My Scottish Upbringing
A personal journey through bias and stereotypes
A personal journey through bias and stereotypes
Firstly, I was born in Scotland. Now, for anyone not native to the UK, you probably don’t realize that over here, we invented bias and discrimination. We revere it and wallow in its misery. You see, we Scots have always been regarded by those south of the border, especially the far south, as a bit strange, slightly inferior, and even worse, unimportant.
So we Scots grow up with this inferiority complex, exacerbated by our strong accent that our next-door neighbours struggle to understand (or pretend not to).
So, that was my first minus point. However, I was also raised in a working-class and less affluent area of the country, which lends itself to more minus points in this still class-ridden part of the world.
Now, these unfortunate blemishes of birth were only minor points, considering that there are more minus points to add, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Our family was of rather short stature, and although not enough to place us in the “little people” club, we certainly fell short of the national average, and we were all self-conscious about our height. Also, belonging to a large family of five boys and five girls, though this was not unusual in the district, was still a cause of disdain in some areas.
But wait, there’s worse to come! We were also Catholic, and living in the Glasgow area, this was a prime discriminatory tick for 50% of the population. It automatically ruled us out for work with certain employers because one of the first questions on the job application was, “Which school did you attend?” If the first word of your reply was “Saint…,” you were shown the door quite quickly.
Things couldn’t get worse, eh? Well, they could, actually. We were also 3rd generation Irish, whose ancestors had come to Scotland during the famous Irish Famine. Now, that was something else because the Irish Catholics bore the indelible mark of Satan according to the Orange Order in Scotland. We had an Irish-sounding forename and surname that shouted out to these lovely people, “Irish Catholic”.
So there I was, a small Irish Catholic person from a large, poor family living in a deprived, poisonous, partisan, and parochial area, where a substantial percentage of our neighbours were unemployed, under-educated, and unhealthy.
Funnily enough, I never noticed this until I was much older and had left the area. You see, our family was also resented by our immediate neighbourhood. From some seed planted in the past, my siblings and I had inherited a modicum of intelligence and breeding that annoyed our fellow peers. Because we were not the usual knuckle-draggers, we were resented as “having airs and graces above our expected position in life.”
Just to buck the trend, that spark of intelligence shone through. For example, one brother became the first director of Scottish Television, another became a chief research engineer, and many of us graduated from University with degrees in the Sciences and moved on, despite all these potential drawbacks in early life.
Looking back at how the lives of many of our childhood neighbours turned out, I always wondered how our family arrived at a place so different from their expected birthright. Twenty years ago, I began to trace my family tree back to the 18th century.
One memory came to mind that my father mentioned to me: his grandfather had been educated by the Bishop of Derry, in Ireland. This was meaningless to me at the time, but when doing my family research, I discovered in one of the Irish History books a reference that mentioned this fact.
In the 1800s in Ireland, when most people were illiterate, the local Bishop would select six children from his ecclesiastical area who appeared to be the brightest, and would personally educate them, free of charge, at his private residence.
This was how my great-grandfather had received his schooling. Further to this, when checking through the descendants’ marriage certificates, I noted that all his immediate descendants, male and female, were able to sign their own names to the registry. This in an area where many people could not read nor write and simply signed with an “X.”
So, that seed of intelligence seems to have been passed down the generations, even to my grandchildren who are showing a high level of achievement academically.
There we are, a life of prejudice and discrimination and I hadn’t noticed. I suppose I must have been a bit dim really!
To me, education is the greatest starting point, whether that be formal or purely the education of life.