Hi everyone,

Yeah, thats right. I’ve posted yesterday, and now I’m posting today- 2018 is mad!

I was inspired by Gracie Chick to make this post. She made a spoken word poem about Islamophobia, and it was in response to an incident which occurred on a bus in London. I’ll link her spoken word poem here (it’s really good!), and I’ll leave a link to the original bus incident here. I’ll summarise if you don’t want to watch the video (understandably).

I was appalled by what happened on that bus. This women is basically having a go at a pregnant Muslim women, talking about how she’s part of ISIS, and how she doesn’t belong here. She also mentions something about the woman sleeping with other peoples husbands and everyones children all living in the same house. She’s very aggressive and swears a lot, but whats worse is she has A CHILD, HER child, in the pram next to her, who is listening to their mother literally swear and make threats to this poor woman. She also mentioned something about kicking the women in the uterus, and that she would make sure she could never have another child. The whole video pissed me off.

I’m sorry, but literally how is this okay?? I get that British people are famous for that whole ‘no-one makes eye contact on public transport we all ignore each other blah blah blah’, but if someone is actively verbally abusing someone else, shouldn’t you intervene??? A few people at the front on the bus were saying something, but the people in the rows at the back were silent!! It astounds me that they managed to not even say anything. If you sit there and let this woman tear down someone else, you are being an enabler, and you are basically saying its okay to do it. I watched a video really recently where a girl goes up to this women on the subway, who is being racially abusive to this person, and she intervenes. It was honestly so nice to see this girl stand up to this racist women and lecture her on why she’s such a idiot. This is the video– why can’t more people do this? Even if one person stands up to the person shouting abuse, you immediately help the situation because there is someone standing up for those poor people getting yelled at, and they’ll stop because they know if they carry on it won’t be tolerated.

This is the main reason why I’m not keen to wear the hijab. Wearing it means people can identify me as Muslim, because without it I’m just a brown girl- I’ve got no religious markers that would indicate that I’m Muslim. Wearing it would carry the risk of encountering this kind of racial abuse, which I’m terrified of.

It’s sad that it happened in London for crying out loud! And so many incidents have happened on the subway in New York. These are meant to be some of the most multicultural places, and yet this crap happens? The fact is that I’m so frustrated that we are advancing in science and the arts and all these other sectors, but we still haven’t sorted out the massive social issues. How about we just stop focusing on going to Mars and maybe focus a bit more on issues that have been going on for decades, because otherwise they are just going to become even worse (if that’s possible) and continue.

Quite short I know, but I didn’t really feel like doing a 1000 word rant on this- even though I could. I think I’d just make myself angrier lol.  I hope you also make a post standing up to this injustice. Also, be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts!

Stay Fresh,

Minty xo