"When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once she takes all our money (in case Rachel Reeves was wondering, her budget pitch-rolling is definitely cutting through). Routine enough, if he hadn't gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling."
"But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn't until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it's still shocking at least for now."
"I thought about him when the health secretary, Wes Streeting, voiced alarm this week that it was becoming socially acceptable to be racist again, with ethnic minority NHS staff fighting a demoralising tide of things people now apparently feel emboldened to say to them. What Streeting was describing not just unabashed racism, but a sense of inhibitions disappearing out of the window more generally goes well beyond hospital waiting rooms."
Everyday small talk has shifted from bland topics to aggressive, online-style hostility spoken aloud in public. Casual encounters now sometimes include threats of political violence and graphic descriptions delivered calmly and openly. Ethnic minority public-sector workers face rising racist remarks and demoralisation as social inhibitions against hateful speech erode. Social media norms of casual extremism are migrating into face-to-face interactions, normalizing statements that were previously shocking. The phenomenon appears across settings such as supermarkets, bus stops and hospital waiting rooms, where routine remarks can rapidly veer into violent or racist tangents.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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