Farewell to America: Returning to England After 12 Years in the US

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-farewell-to-america?

by nkurz • 11 years ago

92 101 11 years ago

DrScump4• 11 years ago

The same article (exact same, not a different agency) was already posted twice... yet you change the title to put it through a third time?

nkurz• 11 years ago

Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't yet received any significant discussion on the site. Specifically, I changed the URL to resubmit it. The change to the title was to increase clarity as to the content, and incidental to the resubmission.

And until I tried to submit it myself, I had thought that it had only appeared once. The previous submissions are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574, each with only 2 comments and fewer than 10 upvotes.

chrisfosterelli2• 11 years ago

That usually means the community isn't interested. Just because you believe it should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates :)

DrScump4• 11 years ago

"Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't yet received any significant discussion on the site."

Problem being, if it is, in fact, worthy of discussion here, there are three different discussion threads for this article... and a given reader is unlikely to see more than one.

For example, your extensive comment on copy #2 goes unseen by those reading comments for this copy only... as most readers would.

mnglkhn23• 11 years ago

"My decision to come back to Britain was prompted by banal, personal factors that have nothing to do with current events; if my aim was to escape aggressive policing and racial disadvantage, I would not be heading to Hackney."

Not sure what we're talking about here then. The whole article sounds like a post factum rationalization. Lots of feelings with not so many arguments.

Retra• 11 years ago

You want arguments against racism?

tosseraccount• 11 years ago

If the racism is so bad, why are so many people trying to immigrate to America, Canada, New Zealand , Australia and Northern Europe?

mnglkhn23• 11 years ago

why does he make his decision to return to UK to be related to racism when he himself admits that it was a purely personal motive?! To me this is incoherent and manipulative race baiting in order to puff up his article for clicks.

The fact that this simple argument is discarded by you in order to maintain your agenda, shows more about how tolerable and inclusive you are not than about how racist I am.

JesperRavn6• 11 years ago

This article is one sided in that it assumes that White fear of Blacks is baseless, when in fact Blacks commit crimes at around 5x higher rate than Whites. Not all this difference can be explained by poverty, but even if it could, most White people are also afraid of White people who come from social classes with very high crime rates.

I'm not saying that most or any of the attitudes of Whites described in the article were justified, but it's one sided to focus entirely on the police and White attitudes and ignore Black crime.

bruceb8• 11 years ago

It is a complex issue. I suggest reading this thread on reddit on the same topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3afjx1/mur...

JesperRavn6• 11 years ago

Can you point to a specific post, or a point you were trying to make. I accept that explaining the Black White crime gap is complex, but if by "it's a complex issue" you are trying to cast doubt on my claim that Blacks commit much more crime than Whites, then I disagree. And I didn't see any comments disputing this from a quick look at the post.

underwater3• 11 years ago

That's the textbook definition of racism. All white people aren't judged by the actions of white criminals. But all black people are.

mnglkhn23• 11 years ago

so why then don't you judge the actions of police on a case by case basis and choose tomassign them to all the white people? Does that make you racist?

JesperRavn6• 11 years ago

More like Black victimization by police is considered a racial issue, but Black crime is not.

bruceb8• 11 years ago

The author brings up things that a lot of people might not know such as whites generally over estimating the age of black youths.

The problem is he then goes on to assume every negative experience with a white person is because he is black.

aeontech2• 11 years ago

I don't see that at all. This comment says more about your mindset than anything else, to be honest.

bruceb8• 11 years ago

What mind set is that?

sparkzilla• 11 years ago

I'm somewhat confused about why this is on HN. The guy doesn't work in technology. He's not leaving because of technology. The article doesn't talk about technology. It doesn't even talk about the immigration process -- which immigrant entrepreneurs and technology workers on visas can relate to. Y'know, despite all the troubles I'm having with my visa (After seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested I have to leave the country and re-apply for a different kind of visa -- a major pain) I still want to stay here. The U.S has many problems, but at least they are out in the open and people are working on them. This is a great place to work and has far, far, more opportunity than the UK. The writer may want to read Cory Doctorow's recent article [1] about how London has become almost impossible to live in.

