Had an odd and uncomfortable experience the other day. I was walking home from the city just making my way along the side of the park just up the road. The road itself was busy but the pavement was not and I was ambling along, lost in thought as usual when I noticed a police car drive past.

Nothing too unusual there but, by the time I'd reached the edge of the park, three more police cars had passed me, two in each direction. It occurred to me then that maybe it was the same car circling back and forth. It was at this point that, just for a moment, a horrible thought gripped me.

Maybe they were following me home to grab me because of my other blog. Now anyone who knows what's been going down in this area of Leeds recently will appreciate why there was a sudden increase in police visibility.

A few days back a body was found in a bin a couple of streets over from here. Not long after that another guy was shot a little further up the way, revenge for the body in the bin according to rumour. So clearly my moment of panic was stupid and utterly irrational, but then it's surprising how easily the stupid and irrational can take hold of us if we're not careful.

Are you racist? Most people would answer no, and pretty quickly too not wanting to give the impression that it needs to be thought about. All questions should be thought about though so let's break with etiquette and have a look.

Several things contribute to the true answer of the question above, firstly upbringing. I was raised to see all people, regardless of ethnicity, sexuality or socio-economic background, as being equally worthy of respect. Does this mean that I am automatically a fully paid up none racist? No.

I was also raised an Anglican but, after giving it both a great deal of thought and an enthusiastic try, I rejected this part of the lifestyle I was raised in. Even with the most solid childhood foundations, fundamental ideals can still fall apart under scrutiny.

The 'isms', or rather the aversion to them, however stood their ground. I thought about it and couldn't find any reason to break away from what I had been taught as a child, in fact my own thoughts reinforced what i had been taught. For example, skin colour, in my opinion, is no more valid a distinguishing factor among people than height.

Imagine if you could stand the whole human race in a line in order of colour, with the very darkest skinned human at one end and the lightest at the other. The categories that appear on forms would not manifest themselves in this line up, instead you would see a continual and smooth spectrum and no definite lines could be drawn to separate one 'group' from another. (1)

So with upbringing and reasoned logic firmly on the right side of public opinion, surely I can answer that damn question above firmly and confidently. Well, no, again. There is, at least, one more thing to be considered.

My girlfriend got in the other night having been hassled by some young lads on her way home. Now as it happens, these lads were Asian and the few other times she's ever had any trouble while out and about the perpetrators were also Asian. She told me she was concerned because she was starting to find that she felt intimidated when she saw groups of young Asian men and because she, 'didn't want to think like that.'

The thing is, despite the qualifying factors outlined above, I'm exactly the same, albeit in the opposite way. I have only been insulted and assaulted by white guys, be it youths or men, public or police. My experiences have bred just the same kind of aversion as my girlfriend, just towards different people. So now, are we racists?

The temptation is, I suppose, to sympathise with our respective situations and thereby justify sparing us the punishment of the label. I'm still not quite convinced I that can claim the moral high ground and declare myself non-racist however as the notion itself is, to me, screaming out to be looked at harder.

Political correctness was part of a shift in our society after which racism was no longer acceptable, and that in itself is certainly a good thing, the problem is that it left nothing else behind. Certain words and attitudes were rightly outlawed but no note was taken of the ignorance through which the words and attitudes came to be in the first place.

That ignorance remains, driven underground and frustrated. Instead of talking about how to dealing with prejudices we were simply told that it was not acceptable to have them. Ricky Gervais's recent series Extras, which I thought was fantastic, portrayed some truly wonderful social horror stories.

Whether it was stumbling about over homosexuality at the BBC, or digging the hole of racism with Samuel L Jackson, the picture was of someone desperately trying to play a game to which they don't know all the rules. The fear of inadvertently crossing the line out of warm, acceptable society becomes far more important than the 'crimes' that would put you over.

This twisting of equality into just another kind of conformity has also led to a bizarre kind of racist-non-racism, where instead of treating all people like people, we treat all people like white people. The idea that it's somehow racist to acknowledge or mention someone's colour comes back down to ignorance again: I don't how to handle this so I'll pretend it's not happening.

In the end I reassured both my girlfriend and myself with the following: You can't control how you react to something so there's no benefit to anyone in beating yourself up over it. What counts is how you act in response. Everyone has prejudices, we just have to recognise them as such so as not to rely on them.

Now generally, race doesn't really occur to me consciously when I'm interacting with people but, this in itself can potentially cause problems. A few months back I had a weird afternoon involving a lost child, two mosques and a whole load of police in body armour. I'll not go into it all now, I've described the whole thing in detail in an earlier post.

The salient episode came later when I visited my local shop. West Yorkshire Police had closed off the area directly around the mosque near here. There were swarms of them, all tooled up and hard faced. One PC told me that, 'there had been an incident', but that was all. (2)

Seeing nothing on the local news that night I headed up to the shop and mentioned it to the guy behind the counter. Now, just like a hundred other people round here, I often have a bit of a chat with the guy when I go in so I thought, if anyone's heard what's going down it'll be him. He hadn't.

I was surprised that no-one had even mentioned it what with the mosque being so close. 'There were all up round the mosque,' I said, 'I thought you'd have heard about it.' All of a sudden his face hardened ever so slightly and replied, annoyed, 'I've been in here all day haven't I.'

Confused I left the shop and headed home, rerunning the conversation in my head. The family that run the shop are Asian and suddenly, in retrospect, I realised how what I said must have sounded: 'You're Asian therefore you must know what's happened at the mosque.'

Shit.

My immediate reaction was to want to set things right. I didn't want the guy to be offended and I didn't want him to think I was racist, (there's that fear you see,) but what could I do? I couldn't very well walk back into the shop and say 'by the way...' could I?

Ultimately it is a subject both tricky and sticky. For me it's a case of trusting my upbringing and logic to overcome the impact of isolated incidents in life. Am I racist? Well compared to the true sense of the word, probably a little. Compared to the hysterically polarised sense the word has come to have, however, I am not and understanding the difference between these two is, I think, the key to problem.

footnotes

(1) culture and colour are not the same thing, there's just a lot of cross over between the two because both are denoted by geography,

(2) this happened long before the London bombings by the way, and I never saw any mention of it in the local or national media, what were they looking for? did they miss something?