This Separated Isle

This Separated Isle

[Prejudice is] ‘an emotional commitment to ignorance’ (Nathan Rutstein)

Even the most annoying words can be helpful… I won’t give chapter and verse, but a writer who has an amazing ability to annoy me with random tangents and ideas recently wrote about a book, and their lack of detail in the piece led me to look for the book, and it’s a gem.

The format is that a number of photographers were asked to photograph British people who are marginalised in one way or another, and interview them. An edited transcript of an interview between photographer and subject accompanies a single picture in each case.

I was brought up in a white, middle-class English home, but was raised to believe in the concept that all people are equal. At school, sometimes the hard way, I learned about the lack of equality in the real world, and the lack of any direct link between background and ability. A Staffordshire state grammar school was quite good for that, and it becoming a comprehensive school while I was there added a richness that I appreciate more now than I did then.

But… It all gave me a practical insight into the clash between reality and assumption based on any sort of prejudice. I now live in a particularly diverse town (in a part of England mistakenly described by a former American president as unsafe for white people), and we generally rub along together reasonably well. Though there are times when it is still safer to be white than anything else, and THAT is another definition of prejudice.

One of the problems that becomes apparent as soon as you start to look closer is that bad treatment at the hands of society radicalises people. They become aware of every situation and nuance that works out prejudice for them, and can be quite spiky company. They may – in one’s own view – become oversensitive to the way one expresses things. I often use the phrase ‘rule of thumb’ and I suppose my mind had a mental image of a craftsman holding a thumb up to take a rough measurement. It is less comfortable when you find that the original ‘rule of thumb’ was that a man could beat his wife with a rod as thick as his thumb…

So, if any of this interests you, you may want to do two things: buy the book (because the pictures are excellent) and look around, for the thing that you can do today to make the world – your bit of it, anyway – more inclusive.