Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

  As would-be black politicians watched what was happening to communities they came from, they began to push for better black representation. Despite a very white leadership, back then the Labour Party had become the political home for the country’s settled black and brown people. The party didn’t have to work particularly hard for black support; it was about necessity, rather than a broad range of choice. Just twenty years earlier, the Conservative MP Peter Griffiths was elected to represent the Midlands constituency of Smethwick aided by the slogan ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’.

  Leo Dickson and Marc Wadsworth established the Labour Party’s Black Sections in Vauxhall, south London, in 1983. It was a movement inside the party with the aim of championing black representation in the party (used in a political sense, black meant everyone who was not white). A general election took place in the same year, and a low turnout of black voters saw the Labour Party admit that they needed to do more to attract them. A pamphlet from the Vauxhall Labour Party published in 1984 reveals the thinking behind the formation of the sections, and the fiery debate the sections sparked among the Labour Party membership in the early days of setting up. In the pamphlet, Leo and Marc wrote: ‘Our constituency covers an inner city area (Brixton) where manifestations of racism in Britain today are all pervasive.’51 It wasn’t surprising that the push for black representation in Britain’s left-wing party came from south London – an area of the country that, at that point, was in its third decade of settled African and Caribbean migrants.

  By the time Vauxhall Labour Party’s pamphlet was published, a debate was raging in the national press about the legitimacy of the Labour Party’s Black Sections. To gain ground in the party, as well as access to other black members, the section’s organisers went to the party’s executive committee to argue their case. In turn, the executive committee took it upon themselves to notify Labour Party members of all races of a meeting of a ‘black caucus’. Leo and Marc were then put in the uncomfortable position of having to argue the case for black representation at some of the party’s local branches. They were met with largely white opposition.

  When the press got hold of party debates on the logistics of it all, it was reported as a race row. In correspondence to the Vauxhall branch in July 1984, the Labour Party’s then leader Neil Kinnock expressed general support towards ending race discrimination in the party, but called the setting up of the Black Sections ‘racially segregationist’.

  The Labour Party Conference of 1984 was a significant one. The membership was voting on whether the Black Sections would be formally established in the party’s constitution. Proposing the motion, the late Bernie Grant MP (then a councillor in the London borough of Haringey) said, ‘Our problem is that blacks are not a priority in the Labour and trade union movement at the moment. Black Sections are here to ensure that they become a priority . . . we are concerned because we have been told that our leaders are against Black Sections. One comrade has said that Black Sections will be turned into black ghettoes.’52 Writing a report of the conference in Race Today, activist Darcus Howe spoke of an organised effort to crush the Black Sections: ‘ . . . The argument was a simple one,’ he wrote. ‘Black Sections divide the working class.’53 The motion to formalise the Black Sections didn’t pass, but their organising led to the election of Britain’s first black Members of Parliament in 1987 – Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant.

  Early one September morning in 1985, police officers broke down the front door of the Groce family in Brixton, south London. The house they burst into was home to thirty-seven-year-old Cherry Groce, and five of her six children. The family heard banging and shouting. Cherry left her eleven-year-old son Lee in her bedroom to find out what was going on. When she went to investigate, she was shot in the chest by a police officer. In a later statement, Cherry said that as she lay on the floor bleeding, police officers continued to shout at her, asking where her oldest son was.54 Testimony from her son confirms this. Speaking to Channel 4 News in 2014, an older Lee recalled those early hours that changed his life. ‘I just saw her on the floor. Lying on the floor. And I saw this policeman standing with the gun. He was basically pointing the gun towards her with his legs apart, and shouting, “Where’s Michael Groce? Where’s Michael Groce?” I was standing up on the bed and I was shouting, “What have you done to my mum?” The policeman turned the gun to me and said, “Shut up!”’55 Michael Groce, twenty-one at the time, was suspected of being involved with an armed robbery. He didn’t live with Cherry when the raid took place.

  Cherry was moved to St Thomas’ Hospital that same morning.56 Meanwhile, local people got hold of the news of Cherry’s shooting, and crowds began to gather on Brixton’s streets. To disperse these crowds, police responded by cladding themselves in riot gear. Clashes between the community and the police led to two days of rioting.57 There were burglaries and looting. Dozens of people sustained injuries, and a photojournalist trying to take pictures of the riot was killed.

  In 1985, Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm estate was heavily policed. But after what happened in Brixton, all police officers were ordered to leave.58 On 5 October, nearly a week after the Brixton riots, Floyd Jarrett was stopped by the police while driving. His tax disc had expired. Because of a minor discrepancy between his car number plate and tax disc, he was arrested for suspected theft of the car. At Tottenham Police Station, off-duty officer Detective Sergeant Randall suggested to his working colleagues that Floyd’s house be searched for any other stolen goods. Keys to Floyd’s mother’s house were taken without his knowledge, and four officers let themselves in. One of those officers was DC Randall.