[1]http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html

DanBC4• 11 years ago

Do you think HN should only have articles that have a link to technology?

lowmagnet• 11 years ago

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

cb184• 11 years ago

This appears to be a long-winded telling of the kind of nonsensical crap that has been circulating as of late that tries to convince people a circle is a square, or up is down or something equally preposterous.

How did the descendants of immigrants become xenophobic?

The founders of the USA were not immigrants, they didn't immigrate to join Indian tribes, they were founders of a country. And until very recently, immigrants to the USA immigrated and integrated, they became Americans, they didn't immigrate and expect to receive special treatment because they were a member of group X.

It's not xenophobic to simply not want your country and culture to be overrun with competing cultures. The idea of multiculturalism is nonsense. Cultures can't coexist that's just not how it works, a culture is the dominant way of life in an area, you can't invite another culture to come and live within the confines of another culture, that makes no sense. What is being done in such a case is you are inviting significant changes to the host culture, and it shouldn't be surprising that most people are pretty content with their home culture and they're not receptive to the idea of having foreign cultures thrust into their home.

cannot pay a visit to their home country because they are undocumented

Are you f-ing kidding me? Can't do you something because it is likely to reveal that they are in violation of a law they willfully chose to violate? That's some kind of big problem we should be concerned with?

A nation without laws is no nation at all. What's the point of any country having rules and regulations for the people they admit if people who break those rules are simply overlooked, much less greeted with pity and concern for their plight of possibly getting caught?

When matters such as these are written about in the media why is it that preference is so often given to euphemisms such as 'undocumented' when what they are actually trying to describe is illegal alien?

Another commenter mentioned the race angle that was brought up in this article, I luckily missed most of that in my brief skimming.

The real race problem that never seems to be addressed, and it's an uncomfortable reality and whatever the solution is, it is not immediately apparent and I suppose that is one reason why there is a near and total blackout on the subject in the national media. But it doesn't explain why the national media tries to portray the facts in a way that is near 180 degrees opposite to reality.

The real race problem is that when it comes to interracial violence, and black on white vs white on black, the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence. It's not even close.

kingmanaz• 11 years ago

This needed to be said and needs to be heard.

lambda2• 11 years ago

they didn't immigrate and expect to receive special treatment because they were a member of group X.

No one is asking for "special treatment". They are asking not to get special treatment that consists of being killed by police officers.

And yes, too many white people are killed by police. The police in the US have both a tendency to shoot too many people, and have a tendency to target too many black people, which both add up to shooting disproportionately many black people.

And yeah, the problem is more complex than simple racism by police. There are problems of too many criminals being armed in the US (both black and white), meaning that the police are more prone to shoot in supposed self defense. There are problems of class and poverty, that lead people into violence. There are a lot of complex, interrelated factors that lead to this.

But all of that said, it is undeniable that there are a disproportionate number of law abiding or peaceful, unarmed black men who are killed by police in this country.

The real race problem is that when it comes to interracial violence, and black on white vs white on black, the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence. It's not even close.

Interracial violence is a pretty small fraction of all violence.

Most violence is intraracial. Source: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf (2010, reporting data up to 2005, see page 67); about 42% of homicides are black on black, about 45% are white on white, about 8.8% are black on white, about 3.2% are white on black. If you're white, I'd be a lot more worried about that 45% than the 8.8%.

You know what's likely to be the most likely way to avoid getting killed or shot? Not having family members who have ready access to firearms. You are a lot more likely to be shot by a family member in anger than you are by a stranger of another race.

artimaeis• 11 years ago

> "The idea of multiculturalism is nonsense"

Say that sentence on St Patrick's day sometime and see how much sense it makes. Or Cinco de Mayo. Or eat at a cal-mex or tex-mex restaurant. Here in America we celebrate our multiculturalism. We sure don't avoid it because it's "nonsense".

> "the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence"

Care to cite that? I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be citing, but I was pretty quickly able to find that the majority of hate crimes are committed by white offenders: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010/narrat...

bruceb8• 11 years ago

hate crimes offenders: 58.6 percent were white. 18.4 percent were black.

