‘They told me to go back to my country’: Inside the UK’s wave of racism

Agnes Peters, a care worker from Manchester, vividly remembers the moment she was targeted for her race.

“I was coming back from work,” she said, her voice low from a table in a Manchester library’s cafe. “I was in my uniform … and they told me to go back to my country, used racial slurs against me and threw things from the car as they drove slowly past,” she said. “People were watching and recording.”
Only one bystander reproached the abusers for “throwing stones” at Peters, she said, remembering the incident last year.

Racists have become emboldened, she said, describing the rise of xenophobia in the United Kingdom.

“They feel like if they come out in public and embarrass me, a Black person, it gives them supporters,” she said. “They’re no longer sitting on the fence. They’re out there actively trying to pull people down.”

While the nature of racism that emerged after Brexit has persisted, focused on those trying to enter the UK irregularly, other minorities have also been at the sharp end of discrimination.

Earlier this month, Oxfam, Amnesty International and 152 other groups issued a joint statement calling for the government “to act immediately” over what they described as the normalisation of racist violence in the UK.

“Levels of racist violence and intimidation that were once considered extreme are now becoming weekly occurrences across the UK”, they said, reflecting on “the consequences of years of growing inequality, underinvestment in communities and public services, and political and media narratives that have normalised racism, anti-migrant sentiment and Islamophobia.”