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LSE: Public lectures and events
Racism and racial justice: 40 years on from the Broadwater Farm riots
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Hi everyone. Welcome to the LS scenes this hybrid event. My name's Coretta Phillips and I'm a professor of Criminology and Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy here at the lse. A warm welcome to our in person and our online audience this evening. It's really nice to see so many of you here. The event's co hosted by the International Inequalities Institute and also the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity and is hosted in partnership with the London School of Economic Student Union. So many thanks to all of those organisations for hosting this event. The event's being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast subject to the usual technical difficulties to there being no technical difficulties. There'll be an opportunity to take questions both from the in person audience and online at the end, once our speakers have finished and I'll give you some a reminder of just to introduce yourself and your affiliation before you ask your question. Before I welcome and introduce our esteemed speakers, I want to just reflect on what it means to be badged as a black history event. That's what we're celebrating and that's at the heart of tonight's event. We've become very familiar with Black History Month events now, but for many of us we'll also recall when Black History Month was actually just organized often by left wing councils and third sector organizations. And I think it's still vulnerable to the kind of oppositional claims that it's advantage in black communities to have this separate event as if every other month of the year isn't dominated by the white majority group. That's of course economically and politically advantaged in this country. The other thing I think that's also useful to think about is what we understand by time and by history. We can think of time dynamically. It provides us with a sense of understanding the present when we look back to the past. And it also gives us some insights into the future. We can look back to the 1980s, we can look back with a kind of sense of righteous anger. There'll be terrible times that will be remembered by some of our speakers that reflect on the violence of the time period. Violence often directed at black and brown bodies by the state, by the police in particular, but also immigration authorities. And we can also think about the institutionalised racism in a variety of institutions and in the structures of our society. I think what we should also be doing is reflecting on both the kind of brave and energetic activism of defence campaigns, of police, in particular, police monitoring groups, and maybe feel a sense of hope about what that can achieve in the current moment, given that we are in. Not sure there's probably a useful way of describing this academically, but what just feels like a horrible political moment in which racism is in plain sight, where it's actually, again, we're in a place as we were, I think, in the 1980s where it's quite commonplace to be racist and for there to be a kind of common sense and acceptable racism. And it feels like we're back there. Racism's plaps today, hiding in plain sight. And I think that provides challenges for myself and for Clive and Roxana as academics. We will continue to document the myriad ways in which racism and racialisation operates. But I hope that tonight's event will also give us some signs of hope of what many of you, as younger people who probably have more energy than some of us, will be thinking about what the future holds and the ways in which we can engage differently. Differently perhaps. So let me now turn to our speakers. Sharon Grant has had a long career in service user advocacy in health and social care and has chaired national and London bodies and local charities. She's the founding trustee of the Bernie Grant Arts Centre. She's also Secretary of the Bernie Grant Trust, which holds the archive at the time of the 1985 disturbances, the focus, of course, of our event tonight. She was a university lecturer and Haringey Councillor and later ran her husband's parliamentary office until his death in 2000. She was awarded an OBE in 2014 for service to the arts and the community and an honorary doctorate by Middlesex University in 2023. Clive Chujioke Mwanka is Associate professor in Film Culture and Society in the School of European Languages, Culture and society within UCL's Faculty of the Arts and Humanities, and he's also a Faculty Associate of the UCL Sarah Parker Redmond center for the Study of Racism and Racialization. He's a Senior Visiting Fellow at the LSE Inequalities Institute and Professor in Practice at the British Film Institute. And then Roxana Willis is an Assistant professor in Law here at lse. Her research investigates the legal system through the prism of structural inequality with a focus on class and race. In addition to contacting long term ethnographic research, Roxana teaches criminal law and two optional courses on decolonisation, abolitionism and law. So, Sharon, over to you. So, first speaker, thank you.
