It was interesting seeing the complaints about the Home Office raid in Glasgow. So many of the comments I saw talked about how terrible it was to carry this out during Eid. Imagine – detaining two Indian guys on such an important holy day.
One thing stood out to me – the comment by the Sikh organisation. And if you look carefully you will see that one of the men has the surname Singh. They were not Muslim, they were sikhs.
And that is something that made me think. I wonder how many people assumed the two men were muslim simply because of their skin colour.
A but, I hear you say, this was a muslim area. Does that mean there are zones defined by religion? Or maybe we are talking about zones with a skin colour that people assume are muslim? Nicola described it as “in the heart of our Muslim community”.
So I went and looked up the census data for the postcode. The area is predominantly Christian. In fact it is only about 25% muslim.
What really got to me was the way the race and religion card were assumed to be valid as part of a woke argument. I am not talking about whether these guys should have been detained, the policy, or the protest. I am talking about the response of people that were only aware of the social media headlines and how their attitude depended on the ability to pigeon hole people based on skin colour.
I just wonder, if somebody is truly blind to race and religion – they see everybody as totally equal and treat them as perfect equals – can they be woke?