Last week, a Sikh woman was confronted by an angry racist mob while walking in a park in Southeast London with her daughter and friend:

[They] were out on a walk and … decided to go home when a crowd of around 20 boys and three girls started shouting racist abuse… The three made their way to their car but were confronted by the rabble minutes later. They hurled sticks, full beer cans and stones at the car causing slight damage to the windscreen. [Link]

The BNP is “wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples” While they got away unscathed, the racists also avoided punishment:

They escaped unhurt and called police. The victim says police told her no arrests could be made because officers said they were “outnumbered” by the horde of teenagers. [Link]

The victim was petrified because Southeast London was where, in 1993, 18 year old student Stephen Lawrence was beaten to death in a racist attack:

“All I could think during the attack was, ‘This is something like Stephen Lawrence went through. It feels like we’re going to get killed’. [Link]

Here’s my question to our British readers out there and those in the know – is this an isolated incident, or part of the rising tide of xenophobia? Is this incident part of the same phenomenon that led to the British National Party (BNP) doubling the number of council seats in the last election?

For those of you just tuning in, the BNP is a right wing nationalist party in the UK that was once a fringe party but which has ominously gained strength recently as anti-immigration sentiment in the UK has grown:

The BNP declares itself “wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples.” It seeks to restore the overwhelmingly white makeup of Britain before 1948; its leader has called Islam a “wicked, vicious faith” [Link]

Recently, I read a story about South Asian workers mistreated by military contractors in Iraq. They were lied to about where they were going, the terms of their contracts were violated, they weren’t paid, they had lousy working conditions, and their passports were withheld so they couldn’t leave. As a result, the US military has had to spend its time cracking down on conditions in its kitchens when it has larger fish to fry:The man told them they would not get any more food. “We bought you,”

The U.S. military said Tuesday that it had issued new orders to private contractors in Iraq to crack down on violations of human trafficking laws involving laborers … at American bases and other sites. An inspection completed in late March uncovered evidence that it was widespread practice among firms providing services to the military to take away their workers’ passports to keep them in place… Hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers, many from South Asia, are employed by contractors at U.S. bases and elsewhere in Iraq as cooks, food servers, janitors, construction workers and in other menial jobs.

Human rights groups have reported complaints by some workers that they were tricked into coming into Iraq. After they paid fees to recruiters in their home countries for jobs said to be in the Gulf, their passports were taken and they were forced to go to Iraq, the workers said. The groups have also reported complaints of withheld pay and overtime and unsuitable working and housing conditions. [Link]

This is deja vu all over again. Almost exactly the same stories first came to light 2 years ago this month when four men from Kerala came back from Iraq after working for a subcontractor for Kellogg, Brown & Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton):

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In today’s NYT online, an article by Tom Zeller called In Internet Age, Writers Face Frontier Justice begins:

WRITING last Monday at SepiaMutiny.com, a Web log dedicated to the Southeast Asian [sic] diaspora, a user called RC declared that “there is no scientific way to compare works of literature.” [Link]

Hopefully, I don’t sound like the TOI quoting the Harvard Independent (not even Harvard’s main daily) quoting the TOI I believe this is the first time that I’ve seen the Grey Lady use Sepia Mutiny in a leadoff quote, with a link and everything. I was so excited that I forgave the author his confusion between “South Asian” and “SouthEast Asian” (to be fair, my Mom has been known to do that too …)

SM is quoted again in the middle of the article, with the quote taking up the entire fifth paragraph:

“Viswanathan might have plagiarism issues with more than McCafferty’s books,” wrote Janak Ramakrishnan, another blogger [sic] at Sepia Mutiny. Mr. Ramakrishnan had noticed a similarity between pious aphorisms scribbled onto posters by a character in Ms. Viswanathan’s book (“If from drink you get your thrill, take precaution, write your will” and “All the dangerous drug abusers end up safe as total losers”) and passages from the 1990 book “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” by Salman Rushdie. A chapter titled “The Mail Coach” in Mr. Rushdie’s book depicts a series of rhyming road signs, including two that read, “If from speed you get your thrill, take precaution, make your will” and “All the dangerous overtakers end up safe at the undertaker’s.” [Link]

Again, I was so excited about the extended quote that I forgave the author his confusion between bloggers (those on the masthead) and commenters – the rest of the mutiny family writing large. As a matter of fact, I think this is the first time I’ve seen SM quoted by the MSM in a situation where all of the quotes were taken from readers, and none from the MastheadMutineers. As all of you out there in cyberia know, it takes a village to raze a topic, and so I wanted to say thank you to you all. Without your efforts the Mutiny would literally not have been quoted.

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Making fun of the driving skills of New York City taxi drivers is an easy snark. In NYC, over 80% of taxi drivers are third world men from countries which are not known for their sedate and obedient styles of driving. Since there are large numbers of brown cabbies (in 1999, 40% of cabbies were from the subcontinent, although that number has probably gone down), this easily turns into a joke about desi drivers. You know, a roll of the eyes, a hand gesture to indicate the erratic path a screeching yellow cab took, etc.

What was that address again? Don’t worry, this is just a shortcut, Amber fort is on the way.

It turns out, however, that riding a cab in New York is considerably safer than being in a private vehicle:

according to … [a recent] study… based on state motor vehicle records of accidents and injuries across the city… taxi and livery-cab drivers have crash rates one-third lower than drivers of other vehicles. [Link]

This is very different from what people think, but it makes sense:

The lower crash rates for cabbies are not so surprising given that taxi drivers are far more experienced than other drivers. They are behind the wheel up to 3,000 hours a year. Their driving records are scrutinized by the Taxi and Limousine Commission and auto insurance carriers. They risk losing their livelihood if they have too many crashes or get too many tickets. [Link]

They’ve also gotten safer over time, as a result of both market forces and government regulation:

… crashes declined 12 percent from 2003 to 2004, and 30 percent since 1999. These declines are attributable to the City’s strict ceilings on the number of DMV points drivers can accumulate and improved auto insurance underwriting practices. Cab drivers have also been staying in the industry longer, a significant fact given that less-experienced drivers are more crash-prone. [Link]

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