Microaggression

[cosmolinguist]

People of color have it far worse, I know, but there's a special kind of horror in having people think it's okay to talk shit about immigrants* around you because you're white.

It just reminds me again that I live in a small bubble of carefully-chosen people who don't talk about how I shouldn't have had access to the NHS when I moved here, and stuff like that. Sometimes I even get to forget these people are really out there -- not just in the Daily Mail or friends of friends on Facebook, but in my lovely local pub.

It makes me all the more grateful for the informed, empathic, liberal, knowledgeable people I usually get to surround myself with.

I got extra hugs from Andrew when I got home. He's very obliging like that.


* And it's even more teeth-grindingly dreadful somehow because they don't even know what they're talking about. You're ranting to your friends about how no immigrant should be able to get benefits for a year? Well, that's an improvement over the two years I -- and my British husband! -- had to wait to be eligible for them!

Comments

[miss_s_b]

I get this at work all the time, when people I have never met before rant on at me about how disgusting it is that the gays can get married, or how "they" should all be sent home, and it astounds me. They have NO idea who they are talking to, yet they blithely assume that I will agree with them. SUCH privilege.

[cosmolinguist]

Yes. I'm still getting mileage out of, when I had a job like yours, a particularly illogical reaction to telling someone I was an immigrant after they said they couldn't support the Lib Dems because they were too soft on immigration and all this immigration* was really worrying, don't you think?

I told her I was an immigrant, and when she found out I was from America, she said, "Oh, America! I don't mind America. My sister lives there!"

Fantastic combination of racism and cognitive dissonance, there.


* And this was way pre-coalition, this was when lovely Phil Woolas was still immigration minister, personally having made it more difficult for me to move here...

[miss_s_b]

ah so she meant COLOURED people... ;)

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I was so tempted to tell her I could be a black Muslim lesbian with a bunch of kids, or something, and still be American.

[benicek.livejournal.com]

Oh...don't get me started. I can't believe how many of my fellow NHS nurses believe this xenophobic drivel too. How can the young Slovaks and Poles working alongside us, entirely educated in their home countries, possibly be 'milking' the system more than we are?

Added you, BTW. :)

[cosmolinguist]

Hello! New LJ friends are a rare luxury these days. :)

Yes, I used to work in the NHS, and I had in those days a stat at my fingertips about how many doctors, nurses, care assistants, hospital cleaners, caterers, porters, etc. are foreign-born: more than enough for the whole thing to grind to a halt if we all decided not to turn up for work one day.

If the guy in the pub last night had his way, I'd have been working in the NHS long before I was able to make use of it myself.

[uglybuffy.livejournal.com]

Don't get me started either. Have noticed that certain of my inlaws and their associates are rabid racists, and mutter that "you wouldn't know the town now" referring to the unfortunate immigrants to their rural Northern Irish town, imagined to be rolling in benefit money, Scrooge McDuck style. But then, these are the same people who view people from another town with only slightly less hostility. One of the Peru drug mules is from the town in question, and I am informed that the whole town have distanced themselves because "her family aren't from here". Mr Uglybuffy has been ostracised by some sections of the community for marrying an outsider, and a suspected heathen at that. Heavy sigh. I am lucky that we didn't move here 20 years before we did, when the bombing was at its height and the Irish were less popular. We do still get a bit of "get back to your own country" (spuddy more than me, building sites tend to be hives of xenophobia) from the Mancunian counterparts to aforementioned inlaws' associates, who consider leaving the area code one was born in to be deviant behaviour. I imagine your pal from the pub would have protested he didn't mean you, because you're white and speak English and not like those other foreigns. Which pub, by the way? Am always looking out for a nice local.

[cosmolinguist]

I'm lucky in a way because my family think British people and living in Britain is exotic and enviable. (Although I am in a country that thinks my sort are at best inherently ridiculous, at least once they find out that I'm not from New York or Disneyland; America's much keener on Britain than Britain is on America.)

I imagine your pal from the pub would have protested he didn't mean you, because you're white and speak English and not like those other foreigns.

No doubt. This is one reason I didn't say anything; that kind of thing's sadly predictable (and makes me all the more infuriated when I do hear it because it makes the racism so much more blatant.)

Which pub, by the way? Am always looking out for a nice local.

The Blue Bell, which is absolutely brilliant and which I can't recommend enough. This is basically the first time anything unpleasant has happened to me, it's normally incredibly friendly, there's a fire, usually a dog or two lying around, and the drinks are incredibly cheap and tasty.

[uglybuffy.livejournal.com]

I love the US, but I'm not a Brit. I still think you should take me on your next trip home! I could drive you around in a fabulous GIANT AMERICAN CAR and charm your parents with tales of Ireland and "America, fuck yeah!" enthusiasm.

Is the Blue Bell a brewery pub? Wondering how a non beer drinker might fit in!

[cosmolinguist]

Actually so many of the people I regularly go there with aren't beer-drinkers that it was impossible for us to spend our beer tokens the first time we won the pub quiz! I'm not usually among their number, so can't speak from personal experience, but I've never noticed or heard of any of them not fitting in for not drinking beer, or not drinking alcohol at all in most cases.

[tdaschel.livejournal.com]

ah, your post really struck home. in Monroeville, PA, a guy said to me, "so, you're from the South? i don't like blacks either !" / and it's nice to think about all the things i could or should've said, but i was put into dumb silence ..