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

by Reni Eddo-Lodge

brutally assaulted with truncheons, and taken to Forest Gate Police Station. Once at the police station he was breathalysed. Three breathalyser tests on him failed.’

‘John Power was walking home after having been to a youth club,’

recorded. ‘As he was walking a police car drew up alongside him, by the pavement. The police officer in the car shouted, “Oi, come here you black bastard.” John carried on walking. Then, fearing something may happen, [he] started to run home. The police officers followed him to his house, got to the front door, opened it and pulled John out and then proceeded to beat him.’ When his father intervened, ‘the police officers started beating him up as well.’ When John’s sister saw what was happening and screamed in fear, ‘the police officer asked her to shut up and then pushed and hit her. All three were then put into different vehicles and taken to East Ham Police Station. They were then charged with obstruction and various charges of assaulting police officers.’

Community policing put officers in touch with people in local areas so that residents could get to know them.

approach did not work to the benefit of black people.

an innocent black schoolboy was detained by the police. Eleven-year-old Shaun Robertson’s secondary school had given a police officer who was investigating a robbery the names and addresses of every black child who attended the school. When the police officer mentioned that one of the suspects had two protruding front teeth, a school staff member let them know that Shaun had been to the orthodontist that same day. It was in this way that he became a suspect.

Oral histories from black people who lived through this time tend to maintain one common thread – that the police were not protecting them.

inquiry commissioned by the government

It recommended that the police put more effort into recruiting new officers from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Hendon Police College set up its first Multicultural Unit.

John was elected by his colleagues to head up Hendon Police College’s multicultural unit. But he immediately ran into problems. The first red flag was that the college wanted to put an emphasis on multiculturalism rather than anti-racism.

‘I was not very happy, as a black sociologist,’ he explained. ‘I wanted an anti-racist approach to it. Because the problem is not a black problem. It’s not my culture, not my religion that is the problem. It is the racism of the white institutions.’

His research saw him ask trainee police cadets at the college to write anonymous essays on the topic of ‘blacks in Britain’. The responses were shocking.

‘Blacks in Britain are a pest,’ read one essay.49 ‘They come over here from some tin-pot banana country were [sic] they lived in huts and worked in the fields for cultivating rice and bananas, coconuts and tobacco, and take up residence in our already overcrowded island . . . They are, by nature unintelegent [sic] and can’t at all be educated sufficiently to live in a civilised society of the Western world.’

‘Housing conditions and facilities could be improved for them, but it is not worth it if t...

‘I think that all blacks are pains and should be ejected from society. On the whole most blacks are unemployed, like rastafarians [sic], who go round with big floppy hats, rollerskates and stereo ...

‘The black people in Britain claim that they are British w [sic] the help off [sic] words e.g., I’ve lived in Britain all my life and so [sic] my mum. This is just a load of junk in my mind because white people who live in, say Mozambique are not considered to be part of the country. Blacks are let of [sic] too much by this I mean a Police Officer arrest a black [person] may be called Racial Predjudist[sic]. If all the blacks were deported back to Africa or whe...

‘They were not willing to let me take the anti-racist stance,’

Eastern Eye, a documentary TV series broadcast by London Weekend Television (now ITV London), aired a thirty-minute programme focused on what John had found.

What we do know is that John Fernandes uncovered archaic attitudes that may have influenced policing at the time. His anti-racism course was sorely needed.

As would-be black politicians watched what was happening to communities they came from, they began to push for better black representation.

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’.

It was a movement inside the party with the aim of championing black representation in the party

Early one September morning in 1985, police officers broke down the front door of the Groce family in Brixton, south London.

she was shot in the chest by a police officer.

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

‘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

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.

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.

goods. Keys to Floyd’s mother’s house were taken without his knowledge,

‘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.’

The following day, a crowd gathered outside Tottenham Police Station, calling for accountability for Cynthia’s death.

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.

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

Cherry Groce’s gunshot wound left her paralysed from the waist down.

she died of kidney failure. Her doctors confirmed that her death was directly linked to the gunshot wound.

‘Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes,’

‘So long as bad moral attitudes remain’,

‘all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder. David Young’s new entrepreneurs will set up in...

‘race riot’ undoubtedly doubles down on ideas linking blackness and criminality,

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 had heard that black people in Britain had always had a difficult relationship with the police.

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.

That I had to go looking for significant moments in black British history suggests to me that I had been kept ignorant.

eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.

Black Britain deserves a context.

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.

A later inquiry found that he was confronted by a gang of young white men around his age, who surrounded him as they approached.

He bled to death on the road.