The cultural ghetto that Manchester can be.

Don’t get me wrong I love this city but like every city it has its problems. To me the most obvious one is the ghettos ethnic minorities live in or are relegated to. While its nice to have a space of ones own the racial segregation in these localities bothers me.

Drunk students on a Friday night drinking too much out for a curry and vomit. A little taste of the orient in China town. Is that what we are? Cute people of colour who cook exotic food. Is this how culture is to be consumed? Bright shop fronts which hide dark realities of our existence. With segregation comes ghettos, barely a mile away from The Famous ‘Curry Mile’ is Longsight the Asian ghetto, police sirens and ambulances used to greet me whenever I went there (so I stopped going). Similar stories of sleaze and gendered violence can be told in any of these exclusive localities of Manchester.

Manchester is probably one of the few places the world I have met people from so many nationalities but that is an elite migrating population. For the most people who have lived here long enough ghettos are a reality. What's more there is not talk of integration we are meant to remain in our place. We are to remain preserved in time and our cultures preserved. We can't be individuals only a group of people who function as a collective, on display to be used and abused. We are commodities to be served up as hot curries. This separation while amusing to a dominant few is detrimental to these communities that have been carefully preserved. We are exotic others who will never be British living on the benevolence of people who like foreign things. 

To say that crime is a racial thing would play straight into the hands of racists however not to talk about these issues would be as much an injustice.