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A
Thank you very much. And good evening, everybody. And can I thank you for inviting me to come and speak to you this evening about the events on broadwater farm exactly 40 years ago now. Now, these events had a profound effect not only on those who lived on the estate, but also on many others across Tottenham and beyond. They continue to resonate in the local community, for Britain's wider black community, I think, and for the institutions of law and order, including the police. And I think it's important to stress from the outsource outset that this is not a story about a single night of violence. It was really the eruption of long suppressed feelings of isolation, alienation and suffering amongst Britain's black communities at the time. It's also part of a much longer story, the pain of which continued for many years afterwards for individuals and families who were caught up in it, and the negative stigmatizing effects of which continue to be borne by the local community and communities of color more widely. And it's also the story about how black Britain used its righteous fury to demand a seat at the table in British politics. And it actually got one, as you will see. Anyway, as Chris has already said, at the time of these events, I was a university lecturer, the recently elected Labour councillor, and chair of the ruling Labour group in Haringer, in fact, and I was a partner of the late Banny Grant mp, who a few months before had become the first ever black leader of a local authority in Europe. Let me see if I can make these slides work. That makes me feel better. If you can't do any. That one. Okay, thank you. All right, there you are. Elected the first ever black leader of local authority in Europe. It wasn't until later, in 1987, that he was actually elected to Parliament. And when he was, I left academic life and I ran his parliamentary office until his death in 2000. So Broadwater Farm played a significant part in my life and Bernie's political journey and in the shaping of the struggle for racial justice in Britain. So there we are. That's the two of us, many years ago. So this evening I want to share my reflections on the context of what happened on the 5th of October, 1985, on the personal and political pressures that we faced, and on the legacy that followed, and some of the lessons I think that we can learn from the event. First of all, I'm looking at the audience here. I think there are not many of you here that will actually remember what happened. Given the age range in the audience here, though one or two perhaps will remember I'm not looking at anyone in particular, but in terms of the context of what happened. These events unfolded in the midst of Margaret Thatcher's attempt to reconfigure the post war consensus about public services, about the welfare state and the role of local government. Local councils such as Haringey were in direct conflict with central government over resources. There was this thing called rate capping, which was an attempt to limit the ability of local authorities to raise funds. At the time, it was a key part of this battle and represented not just a technical change, but a fundamental challenge to the local community support and empowerment. At the same time, unemployment was very high. It was disproportionately high for young black men who faced repeated rejection in the labor market, even when they were qualified and eager to work. I need to talk about the context of housing policy at that time. Public housing policy had often concentrated black families on certain states where they experienced daily frustrations of poor housing conditions, leaking roofs, broken lifts, damp walls, delayed repairs. All this was sharpened by the absence of any kind of tenant control at the time. People lived in places that seemed designed to contain them rather than serve them. And on Broadwater Farm, for example, they reckoned between 60 and 80% of the tenants on the estate were black, for example. And of course, racial tensions were not far, were never very far beneath the surface. Margaret Thatcher, as you may know, made this infamous assertion in 1978 that Britain was being swamped by immigrants, and that gave political respectability to many black Britons that heard what she said. The Labour Party, at that time in opposition, led by Neil Kinnock, was desperate to build electoral support in inner cities in the hope of winning back the next election. But it did find itself divided internally between left and right, and then, to an extent, between London and the rest of the country. There was a fear that the London left would be putting off voters in the rest of the country. And of course, there were already, by 1985, quite a lot of difficulties with the police. The policing practices only deepened the sense of alienation in black communities. In Brixton in 1981, Operation Swamp, as they called it, saw over a thousand stops, largely of black youth in six days under the notorious Suss Laws, which allowed police to arrest on suspicion alone. It was heavy handed. It was humiliated and deeply racialized, the use of the Suss laws. And in 1981, there had been an uprising or riot in Brixton and others in Toxteth, Handsworth and elsewhere. And these were warning signals. Those were arrests investigated by Lord Scarman whose report acknowledged that social deprivation was background cause to these disturbances, but it actually downplayed the role of discriminatory policing. But despite those uprisings, those disturbances very little changed. And in September 85, a few days in fact, before the Broadwood Farm incident, police had police in Brixton shot and paralyzed Cherry Gross, a black mother, during a search for her son. And that triggered further unrest in Brixton, in Peckham and in Tottenham and in Toxteth up north. And at the same time, in north London. In 1983, there were already quite a bit of tension down the road. At Stoke Newington, police, a young black man called Colin Roach died in suspicious circumstances which the police labeled suicide. That many in the black community believed otherwise put it mildly. So for young black people at the time, the message was clear. They were vulnerable to a police force that seemed out of control, unaccountable, and often hostile. At the same time, in the background, they watched the struggles against apartheid in South Africa, and some understood that civil unrest could be one of the few ways to draw attention to injustice. So it was in this context that Broadwater Farm erupted, and the spark came in circumstances strikingly similar to Brixton. On the 5th of October, 1985, police raided the home of Cynthia Jarrett. Let me see if this works. Hang on a minute. Cynthia Jarrett was a black mother whose son Floyd had been arrested on a minor motoring charge and quite inexplicably, detained. In the course of the police raiding her home, where actually Floyd didn't live, in effect, Cynthia collapsed and died. Cynthia was 48 years old, a mother of five children and a grandmother of 10. And she was well known on the estate. She not only looked after her own children, but she looked after other people's children during the holidays and the evenings very often. So she was well known. And her death, perhaps understandably, ignited the grief, the anger and the alienation that had built up