When I was 15, I went to Southend High Street after school one day with two of my best friends. A group of white men drinking beer walked past us, a trio of brown girls in school uniform. One of them pointed and shouted in a ripe estuarine accent: “Oi, Steve, would you fuck one of them Pakis?” As it happened, only one of us was of Pakistani extraction: me. This pedantic point of fact helped my friends and me process this disturbing incident as tragicomedy.
This is how racism is widely understood – as a character defect that causes predatory boors like Steve’s mate to shout slurs in the street – but it is a woefully shallow analysis. Being called nasty names is unpleasant, but it is only one manifestation of deeply embedded patterns of thought and behaviour that touch every aspect of society.
