I thought I was growing up in a racially tolerant Britain. I now realise I was wrong

When my dad went to school in the 1970s, the kids used to pretend he was invisible. Every day he would try to make conversation and play with the other children, and every day he would be ignored. One night it got so bad that my grandma found him crying himself to sleep, unable to process, as an eight-year-old, why no one would want to talk to “the brown kid”. This kind of social exclusion was sadly all too familiar in postwar Britain – my white grandma had endured her own share of abuse ever since she fell in love with my Sri Lankan grandad in 1966, committing the family’s original sin of interracial marriage.

When I heard these stories as a child, they felt like terrible tales from a different time – one of National Front marches and street battles, shot with big bulky cameras on black-and-white film. Growing up at a multicultural school in south-west London in the 2010s, I certainly had a different childhood to my father’s – the notion of being an outcast because of the colour of your skin was nothing short of laughable. Now, though, it doesn’t seem quite so funny.

Just a year ago, in the aftermath of the Southport killings, towns and cities up and down the country were hit with what can only be described as attempted pogroms. Hordes of men in Middlesbrough stood at intersections checking the skin colour of drivers; family homes were vandalised with racist graffiti; rioters in Rotherham tried to set fire to asylum seeker accommodation. As I turned 19 in the midst of the chaos, I was being taught an important lesson, one that much of my generation has had the luxury of forgetting. For the first time I learned what it really means to live in fear because of the colour of your skin, and it has never left me since.

This is all a far cry from my own laissez-faire childhood, which reflects many of the experiences of young people of colour who grew up at a time when racist attitudes were in decline. In 1993 almost half of Britons said they’d be uncomfortable if their child married someone of a different ethnicity; by 2020 that number had fallen to just 4%, a stunning drop. Likewise, the percentage of people saying that you have to be white to be truly British has fallen from 10% in 2006 to 3%. While British society has always been far from perfect (many have rightly taken aim at the continued prevalence of institutional racism and unconscious bias) a consensus seemed to have evolved that racism was itself a fundamentally bad thing that was on the way out.

I thought I was growing up in a racially tolerant Britain. I now realise I was wrong

I’ve experienced more racism in the past year than the rest of my life put together – the only answer is for young people to stand up to the far right, says writer Rohan Sathyamoorthy

^{Rohan Sathyamoorthy (The Guardian)}

mastodon.social/@LaD_Hallo/115… LaD_Hallo@mastodon.social - Seen in Dussmann, Berlin.

#caturday #catsofmastodon #berlin

Dipper (@LaD_Hallo@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image Seen in Dussmann, Berlin. #caturday #catsofmastodon #berlin

^Mastodon

Geedge & MESA Leak: Analyzing the Great Firewall’s Largest Document Leak

The Great Firewall of China (GFW) experienced the largest leak of internal documents in its history on Thursday September 11, 2025. Over 500 GB of source code, work logs, and internal communication records were leaked, revealing details of the GFW’s research, development, and operations.

The leak originated from a core technical force behind the GFW: Geedge Networks (whose chief scientist is Fang Binxing) and the MESA Lab at the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The documents show that the company not only provides services to governments in places like Xinjiang, Jiangsu, and Fujian, but also exports censorship and surveillance technology to countries such as Myanmar, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and other unidentified country under the “Belt and Road” framework.

The significance and far-reaching implications of this leak are substantial. Due to the massive volume of data, GFW Report will continue to analyze and provide updates on the current page and on the Net4People.

#china #security #firewall

gfw.report/blog/geedge_and_mes…

WATCH: ‘Hope’ the tiny abandoned otter is rescued by sanctuary

A tiny abandoned #otter cub has been rescued by sanctuary carers who have named her Hope.

Hillswick Wildlife Sanctuary yesterday (Saturday) received reports of a young otter left alone in a South Whiteness garden.

By the morning, the cub had made her way to an outhouse where she was curled up on a pile of hay.

Carers from the sanctuary drove down to the rescue.

They arrived to find the “tiny wee otter cub” curled up and making little squeaks, clearly missing her mum.

shetlandtimes.co.uk/2025/08/31…

#Shetland #Wildlife #Scotland

W.T.F!?

turtleisland.social/@Yehuda/11… Yehuda@turtleisland.social - Whoa!
FOX News advocating among other things, involuntary lethal injections for mentally challenged and unhoused people...
#FOXNews #Fascist #Nazis

Yehuda TurtleIsland.social (@Yehuda@turtleisland.social)

Attached: 1 video Whoa! FOX News advocating among other things, involuntary lethal injections for mentally challenged and unhoused people... #FOXNews #Fascist #Nazis

^{Turtle Island Social}

Nuns on the run

bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y8r2…

Defiant nuns flee Austrian care home for their abandoned convent in the Alps

Sisters Bernadette, Regina and Rita needed a locksmith to get back into their convent, defying Church leaders.

^{Bethany Bell (BBC News)}