Whites being a majority of the country this isn't an overwhelming number.

cb184• 11 years ago

Say that sentence on St Patrick's day sometime and see how much sense it makes. Or Cinco de Mayo. Or eat at a cal-mex or tex-mex restaurant.

Those are examples of heritage. Multiple heritages can form a culture. Cultures are the formal and informal laws, social mores, and general modus operandi of a people. An example of the unwelcome effects of attempting to fuse incompatible cultures - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rotherham+rapes+pakistani

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-unspeakable-...

Here in America we celebrate our multiculturalism. We sure don't avoid it because it's "nonsense".

It's not a question of whether it is celebrated or not. It's a matter of if you think about it for a bit it makes no sense, it's logically impossible. There could be two or more adjacent cultures and as history shows, they are likely to come into conflict. But there cannot be one culture that is composed of multiple cultures because what a culture is, it's very definition, is what a group and area have in common.

Also, as you may or may not be aware, Cinco de Mayo is a mostly American invention.

And if "multiculturalism" whatever that is, is so great, you'd think someone would have come up with support for that notion by now beyond "Ethnic food!"

Care to cite that? I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be citing, but I was pretty quickly able to find that the majority of hate crimes

If it wasn't clear, by 'violence' I meant things like rape, murder, and assault.

You cite something for which there is actually a degree of ambiguity, discretion, even politics in its prosecution, 'hate crimes.'

Why don't we just stick to the basics, numbers to numbers, dead bodies. A murder seems to be ipso facto a hate crime. Blacks kill whites far more often than vice versa.

1stop• 11 years ago

Firstly, provide a citation for the White-on-Black vs Black-on-white violence stats. Also indicating level of violence (i.e assaults, robberies, murders, etc).

Your definition of an immigrant is interesting, and seems to suggest an assimilation rather than an immigration. Trying to pretend that "Nation founding" was not cultural destruction is an amazing cognitive disconnect.

If you don't want to change your culture then don't try to exploit foreign workers(through immigration) to prop up your failing economy. Certainly don't prop up your economy then get upset with the underclass you are exploiting to do it when they complain they are being exploited.

It's amazing how righteous "whites" can be about the sheer disgusting way they have acted in their history.

jbert• 11 years ago

The founders of the USA were not immigrants, they didn't immigrate to join Indian tribes, they were founders of a country.

Sorry, I'm afraid I don't understand the distinction you're drawing.

If some people move from one country to another, and the other place has people living there already, what characteristics of the move classify it as founding a country rather than immigration?

cb184• 11 years ago

I wish I could believe you weren't serious, especially today, July 4. But, oh well.

The fact that there was no existing country here in the sense the European migrants understood one to be, and the fact they didn't integrate with Indian tribes or attempt to.

The fact they literally founded a country, established the institutions intrinsic to, and expounded extensively on said founded country and the characteristics necessary to make said new country successful.

tokenadult2• 11 years ago

It's always refreshing to see descriptions of America by people who have lived here a long time after living somewhere else long enough to be without American presuppositions about how life works. One of the things I found most startling about coming back to the United States at age twenty-six-going-on-twenty-seven after three years of living overseas was reverse culture shock. When I first went to the other country I lived in (Taiwan), any time an experience felt strange, which was often, I would just say to myself, "Of course this is strange, this is a foreign country." But I was very taken aback when I returned to the United States and found out that many experiences feel strange here now--I know that the United States is not the center of the Universe. Now that I've lived in more than one country, it's a whole lot harder to have a standard for "normal" for many aspects of life.

The writing in this article is very interesting, and the author reports many interesting incidents. This article deserves your close reading attention, and I predict it will be good food for thought for the readers who read it from top to bottom. I look forward to a future article by the same author about what he thinks about Britain after he lives there for a while following so many years away in America.

danjayh• 11 years ago

Can you give any examples of experiences that felt strange when you returned? Just curious what types of things you noticed...

wozniacki2• 11 years ago

Seconded.

