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HA, that is a very depressing story. But it has a use. Anyone who ever complains about PC culture should be given a link to your post.
I moved to London in 1981 to find work with my mate from Donny, initially for 6 months and I’m still here! We worked on the building sites around the old Docklands area. Those sites definitely weren’t for the faint hearted and the ‘banter’ often moved from Micky taking to outright bullying. There was a black lad working with us called Leon who was often the brunt of this simply due to his colour. The abuse ranged from racist comments to things like leaving bananas in his work bag. This was every single day, without fail. Leon would laugh it off but I know from talking to him at the time that it was wearing him down. He once told us something that happened to him that I still often think about to this day. Him and a mate (who was also black) were working on a site near Canning Town when a car full of men pulled up on the street beside them. One of the men got out the car and threatened Leon and his mate with a knife and racially abused them. A very frightening experience. They called the police who arrived quite quickly, but instead of asking them about the men who’d threatened them, spent half an hour on the street asking Leon and his mate what they were doing in a ‘white’ area without showing any interest in finding the perpetrators! Apparently things like this weren’t uncommon for young black men. Leon was one of the nicest men you could meet, and he didn’t deserve the daily racist abuse he took on the sites by these arseholes. One day he came into work and told us that he was going to give them what they want and ‘go back to where he came from’. He left the site that night and never came back. I never saw him again but I’m sure that his experiences contributed to my involvement in the anti racist movement around that time. Things are different now and I don’t believe that there’s the institutional racism there once was, however racism still exists without a doubt. If taking the knee existed back then I would certainly have done this to show my support to lovely guys like Leon.