I didn't read it that way at all. I certainly didn't see him "painting brown people as criminal". I read it predominantly as the musings of a man afraid to lose his culture in the same way the Cockneys lost theirs. Now it's my experience that most fears are exaggerated - and perhaps his fears are exaggerated - but that doesn't mean they aren't legitimate. At the very least, they need to be heeded, because - as no one famous ever said - feelings don't care about your facts.
> a nation is the socially constructed identity I was talking about. It can be mono- or multicultural, and people from other cultures may be integrated
...or they may not be...
> But one thing is clear, if you're born into a culture you are part of the culture, and so through a civic nationalist logic you are automatically part of that nation.
All that is true, but as you just pointed out, there is not only one culture, so which culture are you born into, and is it compatible with the other cultures you have to live with? A nation also has to function; and for a democratic nation to function, it has to be united on the fundamentals. Regardless of the cause, it is quite clear to me that a good deal of trust has now broken down between different communities in my country. That needs to be addressed, not lazily dismissed as mere racism.
And leftists in particular have no business dismissing it as mere racism; because, if we want to get into causes, I'd just like to remind everyone reading this that the idea that we can and should divide and categorise people by their race has been aggressively and exclusively pushed for the last decade or more - and successfully mainstreamed - by the left. Now we all have to reap what they've sewn.
