Think You’re Not A Racist? Take The Test!

by Les May

I LIVE in Rochdale; it is an ethnically diverse town and the district I live in is no exception. Recently I fell into a physically distanced conversation with an old man who lives in the neighbourhood about an incident in which he had been involved a week or so ago.

It seems the he and his somewhat younger wife, who has underlying health problems, had encountered a group of secondary school children in a narrow passage. Needing to negotiate the passage and the children, his wife explained that she was ‘shielding’ and went through without further ado.

When it came the turn of the old man to negotiate the group one of the teenagers, a boy, coughed over him. I don’t know exactly the old man’s age, but I do know it must be in the region of eighty, so his age significantly increases the risk of him dying if he were to become infected with Coronavirus.

The old man’s assessment was that being deliberately coughed over in the middle of a pandemic can reasonably be construed as an assault. Certainly it resulted in alarm and distress for the old man as he told me.

But there’s a twist to this story. As I mentioned earlier, Rochdale is an ethnically diverse town and the old man and the schoolboy belong to different ethnic groups. One of them would I think identify, or be identified by others, as Asian or British Asian, the other as White British. Does this fact propel what happened into a racially motivated action which ought to be reported to the police as a hate incident?

So there we are; we have a ‘perpetrator’, we have a ‘victim’ and we have the fact that the two are from different ethnic groups. In this case does context matter? Should we be ‘colour blind’ in reaching a judgement, or should we take into account the ethnicity of the ‘perpetrator’ and the ‘victim’?

Comments are welcome.

******************************