Positive Discrimination

There’s a very obvious difference between the landscape of the town I was so expertly brought-up in, Market Harborough, and that of my current dwelling in North (our flat) and West (my job) London. This difference lies in the ethnic and racial diversity of the residents of these respective locations. To put it bluntly, in London I have lots of Black, Asian and East European neighbours/colleagues/friends and in Harborough had relatively few. Fortunately as I studied in Loughborough and worked in both Leicester and Nottingham, I was able to mix with people from a variety of backgrounds. However, aside from a few notable exceptions, Harbrough itself never really provided such opportunities.

As I say, a very obvious observation. Yet it was only the other day when I was due to meet my brother in Market Harborough that I strolled along the High Street and seriously felt that something was ‘amiss’. Absolutely everywhere I looked, there were white faces and after a year of living in London it genuinely felt strange, and, dare I say it... wrong?

Particularly as there’s such a diverse cohort of students at the college I teach at, I’m used to the (great) feeling of seeing an even distribution of white, black and brown faces every day. Of course, there was nothing wrong on Harborough High Street at all. But to my sensibility, it felt as though I was looking at a place I know (and love) with fresh eyes.

I was reminded of this frisson of discomfort today as Charlotte and I wandered around the cobbled streets of the beautifully picturesque city of Canterbury. We had a lovely day perusing the independent bookshops and taking in the majestic architecture of the famous cathedral. The thought of moving to a place such as Canterbury some day fluttered in my mind, until I scanned the people around me and, again, felt a pang of disappointment upon finding faces as white as my own.

Re-reading this post, I read the words of the most sickening and pathetically servile, bleeding-hearted, lily-livered liberal. Indeed, perhaps it’s not unfair to suggest that this is actually a form of inverse racism: that my feelings of disillusionment at finding fellow Caucasians are just as irrational as if I’d been uncomfortable among people of a different ethnic background.

Yet I can’t help but think there is at least something ‘positive’ in my ‘discrimination’, even if it does present a few thorny questions around our ultimate ambition to eventually settle down and have a family in Market Harborough.