What Bonnie Chiu and I have in common

8 May 20208 May 2020Angelina Leave a comment

We are both foreigners living in the UK. We both saw what was about to happen. We both started protecting ourselves and those around us. We were both ridiculed, dismissed as over-the-top crazy foreign females.

Then we both sadly gained respect when reality overtook the isolated lalaland illusions the British love to immerse themselves in. I feel somewhat vindicated, but I wish that there was no reason for it.

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I am jargon-averse and have three modes of reasoning: scholarly / theoretical / pensive (thinker) + practical / (pro)active / energetic (doer) + tired / private (“off“).

Below are a few bits and pieces about me.

Academia.edu

Amazon

Author

Amsterdam American Business Club

Member April 2003 – end 2008

COVID-19: APHA, NAM, STAT, etc

2020: Various APHA webinars that count as CE, including topics like health disparities
2020: Various webinars (STAT, Digital Digest, NAM, etc) about topics such as also the food situation in the UK

Geochemical Society (US-based)

Newsletter editor Dec 1998 – Feb 2010

Law (English): HarvardX Law School (EDX), pro se/LIP (UK) etc

2015: From Trust to Promise to Contract

ResearchGate

(You need to be logged in to access my profile.)

Royal Netherlands Chemical Society

Board member Environmental Chemistry (and Toxicology) Section Mar 2001 – Sep 2004

Taking the Lead

Advanced Learners Course 2010-2011 (Take Part)
Member Portsmouth Environmental Forum Mar 2009 – Aug 2010 (dismantled)

Toastmasters International

Member Toastmasters of The Hague Apr 2003 – Jul 2004

Udemy

Bioethics – the ethics of everyday life

Various other organisations (such as Dutch KNGMG and American Geophysical Union)

Former member, for 10 to 20 years; I let go of my memberships some time after I moved to the UK

ON STIGMAS IN THE UK
On rainy days (so to speak), I am a stupid old cow who is delusional about her capabilities, as she imagines she went to university yet cannot even be trusted to figure out how to operate a coffeemaker.

Literally, yes. Except the rainy day bit.

I am often demonised for being female and over the age of 35 or 45 and, perhaps worst of all, not married. This is common in the UK, sadly. It’s not merely my personal experience; there is plenty of research that found that this is widespread in the UK.

On top of that, I’m a migrant, hence from a banana republic (because all countries except the UK are developing countries), a liar, probably also a drug addict and definitely low-skilled. That’s what the UK government says, too.

I became bullied very badly in the UK – by anonymous people around me – after I moved here from Amsterdam at the end of 2004. First in Southampton and then in Portsmouth. Gang-stalked. Sabotaged. Stalked sadistically.

It’s a highly alienating experience. In other words, it produces a major “WHAT THE FUCK?!!” sentiment to be a highly qualified professional, and an adult, and finding yourself bullied and ridiculed and what not by people you don’t know and who don’t know you.

It went so far that it also affected people I worked with, who were mostly in other countries. My clients. My friends. My colleagues. Acquaintances.

On the one hand, it’s incomprehensible to people in other countries. On the other hand, within the UK, it gets you tagged as there being something wrong with you, as “vulnerable”. Otherwise you wouldn’t get bullied, right? The marginalisation caused by bulling gets amplified on its own.

There is a lot of bullying in Britain. Brits are among the most-bullied workers in the world. Many Brits also seem to have no idea of what constitutes bullying and what does not.

That’s evident when for example an employer says “it did not go too far” and “it was not bullying”, when one of the people working for him was set on fire, locked in the trunk of a car, often came home with bruises and eventually killed himself to escape from the bullying.

There is a tremendous amount of meddling that can be considered bullying too, certainly when the meddling requires breaking laws.

Britain is riddled with stigmas. I didn’t know that when I arrived here. I had no idea of all the stigmas sitting on my shoulders.

It was not necessarily merely the fact that I was a foreigner – on its own – that resulted in the bullying and it wasn’t all about that unfathomable class thing either, though those were the main things I could think of and those were certainly issues that I also ran into and in relation to which I violated unspoken rules.

I was too confident for someone who wasn’t filthy rich, for example, which ticked off a lot of people. In addition, there were people who disliked me because they assumed that I was on welfare because they didn’t see me leave for a daily job elsewhere and had no idea you can’t just move to the UK and receive benefits. That takes years of having lived in the UK. Quite a few have thought I was on disability benefits. Some thought I had some kind of learning disability.

There are very strong social rules in the UK – certainly in southern England – that impose on everyone a duty to be and behave in a certain way. I wasn’t doing that. I was highly confident, well-educated, self-employed, living on my own. But I was renting. And I wasn’t going to the pub on Friday to get drunk and to get laid. I sometimes went for a run or a walk, sometimes sat on the seashore, enjoying the waves and wildlife in the sand. That didn’t add up for the strangers around me.

So they figured that something was “wrong” with me.

The only thing that people may have considered “right” about me was that I possessed a pale skin?

Stigmatisation due to any kind of otherness isn’t funny. It’s deeply hurtful and immensely detrimental to health, just to mention two effects. It results in marginalisation and poverty.

It’s also highly damaging to the UK’s economy and to British society as a whole.

I do believe that a lot of it is directly related to this quintessentially English “class” thing, this division into real people and people who can be treated as if they are, say, plastic bottles or tennis balls, in the eyes of many people in Britain.

I think that the 19th-century British doctrine of “utilitarianism” is at least partly to blame for that. It makes other people expendable as long as you declare them less worthy. It divides people into worthy ones and offensive ones that should be hidden away so as not to offend the worthy ones. I discuss it in my book “We need to talk about this“.

Britain isn’t a place of great happiness and great prosperity, in my experience, though there is a lot of sunshine along the south coast of England, where I live, and some places are certainly much happier than others. There is a tremendous amount of misery and widespread deep poverty in Britain as the result of its high level of inequality. It depends on where you go and how you use your senses whether you get to see any of that. That also applies for Tories and tourists.

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Angelina Souren wants you to think about what a more inclusive, healthier world might look like.

She has a question for you. Is cruelty cool?

What Bonnie Chiu and I have in common

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