“Actually, it isn’t racist…”

I read a story about some guys throwing a dick off a tram in Newcastle, who was being horrible to a Muslim woman. Hurray for the Geordies who threw him off the tram. Bleurgh at people being awful arseholes.

One thing annoyed me about the story though, and it was in the comments. Now, I know you should never read the bottom half of the internet, but being a writer, sometimes you have to, so you can see what’s going on outside of the cluttered desks of mediaville.

There were the usual bits of praise and conspiracy theorists, but one comment really got on my nerves… and you see them a lot. It was this…

Now, these total Dawkins need telling, and for a number of reasons, which I’ll underline.

Firstly, shut the fuck up. You know what people are getting at. Your semantics aren’t helping. A real case of ‘oh, that’s what you took from the story is it? That’s the thing you came away with and wanted to share with everyone?’ Piss off.

Secondly, ‘an Englishman can’t be racist toward another Englishman’ is a thing is it? As someone else in the comments pointed out, that line of thinking means that, if the KKK lynch a black American, they’re not being racist because they’re both American citizens. What a load of shite.

Thirdly, you have to assume that race did play a part. Have you noticed how people who get this kind of abuse in the street, are always not-white. White Muslims don’t get nearly the same level of hassle as those that aren’t. This guy on the tram clearly saw a brown face and a hijab, and started running his mouth off. To say race doesn’t play a part in it, just to prove some semantic point, is a dick move. The fact that Hindu people get called ‘Taliban’ and Bangladeshi people get called all manner of geographically inaccurate slurs, show that race plays a huge part when people start yelling at people in the street.

“You have to stop mixing up race and religion,” says our fuckwit friend here. And you, sir, have to stop pretending that the two can never be related in the mind of a complete tool on a tram in Newcastle, or anywhere else.