Your Neighbourhoods Result in Your Oppression and Exclusion
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Right wingers and liberals alike in Britain have started to push the narrative that brown people themselves are the cause behind their oppression. They argue that by self-segregating and not interacting with the rest of British society, South Asians breed the ground for extremist ideologies to develop which leads to their communities being excessively surveilled. This is false reasoning because time and time again it has been proven that those British Muslims drawn towards extremism were very much integrated into British society and did so because they felt an overwhelming amount of injustice committed towards them and their communities by the dominant society.
By pushing this narrative racism has been transformed from an individual and institutional injustice to a prejudice based on unfamiliarity, i.e. white people’s unfamiliarity with brown people who willingly isolate themselves leads them to act discriminatorily towards them. This narrative proposes that if Brown people willingly integrated into British society, letting go of their traditional culture and values, there would be no more difference between them and the whites and racist attacks would cease to occur. We know for a fact that this is not true and that for racism to be tackled institutional changes must be made.
In relation to self-segregation, I would like to bring up the fact that this was often done through necessity to escape the racism in integrated neighbourhoods and also through zoning laws that dictated where South Asians and immigrants could live (often in the shadiest parts of the city). So simply abandoning this vital form of self preservation was not an option for most South Asians even if it would mean escaping racist violence as the ruling elite among right and left wingers seem to suggest.