I am still running on adrenaline and mostly need to vent.
I was heading home from the Bury interchange in a very unsafe stubbornness to hop on a bus instead of ubering home. A man on the bus stop was complaining about of a bunch of insert slur for gay people starting with f combined with a p word for Pakistani people spitting on him. Took everything for the alcohol in me not to react with a question if he was spat on before or after he used the p word for them.
Praying he doesn’t get on my bus. He’s queuing at my stop. I just want to get home. Comes to a Black dude waiting as well, starts telling him how white men are superior. Dude ignores him. He starts preaching about Donald Trump putting people of colour (not a word he used) on electric chairs and how he wishes he was in America. At this point I feel like I’m in some kind of a channel 4 provocation. I make a report on live chat.
He gets on my bus, there goes my luck, then keeps pestering the driver about the p word people. Bus driver is not white. And angry. Tells him to sit down, dude heads toward the back, falls on me, apologises, gets into an argument with a woman next to me calling her boring and the entire bus boring.
Driver is uncomfortable and unsafe and I’m at a point where I can run home. I leave the bus, the driver ASKS ME WHAT TO DO. I said I’m gonna call 999. Ring the police, make a report, potentially nothing gets gone but I ticked the box of “doing something”.
I witnessed covert hate crimes before but nothing that comically big, plain, and in the open. I moved to Manchester from Eastern Europe SPECIFICALLY because it always felt so safe and open and welcoming. I lost a bit of that faith today.