From VICE
by Robert Stevens
Last week, a report revealed that if you’re Muslim, you’re half as likely to hold a managerial job than the average Brit, and far more likely to be unemployed. Papers scrambled to decipher why this was the case, offering up a range of reasons, but not too many solutions. Demos, the think-tank behind the report, had a simple one: Introduce legislation that makes it compulsory for large companies to assess anonymous CVs. That way, the thinking goes, employers can’t discriminate against applicants with names that sound like they could belong to Muslims.
It’s an interesting proposition, but it sidesteps the fact that the right-wing press’s relentlessly negative portrayals of Britain’s Muslims are perpetuating these prejudices in the first place. At their roots, these stories tend to be hung off the notion that the Muslim community at large has failed to integrate into British society—a notion that simply isn’t true.
Dr. Sadek Hamid, a Post-Doctoral Research fellow at Liverpool Hope University who has written widely on Britain’s Muslim youth, spoke to me about this issue. “Muslims are fully integrated in this country and have been for decades,” he said. “Yet, there’s still an ongoing debate that Muslims aren’t fully British. What more do they have to prove?”
Maariyah, 19, a student in London, says she noticed a difference two years ago after she started wearing a headscarf. “I was so new to it, and when people would be rude to me, I would break down. I’d get really upset because I couldn’t understand why this was happening to me,” she said. “I didn’t know how to react. I would be like, ‘I’m sorry.’ I would apologize for doing nothing wrong, and I would start crying. When I’m out, it’s always an issue. When ISIS was on the rise and I’d be on the train to university, people would move away from me. I’ve been walking down the road with my friends and people have stopped their cars to spit at us. It’s really disgusting: We’ve been called terrorists and told to get out the country. We haven’t done anything.”