Three years is an awfully short time to notice things uniquely as though one were an insider. It has been my experience that cultures do not unfurl that easily for outsiders to be allowed in and wrap one's head around, all the motivations for the reasons why a society organizes itself in a certain manner much less, comprehend the complex inner dynamics of such organization.

edit: HN is starting to become a strange place. Take the time to explain how your experiences abroad - even the short ones - helped you gain non-threadbare insights about that culture, which fully invalidate my disagreement above, rather than partake in purely intellectually-lazy flaming.

tokenadult2• 11 years ago

Those first things are hard to remember now (that was half a lifetime ago). And I later had another long stay in Taiwan, followed by another return here to the States, so I'm especially vague now about where "home" is and what is "normal." But in general the United States idea about children being "independent" from parents and parents not actively providing for them seems quite strange to me now--even though my oldest son, still younger than I was when I first traveled to Taiwan, is arguably more genuinely self-sufficient than I ever was up to that age.

mc32• 11 years ago

Robert Frank's The Americans provides a great portrait of America back in the 50's. He was Swiss (now American) and made a cross country trip and documented American life in different paces. He is a great Photographer, however, I think his having been new and thus outsider, he was able to show a different facet of America from the 50s. "THe Americans" is a preeminent work of documentary photography. To this day photographers use it as a measuring stick for documentary photography.

This is why many don't agree with how people tend to deride either western or asian documentary photographers who go to (necessarily poorer countries) by calling it "tourist documentary photography," exploitative, etc. An outsider has a better and sharper eye for what is askew in a place foreign to them.

argonaut2• 11 years ago

I agree with the overall point of the article, but one nit is that it isn't great to cite Michael Brown's shooting as evidence of police racism. There is evidence (witness accounts consistent with physical evidence) to back up the officer's claims. Citing that only weakens your case. The other examples are valid, though.

enraged_camel2• 11 years ago

Your comment is very strange to me.

So, in your opinion, a point that would otherwise be valid becomes not valid if the author does not cite the best example for it?

ams61105• 11 years ago

He said using a weak example weakens the point.

Zigurd3• 11 years ago

Many police shootings are "justified" by US standards, which are much lower than they are in some other places. You don't get to the low number of police shootings in the UK, Germany, etc. using US standards. In other words we have both a specific individual problem of racism, and a systemic problem that tells cops to shoot.

bruceb8• 11 years ago

Are lots of bad cops not fired, absolutely. But of course UK and Germany don't have millions of handguns laying around like the US does. The number of UK police killed in over 100 years fits on to a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer... There are considerably more US cops killed.

ams61105• 11 years ago

Perhaps another explanation for a disparity of police shootings in the US vs. UK is that US police are confronted with armed and/or aggressive criminals more often.

Are you familiar with US and UK law enforcement standards on use of deadly force? I rather doubt they are significantly different.

nextos2• 11 years ago

As a Scandinavian that has lived in the UK for a bit more than a year, I think racism might be lower here in exchange for a rampant classism and bad public services when compared to average EU places like France, Belgium or Spain.

wozniacki2• 11 years ago

Could you perhaps expand on what you might mean by "bad public services" ?

nextos2• 11 years ago

NHS is quite saturated, the road network and Internet are working way over capacity.

rebootthesystem3• 11 years ago

It has become impossible to have objective discussions about something like this --or anything political-- on HN. In this case you'll be labeled as racist if you disagree with the article (already happened in one post I saw). So, there's no discussion at all. Game over. Done.

I happen not to agree with much of what this writer said. I have lived in four cultures in three continents in my life. The USA is most definitely NOT what this author paints us as being. I have noted how, for at least the last twenty years, the overwhelmingly left leaning media has made it their job, perhaps unintentionally, to destroy the US from the inside. This is nothing less than despicable.

While working in Europe fifteen years ago I noted that CNN and TV shows out of Hollywood were the primary exposure to "America" most of the world got. And what an ugly, unfair, one-sided, twisted and hateful image it is. I would hate us too.

No, this article is hateful and highly biased. Go ahead, call me a racist if you must. It'll only add to the nonsense.

ams61105• 11 years ago

We've always had people who make their living on causes. Maybe they first got involved out of genuine concerns but at some point, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, a person can't be expected to find solutions when his salary depends on the existence of the problem.

Also, and related to another post[1] on the front page right now, we have the rather recent element of twitter and other social media that is deliberately manipulated to create and amplify emotional, flash-mob types of dust-ups over isolated events in order to make it appear that there is a huge systemic crisis happening. That gambit is as old as politics, but the rise of social media and the "report first, get the facts later" type of approach to "news" reporting taken by many blogs and even some previously objective media sources has made it much more efficient.