over the years. As the young people said to us at the time, is it going to be our mother next? What's going on here now in terms of what actually happened on the night? The Jarrett family were closely involved with the Broadwater Farm Youth association, and news of Cynthia's death spread very quickly. A meeting was demanded at the police station, and the records of that meeting show that, really the police were giving no explanation as to why, and they had raided Cynthia's home and how it came about that she had passed away. And there was a subsequent meeting at the Youth association building on the estate on the evening, which was a very, very Angry meeting, I was there. A lot of the elders and leaders in the black community tried to calm the young people, but frankly they weren't listening and we left. They planned a second protest outside the local police station in Tottenham. But before they could actually organize themselves, became clear that police vans were starting to arrive on the estate and coaches carrying large numbers of police appeared down the road. And indeed, what we now know is that there was some evidence that the police were actually planning for a disturbance some time before it actually happened. So when these vans started descending on the estate, many of the young people fell under siege. Confrontations followed. Bottles were thrown at the police vans, cars were set on fire, looting began and the estate descended into flames. And that night, as we now know, a police officer, PC Keith Blakelock, was brutally killed and several other police officers were injured. His death was quite shocking and it cast a long shadow for years to come. PC Blakelock was about 40 years old, father of three and a husband, and he had been a local beat officer in Muswell Hill. And he was therefore known to a lot of the local police as a colleague. For our part, Bernie and I were in a civic reception some miles away. There was a visiting dignitary and we got a call to switch on the television. Somebody said the Broadwater farm was in flames, so we switched on the television. Yes, it was. We jumped in our car, made our way back. There were police cordons everywhere, but because we knew the area, we were able to get through. And what we saw was unbelievable fires, shattered glass, frightened families and the ever present press pack, lots of TV cameras, journalists trying to understand what was going on. And it was at that moment that Bernie Grant, little known leader of Haringer council, then stepped into national prominence. As I said, Bernie was the first leader of a local authority, but not really a household name. But he knew Broadwater Farm well, he knew the young people, he knew their experience of harassment by the police over the years. And he's been working for some years on the state on a number of initiatives to try to improve it, to bring economic development. And he truly understood the daily harassment that the young people endured. I remember specifically pointing the group of journalists towards him and saying, if you want to talk to someone, talk to him. To lead the council, sometimes I wonder whether that was the right to think of thing to have done. But anyway, I did, I must admit. And from that point he became the center of attention and he took the side of the community. He insisted what had happened could not be understood without recognizing the alienation and despair that had produced this situation. And to the fury of many, he refused to condemn the rioters. And the next day, under questioning, he tried to report how they perceived the events of the previous night. And what he said was that the youths believed that they had given the police a bloody good hiding. Now, that phrase ignited rage, I'm saying, across the land. But he was articulating what the youths believed and clearly, as only weeks before, he'd only just been selected as Labour's parliamentary candidate for Europe. So this was, or a little bit inconvenient. But the estate lay in his ward and he felt he could not, and he would not turn away from what he saw as the truth. And in the coming days, he made it clear to young people that violence was not the answer and demanded that resources be made available to address the housing conditions, the economic hardship and the lack of opportunities that underpin the disturbance, as well as criticizing the police handling of the situation. And he called for an inquiry into what had happened. Now, unfortunately, the analysis of the deep seated causes of the disturbances were not shared by the ministers of Mrs. Thatcher's government. And there was quite a different perspective predominant in Downing street about what had caused it. But it wasn't until, I think 2015, in the course of papers being revealed, you know, some papers are only revealed 30 years after the event, that we came across some advice that Mrs. Thatcher had been given and clearly believed. It was a memo written by the then Oliver Letwin, who's been since been an mp, but I think at that time was researcher. And what he said in this memo was that the root of social malaise is not poor housing or youth alienation. Lower class unemployed white people have lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order or anything like on anything like the present scale. Riots, criminality and social disintegration, he said, are caused solely by individual characteristics and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will flounder. Putting money into these local economies would simply encourage the disco and the drug trade, he said. The answer, he said, was to change moral attitudes to personal responsibility, honesty and the police from an early age. And a further paper argued that setting up a community program to tackle inner city problems would do little more than subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops. That was the advice that Mrs. Thatcher was being given. And so you see, there were different perspectives on what had happened and why. Anyway, the reaction to the event, to these events and to Bernie's defense of the Community was immediate. This is a picture of Cynthia Jarrett, by the way. This is the one picture that her family supplied in comparison to another one. Quite an offensive picture that the press often used. So the press coverage was emotive, to put it mildly. The press willfully understood Bernie's comments on the situation and branded him reckless. Some of them labeled him a black nationalist. And they had some pretty choice words to say about young people on the state who were seen as lazy jobs. And Bernie became known thereafter as Barmy Bernie. The Home Secretary described Bernie as the high priest of race hatred and other press coverage. Well, there's a lot of pressure on Neil Kinnner to disqualify Bernie as a parliamentary candidate. There we go. That's in the. Was that the Daily Express at the time again? Time to act, Neil. No longer is Bernie Grant going to be. How long is he going to be permitted to stay in the Labour Party, etc. Etc. And that's just a small sample of the press coverage. The press, the Home Secretary described him as the high priest of race hatred and his words were interpreted as being nothing less than the product of a severely deranged mind. According to the Daily Star, other people thought that he should be arrested for breaching peace. And as a