ABSTRACT
Racism is the first issue that has to be broached in any talk of tolerance, beginning with racism among working-class people. Racism still exists, much just below the surface, some explicit, overt and loutish. The most evident expression is at football matches where bananas may still occasionally be thrown on the pitch to greet a black player and the language can be vilely moronic. Perhaps the most deep-seated form of racism, but the most strongly denied by those who hold it and by others who wish they did not, is anti-Semitism. Tolerance towards many, perhaps most, kinds of difference in others can be part of a larger tolerance which still has, in general, more force than separatism, whether actively angry or just below the surface. It begins to seem as though there are more well-used adages about the need for tolerance than about intolerance, and more than expressions of racism and religious bigotry.
