Question for Londoners/ex-Londoners reading~

[bellatrys]

When I visited England in the late 80's, and [white, British] people warned me that Notting Hill was kind of sketchy and I probably didn't want to go around there, was this a totally-not-at-all-coded way of not-at-all-racists telling me that there were black people there? Or just a nice, upper-middle-class bourgie inability to deal with the sort of

Comments

[fjm]

Yes.

I took one person off my list in part becayse she described my own area as a "bad" area. It isn't. But I do have neighbours from all over the world (most of the whites are Polish or Roumanian) and all shades.

I am always boggled

[bellatrys]

by people who find my city "scary" - even the depressed mixed/industrial blocks are not all that bad, compared to real cities. (there's 100k people and change here, biggest city in the state.) It's like, I thought *I* was sheltered, but... And some of it - a lot of it - is class-related: a quiet street full of apartment buildings with some peeling paint and unmowed lawns is "scary"--? I guess if you never leave McMansionLand, maybe. But some of it is overtly racial, as I heard from a shopkeeper of my acquaintance describing customers who were afraid to come to her store because the town is only 92% white now...because Sudanese mothers watching their kids play in the park and Cuban coffee shop owners are just completely fucking terrifying, somehow.

[Time for Steve Stirling showing up to scold me again for being delusional in my non-fear of strangers with darker skin and different accents on my block...]

[skapusniak]

Not a Londoner, that was my Grandparents on my mother's side. White guy living in Edinburgh -- and yes when you travel south, you suddenly *really* *really* realise how rare it's been for you to see a black face in Edinburgh compared to how it is in urban England and especially London, despite, on the other hand, there being plenty of folks with connections with the near east, Indian subcontinent and East Asia up here