albion:
Rjan:
[…]
I have met, plenty in my previous job, that weren’t willing to engage.
It’s sometimes difficult to judge whether to take people at face value on this. All I can say is that I’ve never encountered any frostiness.
Even like where you find some very recent migrants are reluctant to talk, it can be because of a lack of confidence, especially when there is a prospect of being engaged in small talk that goes beyond well-rehearsed interactions - and because many are actually very good, and most can make themselves understood at a basic level, it’s not necessarily immediately obvious how they feel about their own skills.
And on the other side of the coin, many will have experienced or heard about little Englanders who have reacted harshly to poor language skills, and that adds to apprehensiveness in general - certainly, I’ve seen that happen even in situations where I was struggling to understand either what was being said or what was being explained (by an English speaker to a migrant).
I remember one time I was in a tea room and this Eastern European fella walked in who worked in the warehouse - they were all Eastern Europeans on the shop floor. I forget his name but I’d seen him around enough at that stage to know his name but not really spoken to him (he didn’t speak fluent English from what I remember, nor did the others), and he was a big bloke, about a foot taller than me. And he sort of stood in my way in the doorway in such a way that it did seem like a clumsy attempt to intimidate, and I just sort of backhanded him in his stomach in a friendly way and say “Alright, John?” (we’ll call him John), and he moved out the way. And after that every time he saw me having a cup of tea he’d be tapping his watch, and I’d just slurp it visibly or put two fingers up.
And the context of this was that he was working under a supervisor who was a right taskmaster (I could just about tolerate her, but I couldn’t have worked under her), and he probably thought Brits were getting special privileges or swinging the lead. But once it became apparent I wasn’t treating them like second-class citizens (as others frequently were), and took a bit of time to talk to them and help them out when they needed it, the atmosphere softens and you can start to let on and talk in a normal way. Whereas rather than seeing it as a bit of banter, someone who was determined to treat them as second-class and stand over them as work was done, probably would be crowing about their cheek and unfriendliness and lack of language skills and so on, because they’re putting themselves in that position and reinforcing us-vs-them perceptions.
I know in another situation, the context of which I’ve now forgotten completely but it must have been at work, I remember coming across an Eastern European woman whose face looked a bit of a cross between angry and fearful, but once it became apparent within a few seconds that I was being friendly and patient, you could see she started to relax and smile more whilst she was trying to explain herself.
I could reel off many more recollections, but what you usually find with people is that if you’re friendly and trusting, and aren’t chippy about misunderstandings or misperceptions, or superior, you receive friendliness and trust back.
And that’s not just true of migrants but quite generally - I’ve had conversations with managers in the past about their approach where i could see that they began with preconceptions and then railroaded another worker into confirming them, whereas because I knew more about the issue and was seen with more trust (and was introduced to someone who didn’t know me by someone who did) I was able to have a better conversation with the same worker and get a completely different account.
As for the first paragraph, personally, should I have had children, I can’t imagine telling them not to talk to the black kids, that’s straight racism. Doesn’t matter if discriminatory practice is in the ascendency or not. It’s racism.
It may be prejudice but it’s not racism, and it’s like I said earlier or elsewhere, if you’re dealing with children whose parents have odd views or who come from other (frequently far more socially conservative) societies, the simple answer is to be open and welcoming, because the circumstances and structures that create and reinforce those views in the first place can’t be sustained in our society (any more so than highly conservative views have been sustained amongst the whites in the long-term, as the abortion referendum shows in Ireland).
Even if parents from other societies never lose their distaste for certain aspects of British society, it won’t be effectively reproduced in their children, because they aren’t growing up in the same situation where the state and policemen and so on act to enforce those distastes.
In reality, there are far more people amongst migrant communities who look up to British culture and values, because by their nature they are self-selecting. It’s fear, hostility, and exclusion - and poverty, especially amongst the second and subsequent generations - that forces minorities into ghettoes, destroys good attitudes, and sustains old ways or creates new strands of extremism.
And I return to my point that if you’re chippy about such “racism” and determined or pre-primed to perceive it, you’ll be looking at everyone with a squinted eye, even those who don’t hold those views at all. You’re not actually facing any sort of systematic racism - exclusion from jobs, exclusion from housing, and so on - and if you did overhear a parent actually admonishing her child not to play with white children, I think it would probably be enough just to say directly “that’s not very nice, is it?”.
And if a child (maybe a schoolfriend of your child) told you that their mother or father had told them that, you’d say the same back, but you wouldn’t glower at the child or form a grudge, you’d say it matter-of-fact and let the child decide for themselves whether their parents are being reasonable - even if the first generation are able to prevail on their children (whilst they are children), it’s very unlikely by time the second generation are adults and have their own children, and have fond memories of white schoolfriends and their kindly families, that they’d be conveying the same message to their children in turn.
Listening to R4 a couple of years ago, and a chap that had come from Afghanistan as a 6-7 year old with his parents in the 70s, was talking about the new wave of refugees into Germany and the experiences of his parents. His parents had decided from the outset to fit in, wearing western clothes and learning the language to the point at which after three years, his mother was assumed to have grown up in Germany. I can’t imagine that she told her son not to mix with the white kids.
Indeed, but how many parents actually are telling their children not to mix with white kids? And how different is it to the antagonism that was still present in the 70s between Catholics and Protestants in working class communities in Britain? (A division that now seems absurd anywhere outside Northern Ireland.)
sorry mate 
While at the same time making an ally of the Saudi savages and inviting even more radical Islam into the country as part of that alliance.You couldn’t make it up. 
The conclusion seems to be that the Taliban aren’t really sure if they are relatively moderate Sufis or the old school full on nutter zb Hanafis but they’ve decided that they don’t like the Wahabbist Saudi savages anyway. 