"If it's not about racism, what about the racism?"
They'll tell you it's not about racism, and maybe it's not. Maybe the day-to-day regular implicit and explicit racism on the streets of England is totally independent of the Brexit thing, eh?
They rely on the liberal metropolitan elite bubble being a real thing, compromised of people who don't leave that bubble, and wonder to themselves if maybe they're getting it wrong, being unfair to the middle Englander.
I don't live in the liberal metropolitan elite bubble. I don't live in it, I don't look like it. I'm just a scrappy frowning overweight guy with a shaved head in the solid satellite towns.
And I hear people being racist all the time. All the time. And I'm an unfriendly person without conversational tricks who mainly exists in the bubble of his own house. I don't go looking for it.
But I overhear it on the streets, I hear it from people I engage in brief conversations with, working people, taxi drivers, casual acquaintances. If eg London is mentioned, people can't wait to say something about all the ghastly people that now live there. They imply it or say it openly. They probably don't think they're racist. They're good respectable people.
Racism gets treated in the media like it's an outrage, a shocking break from the norm which the committer will never be able to live down. It's not. It's every day, all sorts of people. The strongest targets vary, but it's always there.
Anyway. I wrote a poem when the Windrush scandal was going on, inspired, if that's the right word, by a black guy I saw, probably in his 50s, in my local supermarket, wearing a Jam t-shirt inscribed with the words from 'Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" - "They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many right-wing meetings".
It was, on various levels, one of the greatest things I've ever seen. That's my country, please.
FULL ENGLISH
I’ve been with you
in your England
since its birth, in desperation,
From the ashes of an Empire
gorged on cruelty and loathing.
Born here as it dragged itself
through shame-faced reconstruction,
I’ll die here as it suffocates,
entranced by its own embers.
A traveller’s child is not himself
a slave to expedition.
I know my roots
but made my bed
in brittle little England.
I know each tiny detail
of my difference
and your myth-wish
For England, some new England,
which, in truth, never existed.
I’ve never not been English,
I am older than your memory
Of battles on a pink map
won by white men
with a black book.
My tanks are not on your lawn,
your gates are not beleaguered,
We’re English,
just as English
as your forlorn deathwish protest.
We’re British
as the Celts
who grasped the bitter joke you bleated -
“We’re all in this together”,
in the same breath as you told us
That a jolly hostile send-off was
the very least you owed us
Yet I know more of England
than these puffing thin-eyed wreckers,
Who only know
their corner
and believe it replicated
In every neuk and hood
where their imagination fails them,
Yet I know every England
like a stranger feels a welcome.
I’m the only black man standing
at the Hammersmith Palais,
Bellowing indie anthems
like a reveller at a wake,
I fought like a true Englishman
in Dublin and on Green Street,
Sometimes, only sometimes,
these boys barely even see it.
In some pub off Charing Cross
that night the Germans mugged us off
I’m just another snarling English voice
rich in expletives.
I’ve lived a modern English life,
I’ve bought myself the t-shirt
“They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs … too many right-wing
meetings”
An in-joke and outsider howl
in every brazen detail,
I wear it as I’m marching
through my mid-life small-town exile.
I’m English all the way through,
I am London and the counties,
I’ve heard every expression
which excuses me my colour,
“present company”,
“not like them” …
as if I should be flattered
By ghoulish poisoned savages
who’ve never known a black man.
They’ve seen me on their TV
In the joyous throes of Blackwash
Greeting Richards, Holding, Marshall
Off HMT Empire Windrush
And they’ve damned me for my graceless
Jumped-up unenlightened blackness.
They’d damn me with the Tebbit test,
The lauded racist’s Sunday best
(I’d pass it, but I gave myself
That glorious day of rest)
They call it like they see it
And they see it as they’re taught it.
They wouldn’t know I’m English
From my birth-cries
To their doorstep.
I fought like a true Englishman
At Goose Green and in Belfast
And, then and there, those boys
I swear
they couldn’t tell us apart.
I’ve seen an Eltham Six
in waiting
Each corner I turned
Looking to release themselves
By some unfettered act.
But English is my language
And my manner and my way.
I’ve hardly missed a step, lads,
And never shown a crack.
My grandkids will be English.
Or at least that’s what I’d hoped.
I’m home. My home is England.
There’s my passport. Here’s my word.
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