S.:"Since I've been working on the Stephen Lawrence project I have learned how repressed Bengali women really are. There's a woman who has done a PGCE (teaching degree) and now she works back at the school as just a teacher's assistant. She'd had a good education and everything."
The project she is helping to run is to combat racism in a local primary school.
I explained that Bengali people have a strong sense of duty towards their community and then compared it to the Jewish community assuming that she would understand the comparison. I was taking her name as a signifier of her ethnicity. But I was wrong. Her dad is Jewish, but she was brought up within the dominant culture. It's funny how that makes me see her completely differently now.