If you don't feel comfortable, keep moving until you do. You can analyze whether it was racist later, and then feel guilty if you want to.
In retrospect, I was probably safer every time I walked alone through the streets of Chicago's various neighborhoods than that one time I pulled in to an interstate highway rest stop in Florida. A sheriff's deputy had to watch over us and our car from the time we pulled in to the time we rolled out. None of us have ever peed so quickly in our entire lives.
In retrospect, we should have gone straight through and opted for wetting our pants. In that situation, there was no apparent difference in skin colors. Number of shirts owned, yes. Tooth count, definitely.
Had a similar family with different skin color locked all their doors and hastily re-entered traffic, I wouldn't be calling them racist; I'd be calling them wiser than me. So as I do not know much about the neighborhoods and suburbs of London, I think I'll withhold any uninformed judgements on what he said and did as a young man. It may well be that he is both racist and correct. On the whole, I care more about the latter.
As an ex resident of East London (Leyton) he's right about it being a shitty area and having a high muslim population. However these two facts are independent.
I would lock my doors too. Only because I know two people who got carjacked.
They are not entirely independent. They are simply correlated to different links in the causality chain. The Muslims are there because it's a shitty area, not the other way around. If it were a good area, the houses would be too expensive for the latest wave of immigrants to move into.
It was the same way with the era of immigration in America. The first generation off the boat lived in the worst neighborhoods, and then the next generation rose to power and lorded it over the boats that came in on their watch. I imagine (though I don't know) that Hindus and Sikhs are more accepted as British than Muslims are, just because they have been around longer, and that they have long since moved into the better neighborhoods.
I don't know, exactly. I do know that Florida has its own Fark tag. It was northern Florida. The rest stop was curiously crowded for the amount of traffic on the road, compared with every other interstate rest stop I have ever pulled in to. When we parked, a sheriff's deputy--not a state highway patrolman--adopted a position near our car, and he was making eye contact with people near us and shaking his head "no".
I can only assume that we were at risk of involuntarily auditioning for Deliverance 2.
I have absolutely no interest in finding out more about what it was all about.
In retrospect, I was probably safer every time I walked alone through the streets of Chicago's various neighborhoods than that one time I pulled in to an interstate highway rest stop in Florida. A sheriff's deputy had to watch over us and our car from the time we pulled in to the time we rolled out. None of us have ever peed so quickly in our entire lives.
In retrospect, we should have gone straight through and opted for wetting our pants. In that situation, there was no apparent difference in skin colors. Number of shirts owned, yes. Tooth count, definitely.
Had a similar family with different skin color locked all their doors and hastily re-entered traffic, I wouldn't be calling them racist; I'd be calling them wiser than me. So as I do not know much about the neighborhoods and suburbs of London, I think I'll withhold any uninformed judgements on what he said and did as a young man. It may well be that he is both racist and correct. On the whole, I care more about the latter.