> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits.
As someone who isn't white and was born in the outskirts of London, I took particular offense at that passage, but that's might be more of a personal problem for me.
DHH could have elided what he was really saying by using different words, not linking to that particular Wikipedia page, not mentioning Tommy's march, not trying to frame that march as just this nice lovely fellow out for a little walk. And so on and so forth.
He didn't though. The "demographic change" as you so nicely put it is that the people's skin colors have changed. A surface level of reading might justify putting "presumably compared to recent immigrants" in parentheses, and if you don't care to read it more deeply that than, I can see why one might walk away concluding that people being offended by DHH's statement are just looking for reasons to be offended.
A deeper reading of the words DHH chose to use in the order he used them, one might instead walk away reading that his objection is truly just skin deep. There's nothing to complain about this "demographic change" other than people's skin color isn't white in that one paragraph. Sure, it's entirely his perogative not to want to live somewhere simply based on people's skin color there, but, well, that's racist.
If you don't see that or think it's not offensive, that's entirely your own perogative. That's why linking to DHH's own words is important in the discussion. Everyone's free to draw their own conclusions based on the words he used and how they want to interpret them.
DHH is entirely free to believe whatever he wants and want to live wherever he wants, for whatever reason. Just that if it boils down to I don't like the skin color of people who live there, you shouldn't be surprised when other people don't want to work with you, even if you did create Ruby.
As someone who isn't white and was born in the outskirts of London, I took particular offense at that passage, but that's might be more of a personal problem for me.