  Inside they found Floyd’s mother Cynthia, her daughter Patricia, and her small granddaughter. Later that year, Patricia would give evidence to an inquiry about her mother’s death, in which she said, ‘I saw Randall take his left arm and put it around my mother’s shoulder and part of his body pushed her and she fell with her left arm out, breaking the small table.’ DC Randall said that he didn’t make contact with her. The inquiry, drawing on a coroner’s report, decided that DC Randall’s push was not deliberate, but that it had caused Cynthia Jarrett to fall. Either way, she collapsed. Cynthia was taken to North Middlesex Hospital, but died of a heart attack that evening. The same inquest that Patricia gave evidence to delivered a verdict of accidental death.

  The following day, a crowd gathered outside Tottenham Police Station, calling for accountability for Cynthia’s death. According to a report from community activist and organiser Stafford Scott,59 DC Randall, the same officer who has since been proved to have been present for all pivotal points of the previous day, appeared at the window of the police station. Blaming Randall, protesters started to throw things at him. In the chaos that followed, over two hundred police officers were injured. A police officer, PC Blakelock, was killed by rioters.

  A later inquiry into the events of that night commented: ‘Let us recall what the evidence of the inquest and Magistrates Court revealed: – 1) That the officers who first stopped Floyd Jarrett made computer checks on his car, apparently for no other reason than he was a young black man. 2) That they arrested him and took him into custody on suspicion that his car was stolen which had little of any reasonable basis. 3) That they made a charge against him of assault which was found to be false.’60 The officers’ subsequent claim that the Jarrett family had shouted at them and had become abusive towards them while they were searching the house was also false.

  In Brixton, Cherry Groce’s gunshot wound left her paralysed from the waist down. Her children became her full-time carers. Twenty-six years later, aged sixty-three, she died of kidney failure. Her doctors confirmed that her death was directly linked to the gunshot wound. A 2014 inquest placed the responsibility of her death squarely on the police, finding that they failed to properly plan for the raid on the Groces’ home, including adequately checking exactly who was living there.61 That same year, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, head of the Metropolitan P
olice, apologised to the family.

  Thirty years after the 1985 riots, and the cause of the abject neglect of black communities in Britain’s big cities was laid bare for all to see. Files from 10 Downing Street released to the National Archives revealed that Oliver Letwin MP, then an adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, chose not to accept proposals from cabinet ministers who were keen to implement positive action schemes in the inner cities and refurbish run-down and neglected estates. Letwin, still a Member of Parliament at the time of writing, refused these initiatives. ‘Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes,’ he wrote to Thatcher alongside inner cities adviser Hartley Booth. ‘So long as bad moral attitudes remain’, they said, ‘all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder. David Young’s new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade.’62

  Combing through the literature on clashes between black people and the police, I noticed another clash – one of perspective. While some people called what happened in Tottenham and Brixton a riot, others called it an uprising – a rebellion of otherwise unheard people. I think there’s truth in both perspectives, and that the extremity of a riot only ever reflects the extremity of the living conditions of said rioters. Language is important – and the term ‘race riot’ undoubtedly doubles down on ideas linking blackness and criminality, while overlooking what black people were reacting against. The conditions don’t seem to have changed. When the London riots of August 2011 mirrored, almost step by step, what happened in Brixton in 1985, I wondered how often history would have to repeat itself before we choose to tackle the underlying problems.

  I recall these histories not to obsessively comb over the past, but simply to know it. Perhaps I am betraying my ignorance, but until I went actively digging for black British histories, I didn’t know them. I had heard that black people in Britain had always had a difficult relationship with the police. But I didn’t ask why this was the case. It made more sense to me once I understood that innocent people had died, that homes were broken into with scant evidence for searching them, that teenagers and young adults were frisked in a ritual of humiliation. It makes sense to me now how animosity could brew in that environment, and why some insisted that the police were the biggest gang on the streets.

  But I don’t think my ignorance was an individual thing. That I had to go looking for significant moments in black British history suggests to me that I had been kept ignorant. While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.

  We need to stop lying to ourselves, and we need to stop lying to each other. To assume that there was no civil rights movement in the UK is not just untrue, it does a disservice to our black history, leaving gaping holes where the story of progress should be. Black Britain deserves a context. Speaking to the Radio Times, actor David Oyelowo highlighted the lack of historical British films about black people, saying, ‘We make period dramas [in Britain], but there are almost never black people in them, even though we’ve been on these shores for hundreds of years. I remember taking a historical drama with a black figure at its centre to a British executive with greenlight power, and what they said was that if it’s not Jane Austen or Dickens, the audience don’t understand. And I thought, “OK – you are stopping people having a context for the country they live in and you are marginalising me. I can’t live with that. So I’ve got to get out.”63 Faced with a collective forgetting, we must fight to remember.

