I read the following this evening and I thought you’d like to share in the delight of reading Aslan’s words.
The e-mail below was written further to an e-mail conversation that I mentioned previously:
With billions of English taxpayers money going on the university education of ethnic minorities you can hardly accuse the English of wanting to keep “people of colour” down. So that I am not talking out of turn or being “rude” as you put it, may I remind you of a past musing by you which exposes your declared hatred of my country:
“I’m no longer comfortable any more in stereotyping and deriding Anglo-Saxons. Once, as a rabid anti-imperialist (which I still am), I would have applauded anybody who publicly humiliated the English. If it was done cleverly and with panache it was even more satisfying. Like other nationals who had been subjugated for so long, these small affronts were liberating, a way of confronting that arrogance of Englanders. But these days I feel more disquiet than wicked delight when the English are gratuitously slagged off. ”
It is really too much that someone like you can be so openly racist and bigotted against the English and yet seek to assume some kind of “moral authority” , for being a “wronged” colonial, when your own father and other Asians similarly “invaded” Uganda, and your education was made possible by the people of England and their taxes!
You cannot be surprised that people have contempt for much of what you say, when your hypocrasy is so evident.
If this is really such a wretched place in which to live why don’t you go back to Uganda or Pakistan or India where (evidently) things are so much better? You know as well as I do, you have never had it so good and as an Asian Muslim woman it is England that has given you the kind of rights and freedoms many of your sisters can only dream about.
As to whether you should be grateful, I will leave that to your conscience. For myself, as an English born woman from immigrant stock, I am damn grateful my mother had the good sense to come to England, by doing so she secured my future and our family’s future – your refusal to have any gratitude to this land or her people is one of the reasons the English despise certain kinds of immigrants – the ones that only know how to take but never to give.
You are welcome to call youself British, it means nothing to me. I also have the right to call myself English, as do all those who love England, love her culture, help to enrich her culture and contribute to securing England’s future. You clearly don’t share those sentiments but that is the beauty of living in a democracy – we have the right to be who we are and I would appreciate it if you would respect that right and desist from making unfounded gratuitous insults against England and the people who consider themselves English – to do otherwise would be to be racist and bigotted wouldn’t it?
Yours sincerely,
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