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LadyConstanze -> RE: What do you do when you have a sub or dom thats racist? (12/16/2010 6:36:24 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: crazyml
I overheard a fascinating conversation between two people on a train a month or so ago. It was about the Polish who have come to the UK. It went something along the lines of "What the fuck are these people doing, coming 2000 miles to take our jobs".
I was tempted to join in along the lines of "Yeah, sneaky fucking bastards, they leave their homes and everything they know, they travel 2000 miles, to a foreign country, learn a new language and then send half their pay back to their families - Fucking sneaky low-lifes!"
True, but then you also assume that all of them come only to work, in the UK you're slightly more sheltered due to location, on the continent the open EU caused a lot of problems because it made it easier for criminals to cross borders if the borders are open, now if you grew up in a system that was build on corruption and it was what all you knew, you can't expect that everybody will adapt over night. Being an island has advantages because it's a lot harder to come to the UK than it is just to drive a few miles and be in another country, with the added problem that the countries police forces often don't work all that well together.
Along with a lot of hardworking people you sometimes have criminals tagging along, the criminals are the ones people hear about and notice, you got 1000 hard working people doing the jobs nobody else wants to do, among those 1000 are maybe 2 criminals or shady characters, who will the media mention and who will people notice? That's going to feed prejudices...
Also the people that are leaving their countries in large numbers to do the jobs nobody else wants to do, in a lot of cases they are not the most educated people, they'll have a problem learning the language, they'll run into prejudices, they will have a problem adapting in a lot of cases, so they rather stick with their own group because they are made to feel unwelcome by the locals, which then leads to the problem that you're getting little ghettos and the people on the train can complain that they're now taking over housing estates.... If they aren't integrated it will always the "them and us" situation, but given the way it is how can it happen?
I'm not sure there is an easy solution, in Germany it failed completely, due to their past they were so paranoid that they did positive discrimination, in short if you were a minority you often got better treatment than the citizens and the citizens were told to be more tolerant. That's completely crazy because which better way to give resentment and racism a breeding ground. Personally I think if somebody moves to another country, they should try their best to learn the language, that's a given, they shouldn't be treated worse but also not better, and I think they should try to fit in.
One thing that often does strike me the wrong way is that if people from a completely different cultural background come to countries and expect the new country to accommodate them and change before they actually ever did anything for the country, nothing against tolerance but tolerance goes both ways.
Not sure if that makes me a racist, but I learned that when dealing with Russia, you're better off smoothing your path with "gratitudes" (preferably in bills) or else obstacles happen... We see it as corruption, for them it's their way of doing business. Just like in a lot of Asian countries "Yes" doesn't mean "Yes, I agree with you and we have a deal!" - it often means "Yes, I hear what you are saying, but I am not committing myself to the deal yet!"
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