The Fight Against Racism in a London Neighborhood
The Fight Against Racism in a London Neighborhood
(Bloomberg) -- In the London district of Brixton, police with riot shields struggled to contain the crowd. The ensuing nights of violence would become the ground zero of Britain’s race riots, with stores burned out as young, angry, mainly Black protesters railed against the authorities.
The year was 1981, and a powder keg of resentment had exploded a few miles from the Houses of Parliament. It was one of the first confrontations with the then Conservative government over inequality and discrimination as the country went through radical political and economic change.
Almost 40 years later, Black and White demonstrators in Brixton took to one knee last month in memory of George Floyd, a Black man killed by U.S. police. And in the traditional heart of London’s Afro-Caribbean community there was a sense of unfinished business passed onto the next generation.
The Black Lives Matter movement has thrust the U.K. into what some newspapers and politicians are calling a “culture war.” There are arguments over statues of figures from the imperial past and why minorities were hit disproportionately harder by coronavirus in the present. Yet for all Britain’s efforts to stamp out racism in recent decades, for many the reaction to events in the U.S. has exposed old wounds that never healed.
“It’s being framed as a response to the U.S., but I think there’s a lot of homegrown grievances,” said Rabz Lansiquot, 24, a filmmaker whose mother lived in South London in close proximity to the Brixton riots. “It’s not just a moment, it’s a legacy.”
From divisions over Brexit and strains between the poorer north and richer south to gender and ethnicity, Britain is home to a myriad identity struggles at a time when the country is facing another era of social and economic upheaval. The danger for Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is that it misreads the public mood with the country in turmoil from the Covid-19 pandemic and heightened pressure to unite the nation.
To Lansiquot’s mother, Barby Asante, the difference now is that expectations for change are higher. She has lived in or near Brixton all her life, though it’s young people like her daughter who are providing much of the momentum in the protests against racial inequality. They’re taking risks her generation didn’t, from challenging their employers about racism, to tying themselves to concrete blocks as protesters, she said.
“They’ve got more information—and more expectation, maybe, of themselves and of the world,” said Asante, 49, an artist whose parents moved to London from Ghana. “And that’s very confusing and super overwhelming. It’s like a tsunami.”
Asante was sitting in front of a mural of her friend Ty, who passed away from Covid-19. The memorial painted in his honor read “I COME FROM BRIXTON BABY” in tribute to one of his songs celebrating the place. To her, the upheaval wreaked by the pandemic can open a door for people to demand change, from rethinking the entire education system, to the role of the police and its relationship to ethnic minorities.
As people emerge from their homes after lockdowns and Britain comes to terms with its past, it’s a moment when “we’ve got to ask and decide now what we want as human beings and as citizens of the U.K.,” she said.
Brixton is iconic in the history of Black struggle following a wave of postwar immigration. In 1948, when people came to London from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean islands to help rebuild the U.K., many found their way to the area.
They were called the “Windrush” generation, after one of the first ships carrying people from the former British colonies. The name more recently was associated with the “Windrush scandal” over the status of citizenship, where people were wrongly told by the government they were illegal immigrants.
Brixton was the home of Olive Morris who led a movement of Black women in the 1970s against systematic racism. In 1996, Nelson Mandela visited and thanked a crowd of thousands for their support of the anti-apartheid movement.
Years of under-investment helped leave Brixton’s communities marginalized, but as the government sought to address the issues that gave rise to the race riots of the 1980s, it invested in regeneration. It’s now home to middle-class professionals, trendy coffee bars and microbreweries, and young people like Lansiquot say the transformation of the area means they can no longer afford to live there.
Kate Theophilus, also a long-term resident of Brixton and a friend of Asante’s, sees the propulsion of the Black Lives Matter into the public eye as an urgent call to action.
In the past, these were issues mainly discussed within the Black community, she says. “This time, I felt really motivated to talk to white people in my life—and that is the difference,” said Theophilus, 47, an academic research development manager. She’s optimistic that this moment in time could be a turning point for the better. “You have to feel hopeful—otherwise what do you do?”
On the morning of June 22, Brixtonites emerged into one of the hottest days of the year in masks and sunglasses. With lockdown rules still in place, many shops were closed, murals of rappers such as Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G painted on their shutters. On her way past Windrush Square, Asante passes a friend who reminds her that it’s “Windrush Day.”
It was two weeks after a statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston was toppled into Bristol harbor in southwest England, triggering the nation-wide conversation about the country’s imperial past. Then came the backlash.
A group of young white men tried to rescue the statue in Bristol, and the grave of a slave was vandalized, with graffiti on a nearby flagstone reading: “Now look at what you made me do. Put Colston’s statue back or things will really heat up.” In central London, far-right protesters clashed with police near a boarded-up statute of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, saying they wanted to protect symbols of British history from anti-racism activists.
Then, as Premier League soccer resumed after lockdown and players took the knee, at one match in northwest England an aircraft flew over the stadium with the banner: “White Lives Matter.”
Johnson has acknowledged that Floyd’s death “awakened an anger and a widespread and incontrovertible, undeniable feeling of injustice, a feeling that people from Black and minority ethnic groups do face discrimination.”
Writing in Black newspaper The Voice, Johnson added that the government would work to fight racism. He has set up a commission examining inequality, including racial discrimination. Home Secretary Priti Patel has promised to fully implement the recommendations of a report into the Windrush scandal.
At the same time, the government has been accused of making things worse. With little momentum behind calls to remove Churchill’s statue, Johnson still vowed to “fight every breath in my body” any attempt to do so. A week later, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said taking a knee seemed symbolic of subjugation, and mused whether it was taken from medieval fantasy TV series “Game of Thrones.”
Such interventions in the public debates suggest the government risks sounding tone deaf to an audience that’s also concerned about the post-Covid recovery and issues such as funding for the health service, said Paula Surridge, a professor in sociology and politics at the University of Bristol.
Although the state has poured billions into aid programs to prevent people from losing their jobs, the government has still come under fire for not prioritizing the most vulnerable people. The government was forced into a U-turn on its policy on providing free school meals for vulnerable children during the summer holidays after a campaign by 22-year-old Black footballer Marcus Rashford.
“It’s potentially a very serious misreading of the situation because it can mean that they are being seen as being not sensitive to the issues those communities are concerned about,” she said.
Politicians need to ensure they don’t stoke a culture war like the one in the U.S. for their own aims, according to Bobby Duffy, a professor of public policy at Kings College London.
“We have imported the language of the U.S. culture of wars,” he said. “We don’t really have them here, but you can see how we can talk ourselves into it.”
As the Black Lives Matter movement fades from British newspaper headlines, the question remains of what comes next. In Brixton, one street away from where buildings burned and police fought with rioters when she was younger, Asante said the momentum again is going to be gradual.
“If they want to think about a culture clash in the present, they want to think about a culture clash that comes from the past,” she said.
To her daughter, the renewed focus on minorities has brought public attention to issues of race in a way they haven’t before. She says she grew up with the stories of people coming from all over to the world from Britain’s former empire only to find they were not welcome on arrival. Now there just might be a moment of reckoning.
“I think that means that we could see a change more totally,” said Lansiquot. “But with the government we have I don’t think that’s going to be easy at all. It’s a long-term thing.”
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