THIS is National Hate Crime Awareness Week, which the PSNI is marking with a social media campaign, including short videos, a hashtag and tweets from the air support unit.
My first reaction to this was despair, given the involvement of loyalism in racist violence and last week’s comment from the chief constable on the need to show “pragmatism” towards the UDA and the UVF.
Is the PSNI aware of schedule 2 and sections 10 and 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which make membership or support of either loyalist organisation punishable by up to 10 years in jail?
What would happen if you dialled 999 and complained that Stormont is supporting the UDA via the Social Investment Fund? I think we are all aware of how pointless that would be.
Patrick Yu, the executive director of the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities, also sounded despairing but for another reason.
“We support what the police are doing to highlight the issue,” he said.
“But it’s not just their duty, they can’t prevent everything. Low level intimidation or language abuse - there’s often no prospect of justice at all.”
Citing the Antrim youths filmed taunting a Romanian woman two weeks ago, Yu praised their “sensible” parents for making them apologise to the victim. This is a “model” he said. “We need to promote that good understanding. People carrying out these attacks have no understanding of ethnic minorities.”
For most people in Northern Ireland, which is 98.3 per cent white, understanding the experience of being an ethnic minority is obviously difficult.
However, I feel I have some empathy with what Yu is hinting at. For a year a quarter of a century ago, I was one of a handful of Westerners on an island with 30,000 Chinese people, about 90 minutes sailing from Hong Kong. The island, Lantau, was then quite remote and underdeveloped, without even a joined-up road network. Across large parts of it, outsiders were a novelty. It was almost as challenging as living in Antrim and the insight it gave me into being a racial minority was completely unexpected.
Rather than attacks and abuse, what grinds you down is just being treated slightly differently. This treatment need not even be hostile - barely perceptible reactions are enough. It may only happen every few days, yet in no time at all you are braced for it all day, every day, until it is constantly on your mind. You become adept at detecting it, up to the point where you wonder if you are sometimes imagining it. But you never feel you can respond, because most people mean no harm and you do not want to sound hostile yourself.
This is not like sectarianism because it happens on sight.
The effect is all-consuming and insidious, and that was in a place far kinder than Northern Ireland. I never felt under the slightest physical threat among the Chinese - attacks on foreigners were unheard of, despite a feuding triad problem that made east Belfast look like Chipping Norton.
I should add that Asian racism works differently to Western racism. In the West, we all perceive a common hierarchy of ‘privilege’, with white people at the top. In south east Asia, which sees itself very much as one multi-racial region, each race perceives their own hierarchy with themselves at the top. This means everyone is expected to look down on each other from an equally confident height, which can make people sound more offensive to European ears than they are.
I know my reaction to this was not unusual, however, as I worked with people from all over the world and they all felt the same way - it is the below the radar racism that slowly poisons your life.
We focus on hate crime when considering racism in Northern Ireland for various reasons, chief among them the sense that criminal offences sit at the pinnacle of the problem. But what if high-level and low-level racism are separate problems? They are likely to be perpetrated by entirely different people.
Low-level racism may be deeply ingrained but it is not unsolvable. After my year on Lantau I moved into the city, where Westerners were a common sight, although still a tiny minority. That was enough for a noticeable improvement.
Northern Ireland’s Chinese community calls the white population “the locals”, which scathingly captures our general parochialism. A little more familiarity with the experience of others could make a significant change.
If we are going to raise awareness, perhaps that is where efforts should be concentrated.
newton@irishnews.com
