(not) My Tram Experience

I started this blog, mainly because I felt the need to report in English some news regarding Italy, and also because as an Italian living abroad I get the chance to see a different point of view on my country. But as a foreigner living in the UK for more than four years now, I have also learnt to observe this country, and hopefully understand a bit of its culture.

One thing that would impress most foreigners coming to the UK - at least somebody coming from a place like Italy, where the number of foreigners is relatively low - it's how cosmopolitan this country is. London and pretty much every medium/large UK city are a melting pot of differente ethnicities, nationalities and cultures that, at first sight, peacefully coexist together.

This was also one of the subjects of my masters dissertation. Through interviews with groups of foreigner students and British students, I wanted to see how differently the foreigners would see this society as opposed to the locals. What I found was that the newer people are to this country, the more they think racism is not an issue. The more you live here, the more you think racism is a pretty big issue. Most of the British students I interviewed came from non-white ethnicities and they all felt they experienced some kind of racism at some point in their life.

The reason I am talking about this, is an awful video that went viral on YouTube yesterday. Titled "My Tram Experience" the video shows a British woman (Emma West) with a baby on her lap, racially abusing people on the tram, ranting about her country been taken over by black and polish people.

The video is truly appealing and generated disgust among most people, but looking at a bit of stats, it has so fare gained nearly 3.8 million views on YouTube; 46,952 dislikes and 13,603 likes. Now I wonder, what all these likes mean? Do they mean that 22% of the people that expressed an opinion on the video, agree with the woman? The number seems a bit high, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it represented a realistic percentage of xenophobes in this country.

At times of recession, when day in day out the papers are talking about job losses and crisis, it's easy to blame the lack of jobs on the foreigners.

After studying in this country and finding a job, I remember been happy to have a job where my Italian and language skills in general were a requirement, in that way I didn't feel like I was taking one of those "British jobs for British people" that are often promoted by a certain type of media.

I think this country has come a long way in accepting minorities, and in that it's far more advanced than many other European countries (including Italy), but at the same time, I feel that behind the surface there is still lots of hate and intolerance.