----

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9826200

ScottBurson3• 11 years ago

Where have you lived in the US?

Edited to add: I don't read Younge as suggesting that all Americans are racists. If it were that bad, I suspect, he would have left a long time ago. And I think it's very odd to see a piece like this as an attempt "to destroy the US from the inside". I think he is pointing out real problems that affect a lot of people, and that we need to deal with. To me that's constructive criticism; why you read it as something else is not clear to me.

Here's another post along the same lines (though much shorter), by Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141204174020-261404895-it-s...

underwater3• 11 years ago

Perhaps the reason we can't have a discussion is because you post rambling meta-commentary complaining about HN, insult your audience, and then post unrelated rant-ish statements complaints about left leaning media.

rebootthesystem3• 11 years ago

Nope, it's mostly because some in the HN audience fail to recognize "Emperor Has no Clothes" situations mostly due to indoctrination and a refusal to truly think things through. It is astounding to see how otherwise intelligent people fall pray to some of the most obvious ideological manipulation. I can only ascribe it to youth and lack of life experience.

I mean, here we are actually lending credence to the idea that the US is a racist society, when in reality, the vast majority of Americans are not. At all.

This is utter nonsense promulgated by political actors that benefit greately from minorities, racial and ethic groups being angry at "America". Having these groups remain angry, poor and disenfranchised is a strategic political goal aimed at creating large voting blocks. After elections they are dropped on their heads because improving their standing in life would lose them votes. This is sick. And this isn't limited to the US.

Your profile says you work at Facebook. If this country is overwhelmingly racist, how many of your coworkers would you say are racist? 50%? 25%? 10%?

I mean, you have over 10,000 coworkers from all walks of life. Surely there are a bunch of fucking racists in there since the USA is such a racist nation, right?

How about at Apple?

Google?

Tesla? SpaceX?

Surely Microsoft, don't you think?

No, your shit doesn't stink. The racists have are "those" people. Over there. The old couple living on a farm who own three shotguns. The fucker who watches Fox News, she is a racist, yeah, every las one of them!

Or is it more likely that the correct explanation is that racists (who are despicable pieces of shit) might be just as abundant as rapists, child molestors, murderers or criminal thugs. In other words a very small segment of human manure that is the sad reality in any society.

The vast majority of the people in this country are good honorable people. You, your parents, siblings, extended family, circle of friends, their families and friends, etc.

Chances are most of them are great people who don't hate anyone and would not hurt a fly. Yet here we are lending legitimacy a pile of bullshit pushed forward by a sick ideology that uses people like pawns for political gain.

If I am wrong, please, pray tell, how many people in your family and life are racist? Surely your family, friends and coworkers are no different on average from similar circles around the nation.

You see, when you slow down to think a bit and bring things down to a relatable level the perpective is quite different.

Does racism exist? Of course. Is it rampant? Of course not?

bruceb8• 11 years ago

HN isn't Gawker. One or two people saying another person is racist isn't some group mob burying a poster.

I agree that some people in other countries have a warped view of America based on movies and news. That being said I suggest viewing news from many different news sources such as Al Jazeera, Russia Today, NHK, etc. Gives a more rounded perspective than just watching Fox news or CNN.

rebootthesystem3• 11 years ago

I completely agree with you on getting news from more than one source. The problem is most people don't do that at all OR they consume multiple sources that push the same ideology.

At home we speak five languages (to varying degrees of fluency) and end-up consuming news, information, movies and tv shows from many cultural vantage points.

This is, of course, the exception in the US, where a good chunk of the population has very narrow cultural and ideological exposure. And this is dangerous because it creates a population that is easy to manipulate through media carpet bombing with ideology.

This last point is one of the biggest problems I have with US media and Hollywood. They've mutated into ideology delivery vectors. I am sick and tired of taking my kids to see a movie only to be exposed to two hours of pushing an ideology. Or, news and commentary shows blatantly pounding away promoting ideological extremes. This is very wrong.