result of a lot of this. We will come back to that in a minute. We received a huge amount of racist mail as obviously Bernie was the leader of the council and his office was deluged with large amounts of very, very racist mail from the public at that time. I would remind you, if you wanted to write a letter to somebody who had to actually write it down and put a stamp on it and put it in the post. And they did in very, very large numbers and quite disgusting material. So bad that we had to take some of the staff who opened this mail off of the job because they were so disturbed by it. It went on for some weeks. At the same time all this was going on, a lot of myths sprang up about what had happened. There were stories appearing in the press. Disturbance had been planned a long time in advance, that there were lakes of petrol and stores of petrol bombs hidden on the state. That the young people had been trained in military style training camps. In fact, Bernie had taken a lot of these youths to Cuba for military training, would you believe there was another suggestion that the youth were making napalm on the estate, would you believe? But it was just incredible, the amount of stories that were invented around this. None of them were true. All of them designed to paint the black community as an insurgent threat and to scape them collectively for the tragedy. An interesting theme of the coverage was the clear implication that either Bernie himself was responsible for the death of the policeman or that he knew who committed the murder. The assumption being that because the culprit was black and actually nobody knew who he was, and that because he. Black. Because he was black, he would know. So there was something, the sort of collective responsibility of black people for whatever had been done by somebody that might have been black. Of course, he didn't know who did it. And still today, actually, nobody does know who did it about which. More later. And at the same time as this was going on, as a local authority, at that time, we were trying to introduce quite a number of policies to address institutionalized racism, whether it be on housing or education or social services. And in the popular press, this was denounced as evidence of extremism. The council rang, the popular press, rang numerous ridiculous stories with racist undertones designed to mock Bernie. In particular this one here, the allegation was that Bernie was forcing the staff to drink Marxist coffee that was produced in Nicaragua, which believe this is some of the piles and piles of racist mail that we receive. We've got it all in our archive. If anyone does want to go and read this stuff, it came in bundles. Another story was that Bunny had decided to ban black bin liners because they were racist. There we go. So that was one that's a bit of a mock up of some of the headlines that were produced as a result of this. This one always amuses me. I was chair of the Women's Committee at the time, and the story was that I was calling that Les Lesbians Wanted all women's cemeteries. Would you believe who thought that one up? It certainly wasn't. So the aim was clear to use racist stereotypes to portray Bernie as a dangerous baboon, a madman from the jungle, to ridicule him politically and to undermine the growing influence of black leadership in public life. The scrutiny of ourselves was relentless. Our personal lives were dissected, our family members pursued. Carloads of reporters were outside our home for at least two years. And after I myself, as I said, was a university lecturer's lecturer, I was followed to my work by journalists who tried to get into my lectures to prove that I was trying to distort young minds. They went to my pigeonhole and stole my. My letters and my mail. And a lot of very juicy commentary about the fact that I was a white woman with a black man. We'll go on about that anyway. Eventually, Neil Kinnock refrained from removing Bernie as a candidate and in fact, he paid a visit to Haringey and to the estate, and we have pictures of that in our archive. And I think that he was advised by many of those around him that Bernie Starts was actually broadly supported by the many black voters in marginal constituencies, and therefore he thought better of the idea of disqualifying Bernie. And so it was in the local elections in 1986. That would be May 86, just a few months after the disturbances. The people of Harry Marengay gave their verdict on all of this. But in fact, Bernie actually increased the Labour councillor's majority, gaining an even larger proportion of votes, and banished the Conservatives to the back benches. And then in 1987, despite an ongoing campaign of vilification, he was elected to Parliament as one of Britain's first black MPs. There we go. He was elected and we understand that the young people of Broadwater Farm whooped and a lot of high fives appeared as Bernie appeared in full African dress at the state opening of Parliament. So they saw it as an achievement, a political achievement for them, I think. Meanwhile, in the wake of the death of PC Blakelock, there was a massive police operation. In the weeks after the disturbance, hundreds, we reckon, 360 people were arrested. Doors were smashed in, juveniles were held without solicitors. Parents were left not knowing where their children were. Amnesty International published a report denouncing the treatment of detained suspects, many of them juveniles who were denied access to lawyers during lengthy periods of interrogation. They were tricked into signing documents, threatened and forced to make admissions, et cetera, et cetera. At its height on the estate, there were, it's reckoned there were 8,000 police officers in the weeks following the disturbances. And it's almost like an army of occupation, we were told civil liberties were trampled on in the name of reasserting order. Scores of homes were searched, front doors broken down by squads of armed police officers very often. And young people were kept naked in cells for days with no representation, forced into making concessions in order to get out of the cell. The community set up the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign to protest these abuses and to expose the scale of the police. Neglect the scale of the police. Neglect of process. International jurors condemned the process too, and eventually some of the convictions were overturned. But only one police officer ever was brought to book on this. I think one got some internal disciplinary hearing, but apart from that, there was no accountability as far as the officers involved were concerned. As our calls for a public inquiry were denied by Mrs. Thatcher and her friends, we commissioned our own inquiry, a proper public inquiry, almost like a select committee in fact, chaired by Anthony Gifford cc had a representative from the churches and other leadership figures on the panel and that did a great deal to evidence the social and economic background to the disturbance and helped to correct the record, particularly in relation to some of these wild stories that I talked about earlier. And those stand as very useful records of the facts of the matter. And in particular we asked the panel to return to Bordwater Farm a year or two later. And there's a particularly useful material in the second report about the individual cases of individuals of