Language barrier

I would like to register how much I appreciated and valued Angela Saini’s insight into the embedded racism in science and other areas of our lives (June, p48). I was taken aback to realise that I too had an ingrained element of racism that I was unconsciously practising in my daily life.

I live in East Anglia where there are thousands of immigrants from eastern European countries and Portugal working in the agricultural and food sectors. By and large, they are indistinguishable from the majority of the population in terms of their looks and behaviour. So how was I able to regularly categorise them as being Polish, Romanian, Latvian, etc. By one thing only: their languages.

The interview helped me realise that I was immediately categorising them as different. If they had a command of English identical to my own, there would be virtually no way I could judge their origin. I like to think (and hope) I’m not racist: I supported Remain in the EU elections, and I feel immigrants who come here to contribute can benefit us all.

The article also raised a question over the immigration issue in respect of Brexit. Would immigration be such a high-profile element of the campaign if all immigrants spoke ‘perfect’ English and were virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the population? It’s surely a textbook example of embedded racism within our society, which has little base in logic. If racism occurs due to difficulty communicating, what hope do we have for a tolerant society, let alone a tolerant scientific community?

Roger Lancaster, via email

Often an accent is all it takes for us to start making assumptions about people. But being aware of biases in our thinking is a good start to overcoming them. Daniel Bennett, Editor