It’s been the Brexit anniversary again this week. I have always been against that spectacular act of vandalism and continue to speak up against it against those who will not listen. At this point anyone who doubles down to support it deserves only my contempt. Yet this post is not about Brexit.

Someone on Twitter now known as X, an EU27 citizen living in the UK, remarked that they are frequently told to “go back to their own country” these days and that this did not happen before 2016. Apparently no British person ever experiences this attitude so they can’t possibly understand how hurtful it is. I have had Covid this week and I am not at my most indulgent, shall we say, so I had to say something in response.

I feel very sorry for the original poster, of course. No-one should have to put up with that sort of behaviour from anyone else but only about three of the dozens of sympathetic replies to her post even acknowledged that British citizens from visible ethnic minorities have had to deal with this shit since we were born.

I’m glad her followers, of which I am one, reached out and offered her sympathy for the hurt she felt, some also expressing that, shock, horror, they’ve also been on the receiving end of the same sort of stuff in the last few years. But no-one one picked up the points that we made, namely:

1. Many of us with black and brown skin were born here and are also British citizens;
2. It’s always been just as hurtful for us, and people judge us before we even open our mouth, so we start off each interaction on the back foot, pre-filtering our words. We understand the feeling only too well;
3. Racism exists in the UK. And in the world including, OMG, in their civilised countries. And the more that people deem it not quite polite conversation, the more it hides under the surface

It’s not just Farrige and his incoherent gang of dick-brain potty mouth numpties of hate who perpetuate racism. It forms just as much a social lubricant of the chatter around kitchen supper tables in our cosmopolitan cities as that lovely Valpolicella your hosts picked up online. (Self-declaration: I love Valpolicella).

I received no reply to my post from the OP, though she did have the grace to delete the Tweet pretty quickly. I have no doubt that there was no malice there, only thoughtlessness and call it what it is, ignorance. Because it also exists, this middle-class ignorance, but people can more easily cover it up with a pleasant smile and the confidence that, in polite society, nobody will make a scene and call them out. Go ahead and clutch your pretty pink pearls.

the meantime, a few threads up was a conversation about a Chinese travel guide to London.​

The stream of racist commentators beneath this did not hold back, of course. We’re becoming more and more inured to how social media has emboldened the egregious.

The people in the former group of well-meaning Europhiles, on whose behalf I opposed Brexit, let us not forget, probably never come across the people in this sort of thread. I’m not sure which is more difficult for me to tolerate: the overt name-calling or the suspicion that, behind that smile, people are still thinking that my brown skin renders me sub-human and not a real citizen of my country of birth.