Monday, January 22, 2007

More Racism ?

A sobering tale from Jasvinder Sanghera.

“What about Zainab Singh? Her mother caught her at the bus stop, talking to a boy. That was three weeks ago and Mira hasn’t let her out of the house since. I said to her, ‘Mira, you have only yourself to blame. Let her mix with white girls and she will pick up white girl ways’.”

The worst thing you can say to an Asian girl is that she is behaving like a white person. We weren’t allowed to mix with white people because Mum said they didn’t have any morals or self-respect. She said whites were dirty people with dirty ways. That’s what all the women I called Aunty thought too, and everyone else in our community.

An Asian boy might have a bit of fun with white girls — “white meat”, they’d say — while he was growing up, but when it came to settling down, his family would find him a good Asian bride.

If an Asian girl went out with a white boy that was different. Her brothers or her uncles would find him and beat him up and then they would beat her, too, for bringing shame on the family. Then she would be ruined; no decent Asian man would ever want her. Everyone knew that. I knew it by the time I was eight.


Now I think people should be able to hold such views (without the beatings-up, of course) - but imagine what a row there'd be if this attitude was the norm among working class natives !

We see here a culture which at base is totally unintegrated and which actually despises the native culture. I can understand that - I despise it too. But it's not necessarily a pointer to community harmony - and these people (Sikhs) are generally thought of as the good guys.

Only one worry about her story. Here she says :

“But then if you look at the recent BBC poll for the Asian network they asked 15 to 24-year-olds if they could justify an honour killing, and more than 50% said they could.”

The figures (pdf) look like 8% to me, not 50%.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Also in that survey, if you look at the religion columns over on the right, it appears that Asian Muslims are less likely to answer "yes" than Asian Christians, 7% to 14%. The survey may be "Prepared by the BBC", but still, it's worth looking into further.

In fairness, though, Jasvinder Sanghera's talking about beatings, not killings. I'd like to see figures for approval of that, too.

Anonymous said...

These people are racist scum as much as any channel 4 ratings fodder. The difference is that our media have their spotlight trained in only one direction.

Reality is immaterial - all that matters is what the media says is true. We can blog 24 hours a day for 50 years, but it is they who reach the mob and it is their lies which are swallowed.

Anonymous said...

"...and which actually despises the native culture. I can understand that - I despise it too".

Are you the same chap who claims in another recent post 'it's about culture not race'?

Anonymous said...

I not only support their right to hold such views, I agree with them. The Confucian Orientals are far and away more moral than 'Judeo-X-tian' Occidentals, whose real belief system is a shallow hodge-podge of libertinism, mysticism (look at the proliferation of horoscopes in the unbelieving West) and messianic crusading. Just goes to prove Chesterton's old dictum, that when a man stops believing in his ancestral God, he doesn't start believing in nothing, but in anything.