young people who were wrongly convicted and treated so badly. And of course, as a local mp, Bernie played a considerable part in campaigns to expose all of this. And of course he was central to the most notorious case of all, which was the case of the so called Tottenham 3. In the case of Engin Rakhip, Mark Braithwaite and Winston Silcott, who were convicted of the murder of PC Baytok on really no evidence, but not before their names and faces had been plastered all over the press, as I'm sure you'll hear from other speakers, in a very, very intimidating and racist manner. And as many of you know, after a tremendous campaign, it was discovered that the so called confessions on which they had been convicted had been falsified and they were eventually acquitted of those charges. But I think whenever I talk about this, I think one has to pay huge homage to the families and the community that were involved in those campaigns who turned up month after month, went all over the country campaigning about what had happened and were determined that those convictions should not stand. They went everywhere they could possibly think, they harassed MPs and eventually they got huge numbers of people on their side and they included churches, trade unions, other members of Parliament. So the pressure to examine those cases was, was enormous and eventually they won through the. Yeah, sorry, going here. Yeah. We commissioned some international jurists to look at what is the way in which the police had behaved. We also commissioned a report on Engin rabbit racket. One of the accused, who it turned out was illiterate and could not have signed the confession that he alleged to have made. And this was the Amnesty International report. All of this is in the Bernie Grant archive, if anybody wants to go and look at it. I'm just showing it off today. And again, this was press release from Burnie. Well, making the case for looking at the convictions, the Tottenham three convictions. Yet again. And again the final outcome where the cases were seemed to have been based on false confessions. One also needs to pay tribute to the work of investigative journalists in all of this, because some of them did a great deal of work. In particular, I think the BBC did a program which really did cast serious doubt. The convictions. Okay, so in terms of the legacy of all this and the meaning that we can attach to what happened, first of all, I think it reminds us that policing without trust is unsustainable. Where there isn't any trust, there can't be any order. And people won't tolerate the abuse of authority forever. Secondly, it shows us the cost of prejudice. When communities are stereotyped and. And demonized, when their grievances are ignored, unrest isn't surprising. It's inevitable. I think thirdly, the story illustrates the need for political courage at a moment of crisis. Bernie could have backed down. Might have been easier for him at the time, in effect. But he didn't bow to distortion. He spoke the truth as his community lived it. And for that, the community gave him their support. Some would say that we need more politicians in this mode and that party leaders should try not to constrain the expression of genuine lived experience in their ranks. I've got very vigilant memories of older black residents who told me as they went to the polls that they'd never voted before and now they finally had something and someone worth voting for, which I think spoke a lot. And the authenticity that he took with him into Parliament gave him a credibility, I think that enabled him to take up a wide range of other concerns, other issues of concern to an increasingly diverse Britain. He used it well, I think, whether it was on domestic concerns about institutionalized racism or about challenging international injustices of slavery and colonization. You remember the later case of the Joy Gardner, a Jamaican immigrant who was killed by the police in her home in front of her child that some of you may remember. Here he is on one of his many international trips to in Sudan in this case. And in using his Britishny Parliament, he developed this campaign for reparations. And this is one of the banners which we have in the archive. And obviously a lot of international work he was able to do once he got into Parliament. In this case, he was ably present when Nelson Mandela was released and when Nelson Mandela came to visit us in Haringey later on. So I think Broadwater Farm's lessons are painfully relevant. We learn about the importance of documenting people's lived experience. We have the facts about what happened because we made sure that the evidence was collected at the time. Otherwise it Might not have been so easy. I think we can learn from this about the importance of a strong and respected independent voice, such as we had with the black press at that time. I think it's important to emphasize that at that time we had the Voice and the Caribbean Times and the Asian Times who backed up what Bernie was saying about the experience of young people on the street. I'm not sure that we have that anymore, actually in the same way, and I think that's something worth reflecting on. What we can also, what we should also talk about, keep talking about, is the deficits in police accountability. Since 1985, there have been further scandals, Bock Stephen Lawrence investigation, the death of Joy Gardner. And there remain serious concerns about the values dominating in policing, as the Louise Casey report showed recently. And I think there's a story in the police this very day about what's going on in Charing Cross police station. There's still a long way to go on police accountability. Another issue I'd pick up before I finish is that we hear an awful lot of political rhetoric at the moment attacking so called WOKE activist lawyers, which is a dangerous attempt, I think, to delegitimize those lawyers who are simply doing their job in defending human rights. Without those lawyers, certainly the Tottenham Three would still be in prison, as would a number of other people. And we should ensure that those lawyers are still able to do that work. And of course, we still see young people in communities of color growing up with a sense of marginalization. Opportunity for genuine dialogue between the police and the communities do remain still few, still far too few. There has been some progress. I think there is more recognition of diversity in public life. There are some spaces over fragile for engagement. The Bernie Grant Arts Centre, which was an ideal that he had shortly before he died, but it's now been built. It stands as a testament, I think, to cultural resilience. And we have also established the Bernie Grant Archive, which we've recently started to digitalize, along with my good friend here sitting at the front, Professor Kurt Barling. And we're trying to apply AI to that archive and that's one way of ensuring that history is preserved and told by the communities that actually lived it. So in conclusion, 40 years on, I feel very sad about what happened, but also proud of the way in which people fought back against the oppression they were experiencing. I'm very proud of obviously my late husband and those who fought to ensure that justice prevailed in the end and that continue to fight for a police, which is a police force that's Truly accountable. Thank you very much.
