be true; it makes sense that racists and xenophobes will be buoyed by the victory of what was a largely racist and xenophobic campaign—that they will feel more comfortable voicing their prejudices. However, as any non-white British person who has lived in the UK will already know, these kind of incidents are sadly nothing new. On any day of the week at any given time, someone who knows nothing about you may stop and demand your ethnic credentials. They might ask about your background, your "people," where you're "really from." Or they might ask to touch your hair, follow you around a shop, or, as I had the pleasure of experiencing in December last year, spit on you in the street and call you a black bitch. [...]
Putting vocally racist people "back in the box" won't work. This is a time when we in the UK need to have a frank and honest discussion about race and ethnicity, in which we actually listen to each other. People are scared—they're worried about job security, school places, waiting times at hospitals—and will continue to scapegoat others based on ethnicity until we unpack both the roots of prejudice and the real reasons life has been getting harder for so many of us, starting with the impacts of Thatcherism on British manufacturing and moving on to ensuing welfare cuts.
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