Bitter Memories of Ongoing Inequality
There are memories in London that won’t go away. They span thirty years and each has a name: Cherry Groce, a Black woman whose shooting by police officers sparked the Brixton riots of 1985; Cynthia Jarrett, another Black woman whose death during a police raid on her home a few days later caused the Broadwater Farm riots; Joy Gardner, yet another Black woman who was killed by police officers in 1993; Wayne Douglas, a Black man whose murder by police officers resulted in the Brixton riots of 1995; and Roger Sylvester, a mentally ill Black man who died in police custody in 1999. Now we have another name for these memories: Mark Duggan, shot to death by police a fortnight ago in Tottenham. Just two days after his murder, the streets of north London erupted once again and spread like wildfire across the city, an anger whose tremors were picked up, remoulded and let loose as far away as the north of England.
And pretty quickly the most frightening aspects of ‘broken Britain’ were laid bare. It turned out that the IPCC lied to the public about the circumstances surrounding Duggan’s death. Our out-of-touch leaders continued to holiday even as towns and cities burned. And when they returned, calls were already being made to bring in the army or at least to equip the police with ‘better weapons’ such as tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons. Some took the opportunity to give racist tropes an air of respectability, whilst others took to the streets looking to beat up Black people or called on their followers to burn down mosques. A Facebook page supporting the Met against the rioters, set up by a man who revels in racist jokes, gained a million followers overnight. There were even demands for rioters to lose their benefits and their homes as well as a review of human rights legislation. But for the odd voice, it seemed that a consensus had been reached, that everyone had turned into the model citizen standing shoulder-to-shoulder against a vast section of society that had failed to ‘act white’ and turned into mindless thugs, the embodiment of ‘criminality pure and simple’.
If these voices are to be believed, then this ‘wolfpack of feral inner-city waifs and strays’ simply awoke one morning and decided to destroy their neighbourhoods. They were greedy teenagers looking for freebies, we were told. Melanie Phillips asked whether the ‘liberal intelligentsia’ (liberalism being a synonym for multiculturalism, itself a synonym for immigration) were to blame. Paul Routledge pointed his finger at rap music. What they were really asking was: ‘Is it because they’re Black?’
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