- [45:50]
B
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell.
- [45:52]
C
You about another awesome LSE podcast that.
- [45:55]
B
We think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why.
- [46:03]
C
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- [46:06]
B
Or can we afford the super rich?
- [46:09]
A
Come check us out.
- [46:10]
C
Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts.
- [46:15]
A
Now back to the event.
- [46:17]
B
So, a reminder. Clive Chiji. Okay. Nuonka is Associate professor in Film Culture and Society at ucl.
- [46:25]
D
Thank you for an amazing opening talk by Sharon. This lectern wasn't built for tall people, so touch down slightly. So forgive me. So, firstly, I'd like to thank obviously Sharon, Coretta and Roxane, who'll be speaking after me, for accepting my invitation to be part of this event and the LSE SU in particular, for selecting this as their lead event for LSE's Black History Month month. It's always a pleasure to return to LSC on such a platform, where I enjoyed a good relationship with the SU during my time working in teaching here in the Department of Sociology. This, of course, is intended to be a response to the fantastic talk by Sharon, but in reality this functions more as a kind of parenthesis, for there's much in my own thinking that finds a resonance with Sharon's talk. Before I proceed with this, I would like to preface my contribution by drawing our attention to a quite salient moment in LSE's history that should be understood as precisely black history. For deeply embedded in the history of Water Farm's public campaign for justice is the LSE and specifically the lsesu. And one of my primary motivations for wanting to host the event here is a result of an area of underexplored research I discovered in the course of writing on this topic. In 1989, the LSCSU, led by its then president, Amanda Hart, in response to the conviction of Tottenham three, awarded Winston Silcox the Honorary Presidency of the LSCSU with the sole intention of increasing public awareness of antidural public contention to the conviction as an offence to justice and the need for fair trial. This was a stance that was met by support from other university SUs, but also widespread castigation by the LSC directorship, by mainstream media and by sections of the public. And there is a certain symmetry in that we are marking the anniversary here within the LSC's old theatre, for was in this very building in May 1989, where what was to be known colloquially as the Silke Affair there reaches apex when extraordinary Meeting by the LSCSU to vote on the motion to rescind the Honorary Presidency became cause a libre not just within and across university sector, but across the public. Present and speaking that day was also Lord Anthony Gifford kc, the noted human rights barrister, speaking that day, and of course chairman of the Border Farm Inquiry, who described the case as, I quote, the most serious miscarriage of justice in a jury trial of this decade. That fair trial will of course finally take place at the Court of appeal on 25th November 1991, where after just 90 minutes, all would have their murder convictions overturned after forensic evidence revealed gross miscarriages of justice by the police, including the fabrication of written evidence and the drawing of confessions under extreme duress. Now, I've highlighted this for two reasons. Firstly, to remind us that the interrogation of racial injustice is the public purpose of the university, which should be applied to not just academics, but its students as well. And secondly, in the context of this history, it is correct that we acknowledge the LSCSU and of course Amanda Hart, who I believe is with us this evening for that display of conviction and temerity. This was about black history and the LSE su. On the right side of that history, you will find in the archives in the LSE library, we have no entries beyond 1990 on this matter. Hopefully this evening and these conversations will act as a kind of overdue addendum to that archive. So, on the 1st of October 2023, just going back again, bit my book Black Boys was published. And in my opening chapter I explore how ideas and depictions across the media of a criminalized black identity find their genesis in myth. Now, as Levi Strauss argues, the nature of myths cannot be understood in their singularity, but through an ecology of relational meanings. Thus, the question of myth is central to the exploration representations of the broader farm rights, but also its function as a symbolic location. Now, this was a descriptive term, a highly racialized one that was applied by the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner Kenneth Newman in 1983 that identified areas marked by crime and violence, high unemployment and drug dealing and abuse. There was an instinctive racial connotation present in the categorization of such locations as no go areas. And the symbolic location became an all encompassing shorthand for the public denigration of black communities, one being the border farm estate in Tottenham. It's how the mythic construction of the urban as a geography for the spectacle of unassumable black identity can be approached through the framework provided by Levasras in his idea of my theme, the units of a myth are the basis of a narrative structure from which myths are constructed and actioned. This theory asks that the my theme should be understood as unification of theme, characterization and event. And such formation is conducive to a reading of the mythical portrayal of Winston Silcott in which racial imagery lay close to the surface. Central to my identification of my theme in the development of the social idea of black savagery as indexical to the symbolic location, our urtext here is to be identified in the circulation of the image of Winston Silcott. What is encoded in the figure of Silcott as the symbolic location, symbolic target, the mythic creation of a black savagery is not necessarily assured through the fact that he had been identified by the police a priori as a primary suspect in the murder of Keith Blayclop, but the symbolic product of the black myth made tangible by both the image and the methods through which the image was captured. According to Silcott, having been arrested days after the murder, he had been asleep in his cell when he was dragged out of his cell by several police officers and taken into a custody room where a camera and tripod were set up. After momentarily struggling, he was then suddenly let free by the officers where a photograph was taken of him startled, with his hands raised slightly by his side. As we can see, we find an account of this in the 2005 BBC documentary on Borte Farm that was made by the then BBC journalist Kurt Barling, who I'm very, very pleased to say is with us this evening. What interests me here is the disturbing racial choreography of the image