Messages

The way it should be...

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I work in education now I am back on the mainland. As supply, I get posted to different primary (elementary) schools in the area. My latest posting is at a very diverse school. Scarborough is a relatively small town, but, despite the popular misconception touted by some on this forum, it, like much of the UK is actually quite diverse. The problem is that when some quote the stats they use Black and White as the metric, totally ignoring European white diversity and Asian diversity.
In my class of 30 we have Nigerian children, Pakistani children, Ukrainian children, Polish children, Romanian children and British children.
Many of our children don't have English as a first language.
We have Halal on the lunch menu and Kosher.
We study ALL the 5 major religions. None are pushed above the other. Currently, we are looking at prayer and the similarities and differences in how each religion worships. Recently, some of our children asked to come in cultural dress, because they got new outfits for a major religious festival, and it was lovely to see them in their best clothes. Reminded me of getting a new dress every Christmas, to be my best for the year, as a child. Because we aren't so different.
Christmas will be celebrated here, just as Eid has been. Celebrating the one doesn't HAVE to cancel out the other, and despite media crap saying otherwise, it generally doesn't.
Watching how the kids get on together, despite language barriers and differences in culture is, as always, a revelation.
This is how change happens. This is how we get a future in which we all get on better. This is how we raise children to accept difference. Not by pretending it isn't there. Not by refusing to acknowledge different traditions altogether. Not by forcing all the kids to abandon their own culture in favour of ours.
We are reading a book currently about a refugee child coming from a war torn nation. That's the life experience of many of the kids at our school/their parents.
Some may think this is naive. But let's face it, the ways I grew up with of forced Christianity and isolating kids from other cultures didn't exactly work, did it?
Of course, we could lock the doors, shut off the borders and live in splendid isolation. We have already ended freedom of movement from the EU. Nobody learns to live with anybody and when, in the inevitable labour shortage we are already starting to experience, we start shipping people over for our convenience again, we will be right back to square one.
Freedom of movement in the labour market is key to commerce for a small nation, unless we all start having 10 kids each. We need other people. We always have. If we keep treating other people as badly as we have in the past, we will just perpetuate the division which causes the problem.
The kids don't care. The kids don't want us all to worship their gods, etc. They just want to talk about what they do at home, like all kids do.
I love my work. I love the diversity. We are so much poorer without it.

RE: The way it should be...

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That's very nice. Children (before they are corrupted by adults) are a blessing and bring joy to the world.

RE: The way it should be...

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Agreed. The inclusion starts at school. The corrupt adults have less of a chance of getting a foot in the door if the children are given a positive experience at an early age.

When I was a girl, I grew up in a very rural area. We had a child at our church of England Primary school who I say with hindsight was likely Jewish. I say with hindsight because it was never talked about. He was excluded from daily assembly (in those days, C of E primaries had to have religious assembly daily and hymn practice on Friday), he didn't join in the Christmas activities. We weren't encouraged to talk about it, as though his difference was some shameful secret. We didn't study other cultures AT ALL at that age.

I can see how children growing up in this atmosphere get tempted into believing we hate their culture and we are the enemy.

Corrupt adults aren't born. They are made. The more we do to reduce the making of corrupt adults, the fewer we have. We know that works to a degree. How do we know? Because of the things we used to do that we don't accept widely any more.

If we think we have something good, whether it's an accurate belief or not, showing it and sharing it is far better than simply shutting the door to protect it. All that does is force those shut out to try different battering rams.

If we open the door an inch but no further, insisting on some sort of 'borg assimilation' (Google the reference if star trek isn't your thing) as a condition of entry, what we get is resentment which builds. Resentment from the people we use to wash our floors and fight our wars but still treat as suspicious aliens.

Some of us point out the lack of consideration we would get in 'their country'. Undeniably true of some cultures. But not remotely relevant. We can't control what happens in 'their country'. What remote benefit is it to any of us to copy the actions of regimes we openly don't agree with?

Of course, there's another, darker way to view positive inclusion. We want it where we can see it. We want the kids in our schools, so we will notice changes in behaviour. We want people mixing, rather than having an excuse to shut kids away at home or in 'faith schools'.

RE: The way it should be...
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RE: The way it should be...

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Glad you got the ST reference. With you on the Federation, it has a touch of the old colonials...

I don't disagree with your 'projects' example, but isn't that more to do with a culture of poverty? Are the gangs in America really all formed by recent immigrants?

Fundamentally, you live in a nation that owes its very creation to immigration. I live in a nation that was rebuilt by it. Every culture we have had here, from the West Indians of the Windrush Generation to the Bangladeshis of the post-partition migration, to the post-war Italian prisoners of war who made their home here, to the Eastern Europeans who worked the land have brought different ideas and cultures with them.

Some thrive, some don't. Some cause trouble, some work their arses off. Some win medals for us at the Olympics. Many have grandparents/great grandparents who fought alongside us in the last war.

But they are a convenient scapegoat. As though we would have no problems without them. As though our 'own' are not any part of the problem.

Why should we only see negatives? Makes me laugh in my country to hear people talking about how much they love a good Indian Takeaway, whilst crying 'close the borders'. Hmmm.

Is it that we are only happy with migration when the migrants have what we see as 'subservient' roles?

One theory about the historical anti-Semitism in my country isn't that the Jews were troublemakers, despite the popular view of Jews as unsavoury, historically.

It was because they were successful. They made money, and we didn't like it, despite the fact that centuries ago, we welcomed Jews as money lenders because our religion prohibited money lending and theirs didn't.

