General prejudice or tribalism?
In Oxfam today I was charged with supervising a new(ish) volunteer on the till, which was needed for my experience with unusual stuff such as Oxfam Unwrapped and he got into a conversation with a regular customer that I was listening to. Apparently she had recognised his accent and they got talking about where they both came from in Durham, sharing memories etc. So far, so good. However, then they moved on to discuss Sheffield where the new volunteer is at University, and at this point things started to go downhill. The customer said that a friend of hers involved in the security services(?) had said that Sheffield was sinking into underground terrorism that the vast majority of people had no idea about. He had told her that the best advice was to “get out now”. While I thought it was probably pointless rumours (I heard “sex gangs” mentioned amongst other things) as terrorist cells are likely to be in every major city by now, I didn’t exactly think anything of it.
However, the conversation then changed. The customer (who had already lowered her voice to begin this section of the conversation about terrorism in Sheffield) then inferred a sweeping generalisation about followers of Islam, noting that ‘they’ had now got a Mosque in the centre of Sheffield (it’s a very impressive building that has been put up recently) and that this was going to make things worse. She moved on to say that this would apparently never happen in Durham, because the locals ‘wouldn’t stand for it’ because Christianity, being a vital part of the community, was important for tourism and that it would kill the area. This conversation was shocking. Terrorism is appaling and it makes sense to be concerned (even if I personally am not really too worried), but suggesting a link with the entiriety of Islam? I was sickened.
This is where I come to the title of this post in an attempt to question the reasons behind this event. This person was, as I said, a regular: she had made provisions to repair some specialised donations (sending some expensive dolls to a dolls’ hospital), really helping Oxfam – this made it more surprising to me. The point I am trying to get at is that based on her comments about Durham I am unsure of whether she is against Islam or Islamic people (bunching together religion and ethinicity) moving to live in Britain. The former would be prejudice or ignorance as she is making the assumption that all or the majority of Muslims support Islam as this is simply not true, and the latter I could excuse as tribalism, simply wanting to maintain the area’s current population and not allow other groups in. I have begun to observe the latter a lot more in recent times, meaning you have people who are totally not racist or religiously intolerant but who want to keep the communities seperate. “Sure, great religion – go live over there, and we can have the occasional visits to each other” would be a summing up of their point of view.
How on earth can we tackle this view? One can understand and accept actual negativity caused by job losses and language barriers, but multiculturalism is important. We must make it work as a society, otherwise war will always rear its head.
On a side note, SilentFlame is donating to charity at last. I forgot to take the £30 I had ready in to Oxfam today though.
Congratulations on your first donation to charity. Hope you are able to continue to help out the community in this way.
Save the congratulations for when I have actually taken it in