Same Flags, Different Stories.
What a weekend. How was yours?
My weekend felt like scrolling through social media on the way home at 2am, bleary-eyed, cognitively depleted, emotionally fragile, phone on low power mode, yet you continue scrolling and absorbing trying to make sense of what’s in front of you.
On Friday, I was standing on the platform at my local train station when two women behind me began talking about their daily lives. One proudly said she wasn’t “sitting on my arse like these young people” the other added she’d never sign on for benefits. Then, casually, “the Muslims are the worst”. Her friend added, “my daughter dated a Muslim… you can’t say anything these days”. I turned around to put some faces to the opinions I was hearing. One of them saw me, nudged the other and in a hushed tone, “see, I told you, here we go”. I chose to move away, walking further down the platform. It seemed that my presence had been acknowledged because I heard, this time definitely loud enough for me to hear, “I’m not saying it’s the individuals [muslims] that are bad”. Nothing says open-minded tolerance like a disclaimer added under duress. Hearing them backpedal wasn’t satisfying. It just left me with the familiar heaviness. Racism circulates in precisely this way - in casual conversations, low tones but still loud enough to land. It’s both ordinary and insidious.
That evening, I went to see Ambika Mod in a one-woman play. A South Asian woman on stage, alone in the spotlight, funny, sharp, magnetic. She was the whole show! But then, the contrast. On Saturday, I read about another South Asian woman taking centre stage, though not by choice. A Sikh girl in Oldbury the victim of a racially motivated sexual assault by two white men. Her story wasn’t even reported on main stream news channels, let alone headline news as you might expect. Two South Asian women, both in the spotlight over the same weekend. One celebrated, one brutalised. One visible, the other nearly erased.
Whilst standing in the supermarket queue, a man behind me was on the phone, telling his friend about the chaos that had ensued on the roads from the tube strikes earlier in the week. Whilst driving, he was cut up by another driver and was then on the receiving end of some verbal abuse which wasn’t about his driving, it was about who he was - a black man. “I just keep my head down now, you don’t know how people are going to react”, he said. That stuck with me. His weariness weighed more than the shopping in his hands. Imagine having to treat your ethnicity as a health and safety hazard. Racism seeps into the everyday, forcing people to shrink themselves just to move through the world.
By Saturday, the far-right protest filled central London. Over one hundred thousand strong, a mass gathering fuelled by grievance and hostility. A number too large to dismiss. I know not everyone there was racist, but when the chants roll, when the rhetoric sharpens, would you stop and pause to make any distinction? Racism is both ordinary and organised. It is carried in the habits of everyday life, and then magnified into something more deliberate and dangerous when given a stage and a megaphone.
I stayed in on Saturday night, getting on with some work with the BBC Proms playing in the background. The familiar sight of Union Jacks swaying in unison, voices filling the Royal Albert Hall with patriotic fervour, belting out the controversial Rule Brittania. It is a tradition woven deep into the event, but one that sits uneasily when viewed through the lens of history. I know, I know, we can’t always separate the art from what we’ve since learned about the artist, or the tradition from what history reveals. Still, I couldn’t help noticing the overlap. That same day, flags had filled the streets at a far-right rally and by evening, they filled a concert hall celebrating Britain in all its supposed glory. I grew up knowing that a flag outside of football season was something to be wary of. Inside the Proms, it seems harmless, even quaint. But after the protest, watching one scene blur into the other, the same flags carried entirely different meanings depending on who held them aloft. How are you supposed to discern who is safe and who isn’t when the flag waving is exactly the same?
An advert came on TV for yet another travel show. Two white men travelling around India, presumably to discover its history and culture. The old colonial template repackaged for prime time. England’s fascination with India, filtered through the eyes of privileged white men, remains a stubborn genre.
I ended the weekend watching Freddie Flintoff coach a ragtag bunch of teenagers in cricket, a sport stitched into my own childhood, and therefore familiar and grounding. The programme was a reminder that it is community and empathy that make us stronger. That goodness does exist, though unlike the noise of protests, it rarely makes the headlines.
This was one weekend in Britain, but it is not confined to a single set of days. It reflects a recurring pattern: who is amplified and who is silenced, who is given the spotlight and who is pushed to the margins. Until that imbalance shifts, safety and visibility for people of colour will be conditional.