Hordes of people have their opinion formed by the relentless messaging. And this is true regardless of ideology. Even if one agrees with the ideologies being pushed an intelligent person would take pause at this.

Why? Because the mechanism can be used to manipulate the masses to nefarious extremes. The first thing any dictator does it take control of the media and the messages.

While we don't have a dictatorship we do have media that is complicit in creating a frenzy around racial, ethnic and minority issues that is very, very far from the truth. America is not a racist nation. True racists are probably an insignificant percentage of the population. There might be race related biases or profiling but that is not racism.

BTW, "racism" doesn't mean "whites who are racist towards blacks". Racism occurs with all groups and in all directions to different degrees. Having a multicultural family and having lived in multiple countries in my life I've seen this first-hand everywhere, not just the US.

Jews prefer to hire Jews. So do Arabs, Mexicans and Chinese. Japanese don't like to work with Koreans or Chinese, etc. This isn't always racist, it can be pragmatic when culture, language and behavioral constructs are considered.

For example, this will never happen in the US:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFXi1cM9vO0

We are different enough culturally that it is simply impossible to even imagine this. Certain cultural groups would actually consider bowing to the train and passengers to be demeaning. Most everyone would consider having to work that fast and hard to be abusive. Unions would certainly not allow it. In fact, unions would pretty much guarantee that we'd have almost exactly the opposite results as what is seen in this video. I have a lot of experience working with and around unions. Don't get me started on that one.

And so, to an ethnic group used to a certain way of thinking, speaking, behaving and relating to each other "Americans" can seem like inconsiderate uneducated brutes. When they live here and live in relatively closed clusters they develop this idea of "we are better than them", where "them" is everyone who isn't of their ethnicity or "Americans" in general.

I studied Aikido and Karate in Japan for a while. In those highly traditional groups the way we behave can be highly offensive. Something as simple as crossing your arms or speaking when you are not spoken to can be seen as grave offenses.

Is this racism? Nope. Not at all. I don't see it that way. It's probably a natural result of the way culture and customs are constructed and adhered to. So, the stereotype of "blacks are loud" or "asians show no emotions" or "Jews only care about money" or whatever are simple-minded ways for people to classify others.

Is there a degree of truth to them? I am not going there except to say that there are distinct behavioral patterns in different cultural groups that are very real and identifiable. You are not going to see a typical "American" wedding result in people making Arab yells as they exit the church. You'll never see coworkers kissing each other on the cheek every day as you might see in places like Buenos Aires. These things are real. They are not racism.

When people see certain behaviors played out on TV and carpet-bombed all over the place 24/7 their view of a group might be reinforced or modified. Seeing young black males burn down everything in sight in a town and loot stores right and left does not do the black community any good at all. It is quite damaging. And it could take years to repair that damage.

This is why it angers me to see our leaders use these events for political gain. They see them as opportunities to solidify voting blocks. They don't care that they are destroying lives. They don't care that feeding these flames will result in the black CEO of a large US corporation experiencing someone being apprehensive about crossing paths with him while walking down the street. That's not racism. That's politicians and the media manipulating the population to create a result that is of benefit to them. Doing damage to these communities is to their benefit. They ultimately do not care about these groups at all, they are tools they use to support their political agenda. And they are really good at doing this.

I wish more people would stop, think and realize that we are all being played like finely tuned instruments. It's sad to see so much blindness. It's sad to see cargo cult that fails to see that the emperor has no clothes.

Asking for an ID when paying by credit card or demanding that people who vote in the US prove they are US Citizens isn't racist. Yet these and other situations are being paraded around as racism to feed the fire.

Is racism real? Of course it is. Yet it is not as rampant and tv as politicians would want you to believe. I don't know any racists. Do you?

mynameishere• 11 years ago

Fleeing one "racist" white country to another "racist" white country. Eventually there won't be any racist countries left to flee to, given how non-whites are so abundantly attracted to them, racism be damned. Does that occur to our author? Why doesn't he flee to Equatorial Guinea?

me_again• 11 years ago

He explicitly states he isn't leaving (or fleeing, if you want to be needlessly dramatic) because of race. Try reading the article.

Farewell to America: Returning to England After 12 Years in the US

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