that was to be circulated by the police to the mainstream tabloid media and then lead up to 1987 murder trial. For so many involved in the public campaign for justice, from the top three, our innocent campaign to the broader farm defence campaign, to legal counsels, this was the image that convicted Winston Silcott. I'm of course in agreement with Kurt Barling's assertion that this image created a monster to stalk the nightmares of Middle England. But the image also possessed a bi directionality, for it also had a permeation across the black population. There was a generation of black men, black people, my generation, who were confronted with the image and narrative of Winston Silcott as a black figure of danger and were, in the earliest recollections of an official black discorded menace. In other words, it is this image of Winston Silcott that made them scared of black male identity. As I state in my book, the feelings dispersed by the unsettling power of the monochrome Image of Silcott and his forced choreography of racial menace. The ahistorical acceptance and association with a figure as the black savagery, antagonistic in the mythical narrative of a haunting black non being, becomes animalistic in nature. And in considering how the myths are anchored in meaning by the use of captioning as argued by so many, this photo finds its correspondence with the racial logics within the tabloid media representation. In the accompanying text, where Silcot is described as a monster and a beast. The photo of Silcot in all its claims to represent, in the conjunction of image and text, is equally where its racialized meanings arrive at a point of illogical disclosure. In doing so, the image secures into the publics the Beast of Brawater as a natural creation of a symbolic location. It's about being haunted by the image of and the accompanying words of immediateised construction of the Beast of Broadwater as a black monster, as a savage, as evil. For even upon the acquittal of Winston Silcot In November 1991, broadcast and tabloid media were unified in their use of this image in their coverage. Upon being awarded compensation for false imprisonment, malicious prosecution and wrongful conviction in 1999, it was again this stock image of the Beast of Broadwater that was circulated by the media. Black intellectual work has always provided a way of understanding this. I'm recalling the words of the French philosopher Frantz Fanon. The glances of the other fixed me there in a sense in which a chemical solution is fixed. In Dyke we have the often cited work by Stuart hall and the consideration of the racial contingencies that structure the uneven application of the evil labor. In other words, the machinery through which those marginalized identities are classified as evil is constructed upon existing hierarchies of race and the acceptance of black or blackness itself as violent crime. Webb, Du Bois and the idea of a double consciousness. Seeing oneself through one's own eyes and simultaneously seeing oneself as others perceive them through a racial lens. For those of us, like myself, who live within these black symbolic locations, geographies and communities, this informed our cognizance of how we inhabit public space, institutional space, of who we are, what others think we are, how others perceive us to be, and the actions of those perceptions. And we are surrounded by the residues and facsimiles of what I describe as the racializing of the otherwise benign imagination. Or, in simple language, how the black urban figure as a historical figure of social anxiety becomes resignified through new discourses, representations of blackness and criminality. The images of hauntology, the recurring presence of ghosts, images, ideas, spheres and figures amiss born from the past that maintain a haunting effect on the present. This is a harming effect in present and illustrates how the violence suffered by black people from the period of slavery, colonization and beyond is re experience in the coloracial justice confronting Black Britain. I have a simple anecdote to illustrate this. In June 2018 I was accosted on this very LSE campus outside my place of work, outside my own department by an LS and two LSE security guards after I was wrongly and unjustly categorized, classified, identified as someone in possession of what was told to me as high risk of confrontation and violence. Eventually there were apologies and penitents, but the sighting of this experience has a much more salient purpose. It was true to me at that moment. I embodied the black my theme that my status as an LSU academic could not and does not transcend my basic identity as a black male within a space of racial homogeneity, the myth of black danger. This is why the legacy brought to farm cannot be reduced to the event. But how the meaning of the media construction of the image is observed in the contemporary social infrastructure, our legal systems, education, the premature adultification of black children, policing AI, how live facial recognition technology discriminates against people of color color how the angry black woman stereotype is so alive in society how institutional processes are incautious to the dangers of racial categorization and incurious to its origins, manifestations and consequences, and who approach the question of insexuality at best as inconvenience at worst with contempt. To conclude, I accept there is great perturbation and debate over the meaning and purpose of Black History Month, much of which I actually share and agree with. And in the exploration of the racial impetus so powerfully encoded in the image of Winston Silcott, and how the historical meanings continue to haunt both black and white people into the contemporary. It may help us to think about the current erosion of the humanities as academic discipline purpose to interrogate such experiences. Black History Month can indeed be about celebration, but also about confrontation, interrogation, contestation, preservation and address. It can be about how we can allow ourselves to draw moral and ethical instruction about the black condition from history. It was a singular act associated with Broads a farm, the killing of PC Keith Blakelock in such horrific circumstances that became the pathologizing event that unifies black identity with the racial imaginaries abroad to farm. Thus the choreography of the Black mind theme refers to a relational body of myths, racial myths that became implicated in the Fictive allure of a moment of black social crisis that became the basis for mainstream media representation which carries with it specific forms of social meaning when presented to us within official context, is in the particular image of Winston Silkworm that we can observe the aggregation of the my themes that indeed created a monster to stalk the nightmares of Middle England, but also the nightmares of black Britain. Thank you.
