I was going from Trafalgar Square to Heathrow. He was the driver. He was in fact born in the UK, as his accent demonstrated, but his extended family moved from Kashmir to the UK before he was born. How could he not be aware that in some sense he is not “English”?
When he was a child, he had English friends at school, but they never came over to play or spend the night. Now his children’s English friends do come over, spend the night.
Racism is really bad in the States, he says. He and 3 friends were Recently held for 4 hours at Miami airport, interrogated as though they were caught at the scene of a crime.
He doesn’t think racism in southern England is bad. But he won’t go on the underground. He had to take the underground on 9/11. What was so horrible was the way people stared at each other, and particularly at him. They’d move away to sit anywhere but beside him. He still has nightmares about that day, he says. He said they were about the falling bodies. But maybe also the way he was then so very clearly not part of his society.
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And just in case you are wondering, we had this long conversation because London was practicing completely screwing up traffic for the Olympics. The idea seems to be that one totally changes everything so that the athletes and various VIPs can move about easily. Well, given the grand way complex systems work, lots of bloody luck!