Mr Wilson, I was not being deliberately obtuse. I was making a serious point, making fun of Sainsbury’s’ posturing and hoping to get a rise out of people such as yourself. And succeeding. Thank you for rising to the bait. One or two of your points: BAME “FOLK”BAME folk. you say, do not experience a level playing field in all areas of life. No one does. Sainsbury’s’ black employees, with their just-for-them “safe space” appear to enjoy black privilege - whether they want it or not. Mr Iddon is right. Sainsbury’s’ attitude to black people is patronising. They need a little room to retreat to. It is also divisive as is the BLM movement, with its remember-slavery scenario, proxy for the Marxist oppressed-oppressor scenario of the “long march”. Most black people are busy in the here-and-now, not living in history. The shackles are off. The slaves were manumitted. But try telling that to woke-folk. SAFE SPACE Safe spaces, you say, “do not mean segregating how staff work in the stores”. It does when one group is treated differently from another, and, when one group is treated differently from another on the basis of race, that is racial discrimination. That is RACISM. You say these spaces are where black people can find “peer support, mentoring, etc.”. What goes on in these stores to make that necessary? Are members of the white staff tripping them up as they go along the aisles or the public taking tins of Ambrosia Creamed Rice off the shelves and throwing them at them. Or are we thinking in terms of “micro aggression” - that no one can see or hear? I wonder in how many stores black people have gone to the manager and asked him/her to provide them with a safe space in which they can support one another. This is posturing from on high.There is a nasty side to some supermarkets’ posturing:Supporting BULLIES. Who could forget the Asda employee, a 54-year-old disabled grandfather who was sacked for sharing a Billy Connolly sketch about religion on Facebook? A colleague - some colleague! - in their Dewsbury store complained that Connolly’s skit was anti-Islamic. The 54-year-old disabled grandfather was himself accused of Islamophobia and dismissed without notice. Incredible. Islamophobia in Dewsbury! It’s not as if that was where “a gang of devious and manipulative men Ismail Haji, Imran, Ibrahim Kola, and Mohammed Chothia raped, trafficked and groomed teenage girls”. Of course not. That was Emmerdale. “WOKE”“Woke”, Mr Wilson, may once have been used as you use it. It is now used to mock soy-boys, pasty-faced millennial social-justice warriors and older men who are still emotionally stuck at the adolescent “it’s-so- unfair” stage of life. How old are you – in your head?
Andrew Farmer ● 1661d