Picture this, you grew up in a small town in Norway. You had to walk 45 minutes to feed your neighbors cat´s when they went on holidays- though it was worth it because cats, obviously. There were more tractors than cars and more cows than people.
Then for some crazy reason you decide to move to London. A town with 4 million more people than in your entire country. There are cars everywhere- not tractors- but real cars. And busses with stairs in them. It´s a crazy mad world and all you really wanted was to find a bus back to uni after a food trip. As there are more than one bus in this metropol you have completely forgotten where and which bus you where supposed to take.
Lucky for you a nice elderly woman sees your distress and offers to help. You explain where you want to go and just your luck it´s exactly the same bus she is after. All you need is to follow her and hop on the right bus- huzza!
Like most elderly women she doesn't just want to walk, she wants to talk. Although as a norwegian I normally dont talk to strangers on principle, it would be impolite not to. She asks me where I´m from and I tell her about my little town, about the tractors and that one scary cow that always follows you with her eyes when you walk by.
We arrive at the bus-stop and all is well- or so I thought. Just as the Norwegians love to pretend other people arent there, the English love to queue. So in traditional english fashion we line up to wait for a bus that isn't scheduled to arrive for at least five more minutes. I breathe a sigh of relief, confident I survived day one in this crazy town when the older woman leans over to me. She points to the black woman in front of us and whispers (loud enough for everyone to hear) "look at those immigrants. Just coming over here, taking our jobs."
I found this particularly strange considering most of our conversation so far had been a detailed description of my own immigrantness. My head was a whirlwind of what to do next. Not only have I engaged in social interactions with a stranger, it turns out the stranger is an politically incorrect possibly crazy person.
I responded as politely as I could, "uhm... I´m an immigrant?" I leave out the part of my intentions of taking one of their english jobs at one time.
"Oh you dont count," she smiles while the black woman in front has turned around with an eye shady as the arctic winter, "you´re from one of those nice countries. They stick together you know, so we whites must to stick together too."
I seemed suddenly to be frozen in time. In fact I think a part of me is still frozen in that exact moment. I´d like to say I rebutted with some fabulous rebuttal of just how wrong she was, how we should all stick together because the human race is one, and if she doesn't like multiculturalism why the heck is she living in London?
Unfortunately all I did was share a "I swear I dont know her" look with everyone around me as I repeated in my head, dont worry she´ll die soon and take her opinions with her, before I slipped away into an overcrowded bus and hid until I was safe at uni.
I have never before experience such an obvious example of overt-in your face-I´m not even going to pretend otherwise racism.
It´s two years now since my double-decking trip, but I still revise it in my head of what I should have done. How do you react when otherwise nice-seeming people say such abhorrent things? In the past few months, influenced by the refugee crisis and a certain american presidential candidate´s comments fueling a fire in certain groups, the opinions of nice old racist ladies dont seem to be dying out any time soon. So how do you react when you meet those opinions face to face? Do you tear them a new one? Politely disagree? One thing I do believe, they should not, as I did then, just be ignored.
Nice read, I was in a similar situation on a bus heading south from Uni on the 550. It was a Maori lady and a pakeha man. Well kind of similar, the bus was full of chatter and i had a front row seat as the Maori Lady was sitting in front of me and the pakeha man was in the opposite seat. The Maori Lady took offence and told the pakeha guy took take his feet of the seat. He responded that it was a free country and then the insults borderline racist started up... there was a moment of silence amongst the bus, as the saying goes you could hear a pin drop. I piped up and said "Be Quiet!" because i did'nt want to offend anyone by saying shut up. The Maori Lady said "yeah, you tell him!" I replied "I was talking to the both of you, someone could be recording this on their cellphone, you're embarrassing yourselves!". I felt pretty strange speaking up like that, as i'm sure my ears were burning and i did feel bad telling the old lady to be quiet. The rest of the ride was totally quiet, even from the rest of the bus. The lady tried to make conversation with me where I politely answered her questions, and that she said those words because in some cultures it is considered rude. I don't know if i did the right thing or if it was wrong, i just thought that maybe there needed to be someone who was from neutral ground to speak up as i believe it was very uncomfortable for everyone when racist remarks were used from both parties.
ReplyDeleteInteresting to read especially since I'm from the UK with ethnic origins. I find that in the UK we tend to tolerate the elderly and their racist comments a little more than younger generations. There goes the argument of they grew up in a generation where racism was all they knew, but after reading your post I think that's perhaps far too lenient of an excuse. As uncomfortable as it is, everyone in an oppressed position deserves someone to stand up for them. I appreciate how awkward and difficult it must have been for you at the time though!
ReplyDeleteAs an extension of this topic, relating it to media it might be an interesting idea to explore how racism is portrayed in the media in terms of whether elderly people seem to get away with it more or not.