Last week on the No 9 bus, a middle-aged white woman shouted “bloody Paki” and spat at me. The sputum landed on the back of my seat, grey and revolting as she was.
No one said a thing, not even the black and Asian people around me. They all lowered or averted their eyes. I was spat at in 1972, too, after exiled Ugandan Asians with British passports arrived here. That time I was sitting quietly in a park in Oxford, reading Middlemarch. So you think it’s much better than the really bad old days? The truth is that, since 2001, in-your-face racism has returned. But those who suffer it just have to swallow the insults and degradation.
The difference is that, back then, we had politicians of all parties, including Tories, who felt keenly that racial prejudice and discrimination were unjust and reprehensible. They passed laws, used government purchasing power to get companies to operate fairly and, bit by bit, made racism unacceptable in the public space. Now those at the top – with the exception of Diane Abbott – say nothing and do even less about this stain on our society. Ethnic-minority politicians are the biggest cowards of the lot. » | Yasmin Alibhai Brown | Sunday, November 09, 2014