So how do we 'win' at this? Both our nations have a history of drafting people in from other nations to do the stuff we can't or won't do. It's not new.

What do we do? Ship over the ones we 'like'? Doesn't work that way, does it? Because people are people. There's one born every minute, they do say, and there's good and bad in every culture. If we think keeping six degrees of separation is better, perhaps we ought to look at some of the nations with minimal migration. North Korea? Russia? China? In fact, many of the countries that historically discouraged immigration seem to have ended up with harsh regime's and the primary reason immigration has been discouraged is that it might bring some enlightened thinking.

Diversity has massively benefitted both our nations. There's positives and negatives. In some ways,we might benefit from a spell of closed borders. Then maybe we'll stop blaming all the convenient foreigners for all our woes....

RE: The way it should be...

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There is truth in what you say. Some immigration is good, while others are not. No, it is not a culture of poverty. Poverty and morality or culture are not the same and one does not lead to the other. If it did, then the rich would be saints.

Some homogeneous nations do have issues, whiles others who reject diversity of culture or immigration do not have the issues to the degree the US and UK do, Japan, Poland or example.

Did immigration of different cultures make our nations 'great'? Hmm, that's a hard one. There many other factors at play, especially for America. Geographic location for one, less developed (socio-economic, politically, and technologically) neighbors, a large demographic of European immigrants with established work habits and shared desire, capitalism, and land to expand, shared pillars of society (religion, values, race, and family structure.) Like it or not, the US was mostly built (and conquered) by European settlers (white people), despite what silly college kids and afro-centric (bad at math) fools say.

RE: The way it should be...

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I mention about the culture of poverty mainly because your situation described vis a vid the projects is not dissimilar to things that have happened here when similar things have been tried and it really isn't about race.
No, the rich certainly aren't saints, but when you are talking about people bringing down neighbourhoods with gangs, etc, you aren't talking about trust fund kids, are you? They tend to end up committing different sorts of crimes, arguably bigger ones, but not the kinds that result in instances of violence, etc, increasing in neighbourhoods.
In the UK, there's a lot of what we call, 'nimbyism' - not in my back yard. Since there has been a reduction in purpose-built social housing and an increase in private housing being rented out as social housing, there are people who do think the presence of those usually found on council estates equates to an increase in certain types of crime. As I say, here, race/immigration has nothing to do with it. The idea that the British underclass are all foreigners and that the white British poor are all hardworking innocents is dispelled after five minutes of living on any council estate. The worst estate round here (another school I have worked in serves it) is predominantly white British.
Unfortunately, certain elements of the white British underclass have themselves spread. Whilst the problems with tourism currently being highlighted in the Canary Islands are many and varied, at least part of the issue is the behaviour of the white British.
I don't like admitting it, it's embarrassing, as a person from a working class background, but you can tell the places where the cheap package holidays are, and it isn't surprising the locals have had enough.
Spain, interestingly, has regions heavily populated by white British migrants. When pressed, most Brits would say 'it's different, it's mostly retirees'. In actual fact, there's a growing white British underclass in Spain who don't bother to speak the language, their children don't attend school, and they have brought a lot of crime with them.
Not to mention the Costa Del Sol was where all the white British criminals went in the days when you couldn't be extradited from there.

Of course, we get the luxury of being called 'ex pats', despite the fact that most Brits living in Spain now are economic migrants in the sense they moved there for cheap rent and booze.

You mentioned the Europeans who built your country as though they weren't immigrants, which I don't really understand. They were. I don't see why we make this distinction between those who went over to seek their fortune in the new lands in the pioneer days and those that do the same now. We have this old colonial image that has endured of missionaries and visionaries. The truth was, the vast majority of early settlers were no different to some of the people landing on our shores in dinghies today. Economic migrants hoping for a better life, believing that in the new world they would be free from the class constraints, etc, of their homelands.

Not all of them were these great people who forged a pathway to a bright new world with hard work and a can-do attitude. Not all of the people who migrate today, legally and illegally will build a positive life. Some will cause trouble. Some will bring the bad shit with them. Some will win medals for us, become MPs, have restaurant chains. Good and bad, as it's always been.

It's always interesting to see different perspectives. From the British point of view, Poland, for example, is an impoverished Eastern European country which has a large diaspora in my country of economic migrants.

A lot of folk in my country are just as unhappy about the legal Eastern European migrants as they are about the brown boat people. It was one of the big drivers for getting out of the EU, ending freedom of movement. There was a period of time when the gutter press was full of lurid headlines about the 'invasion' of millions of Eastern Europeans.

Here's the thing. To put it bluntly, I'm not of recent migrant stock (by recent, I mean in the last 3 or 400 years). My family are Anglo Saxon on my mother's side, Celtic on my Father's side. You don't get much whiter than me (especially at the moment, it's been a dismal Spring). I could be forgiven for having a negative view on migration. But I don't, and the reason I don't is because I know what we really are, we Brits. I don't elevate our own migration above that of those who migrate here today.
I don't give it different words like 'ex pat' to pretend there's some big distinction between a migrant worker from Nigeria living and working in the UK and an English migrant living and working in America. There IS a difference between refugees and economic migrants. We have, in my country, both refugees and economic migrants who are white Europeans. Other countries have British economic migrants living there.

It's gone on for centuries. It will continue to go on for centuries more. We can either get on with it and each other or we can make a big song and dance about it and act like our shit don't stink because of an accident of birth. I personally admire anyone who has got enough gumption to try to make a go of it in this country, despite some of the shitty attitudes they face.