  I know that there is so much more history out there about people of colour in Britain, if you’re willing to put in the effort to find it. After Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, we were told reported hate crimes drastically grew in number, and that racism was on the rise in Britain again. But looking at our history shows racism does not erupt from nothing, rather it is embedded in British society. It’s in the very core of how the state is set up. It’s not external. It’s in the system.

  2

  THE SYSTEM

  On the evening of 22 April 1993, eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence left his uncle’s house in Plumstead, south-east London, with his friend, Duwayne Brooks. As Stephen and Duwayne waited at a bus stop, Stephen started crossing the road to see if the bus was coming. He didn’t make it to the other side. A later inquiry found that he was confronted by a gang of young white men around his age, who surrounded him as they approached. Stephen was set upon, and stabbed repeatedly. Duwayne fled, and Stephen followed, running over a hundred yards before collapsing due to sustained blood loss. He bled to death on the road.

  A day after Stephen Lawrence’s death, a letter listing the names of the people who turned out to be top suspects in the case was left in a telephone box near the bus stop. In the following months, that letter led to surveillance and arrests. Two people were charged. But by the end of July 1993, all the charges against them had been dropped, with the Metropolitan Police citing that evidence from Duwayne, the only witness to the crime, was not reliable enough. An inquest began later that year. It was halted after the barrister representing the family brought new evidence to the table. A year on, the Crown Prosecution Service chose not to prosecute any of the suspects, again saying that there was insufficient evidence to do so.

  Stephen’s parents launched a private prosecution against three of the suspects. Meanwhile, police surveillance saw the same men suspected of murdering Stephen Lawrence using violent and racist language. By April 1996, the private prosecution launched by his family had failed. This time the judge ruled that evidence from Stephen’s friend Duwayne Brooks, was not valid.

  In 1997, the decision from the inquest initiated in 1993 was announced. Although each of the five suspects refused to answer the questions put to them, a verdict of an unlawful killing in an ‘unprovoked racist attack’ was delivered. Later that year, Kent Police investigated police conduct after an official complaint from Stephen Lawrence’s parents to the Police Complaints Authority. The result nine months later would find ‘significant weaknesses, omissions and lost opportunities’ in the way that the police dealt with the investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s death. Kent Police’s Deputy Chief Constable Bob Ayling spoke to the BBC’s Newsnight programme two years later, calling the police’s investigation into Stephen’s death ‘seriously flawed’. Another key witness had come forward, Ayling revealed, but he had been seen by a low-ranking police officer, and his testimony had been dismissed. Three phone calls had been made to the police by a woman who sounded like she was close to one of the suspects, but her statements were not adequately followed up.

  Now, it is public knowledge that the process of convicting Stephen’s killers was tantamount to a charade. But back in 1997, the public still had faith that the police could solve this crime. In July of that year, the then Home Secretary Jack Straw announced that there would be a judicial inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s death and the following police investigation. It was to be chaired by a High Court judge named Sir William Macpherson.

  Dissatisfied with the police’s handling of the case and their seemingly unending search for justice, in 1998 Stephen Lawrence’s family called on then Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon to resign. He responded not by resigning, but with an apology. ‘I deeply regret that we have not brought Stephen’s racist murderers to justice and I would like to personally apologise again today to Mr and Mrs Lawrence for our failure,’ he told the inquiry while giving evidence. ‘We have heard what people have been saying and I accept that a central concern is that the Met is racist. I acknowledge that we have not done enough to combat racist crime and harassment.’

  Despite this admission, Sir Paul chose not to yield to any suggestions that the Metropolitan Police were institutionally racist. Speaking to the press at the time, Doreen, Stephen’s moth
er and the figurehead of the Lawrence family’s campaign for justice, said, ‘Sir Paul has got fine words. I still have not been given the answer as to why Stephen’s killers are still free.’1

  In a later statement, the Lawrences said: ‘Maybe we need another public inquiry into police corruption for the Commissioner to then accept that these boys were protected in some way. If it hadn’t been for this inquiry, the Commissioner would still be saying that officers did everything they could to bring our son’s killer to justice.’2

  The report of Sir William Macpherson’s public inquiry was published in February 1999. It concluded that the investigation into the death of Stephen Lawrence ‘was marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers’. This institutional racism, the report explained, is ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.’3 Most importantly, the report described institutional racism as a form of collective behaviour, a workplace culture supported by a structural status quo, and a consensus – often excused and ignored by authorities. Amongst its many recommendations, the report suggested that the police force boost its black representation, and that all officers be trained in racism awareness and cultural diversity.

  In 2004, and after another review, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute any of those suspected of murdering Stephen Lawrence. In 2005, a change in the law saw an 800-year-old ban on double jeopardy lifted, meaning that it was no longer illegal to try suspects twice for the same crime. A review of forensic evidence led to a new trial of those suspected of murdering Stephen Lawrence.