I worked at jaguar Land rover for 2 years .
The lads before me on the track were white and Indian, the lads behind me on the track were white and black .
All down the track people of every background quite literally getting on , having a laugh working together .
I now work at a place where it's a similar story (I won't name it as I don't know whose on here )
I just don't see this fractured society we are told about .
But we are told about it constantly by everybody else .
That's why it confuses so many people and annoys them .
I live on a street with people of different races and backgrounds ..
We borrow things off eachother , the Indian guy behind me jet washed my patio for nothing , the Somalian family by us , we took their daughter last week to Kenilworth Park , when it's hot we all chat in the gardens .
Many people just don't see it and that's why it's so confusing and hard for us to understand
I think when you are collaborating and working with people from different ethnicities and backgrounds it is one of the best cracks you can have. In my last job we had white, sikh, hindu and muslims working together. There was loads of self deprecating humour going on (Muslim mate moaned about the lack of phone signal in caves when he got back from visiting family in Pakistan) for example. We'd play football after work, go the pub at lunch times. Pretty bang on.
Equally though I can tell you stories about when I was a manager of a food store and my boss who was a hindu showed me a racist anti-muslim video on his phone in what was one of the most awkward moments of my life. Same boss got called a paki by one of my members of staff as he got out of his car just before we were about to sack him. The lad was nicking from the tills and wouldn't have even known who my boss was at that point.
Basically I think most people are sound, you see this in these collaborative environments like shopfloors on the tracks etc as people have explained. Start removing the number of eyes and ears around though and some people show their true colours. I'd be amazed if most people weren't mainly exposed to racism within their own 4 walls. I know I was. Now you have twitter where you can be relatively anonymous and dish out abuse and extreme views (left, right, black, white, whatever) and you have a sort of opposite environment to the one I described above where you have a community of fuckwits who get emboldened by it.
Well that is my hot take anyway.