- [61:11]
B
Thank you. So really pleased to introduce Dr. Roxana Willis, who's an assistant professor in the law school at lse.
- [61:22]
C
Thank you and it's an honor to talk today. I will be quick in my reflection. I give. So I was asked to speak about the broadwater farm riots 40 years on and how it relates to my research. And I really wanted to share a hopeful narrative. You know, things that have really radically changed in 40 years. And I did try. I won't go into the Tottenham three because that's been really well explained by our previous speakers. Looking into the Tottenham three and the injustices, it jumps out. The recent Manchester four case, which involved 10 young black men in Manchester, were involved in the case, and four in particular young black men were convicted for conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to cause GBH on the basis of very tenuous evidence. Using social media posts, you know, a couple of posts, and these young men being given really lengthy sentences in court. So we see these strong reflections of these miscarriages of justice. And I thought very recently we've seen the decision at least of one of the young men, Adam Moller, being quashed, being found as not valid for this conspiracy conviction. And he was recently exonerated from that crime. And some of the other co defendants, their sentences were reduced. So I thought, hooray, we have a success story and reflecting of the Tottenham three. You know, the community in a similar way, with kids of color and community activism, lawyers, academics at lse, a big movement move to support the young men in the Manchester case. However, you'll be screaming at, how is this a success story? Here we find ourselves again with the same situation, young black men being pulled into the criminal justice system and having their lives turned upside down. So then I looked elsewhere, I thought, okay, maybe we'll find a happier story. Looking at some of the progress that has been made in terms of the inquest, the inquiries and so on, perhaps we can find some legal reform that has led to change, perhaps hate crime law. Hate crime law surely is a state recognition of this systemic violence. And we've had progress from the 90s. These new laws introduced where racism is now considered an aggravated offense. A Worsening, notwithstanding the importance of hate crime legislation, we've also, in this perverse situation of hate crime law, the law that was developed to protect black people and people of color, it's just being used time and time again against these same populations. And there's been a spate of these cases happening. And Ife Thompson's work's really interesting in this and I point to her podcast. This phenomenon of people of color being convicted for hate crime is not just in the uk, it's America, as we might expect. But all over the world we're seeing this kind of trend of hate crime laws being used against the same race, racialized populations they were purportedly designed to return. So here we don't find our happy story yet. Now, black scholars and abolitionists, feminists, they've helped to explain why these perverse outcomes arise with legal change. They argue any law that leads to the empowerment of the police in any way, even if these laws are purportedly designed to protect people of color, they're always going to have a negative impact on black communities. Why? Because we're in a society of systemic racism. Racism. So any efforts to empower the police will only lead to more violence against these same communities. It's inevitable. It's part of the structure. But I find within this literature hope and a kind of way forward and Ruth Gilmore's work in particular. She gives us this concept and takes an old concept and does her own thing with it of the non reformist reform. And how might this non reformist reform be a way for us to find in the next 40 years? How so? The difference between a reformist reform and a non reformist reform. The reformist reform might lead to the. We expand the norm, at least to the empowerment of the police. In some way it leads to the state gaining more power or resources being sent into the criminal justice system. However, a non reformist reform is distinct from this. A non reformist reform aims to tackle the injustices of the system. It aims to lead to a transfer of power from the state to the people people. It's an aim to be more democratic in the type of law reform we seek to pursue. Instead of empowering the police, let's empower communities. And so I wanted to think about is there an example of a non reformist reform in law that we could pursue? And this relates to an area of my research I've kind of going into. I have thought about this in relation to criminal justice and is there a way we can empower communities through criminal justice? But perhaps we can Empower communities in other ways by stepping outside of criminal justice. Here I'm looking at environmental justice in particular. I'm so sorry. I had insomnia last night and I just completely came. Let me just move. I lost my point of the paper straight away. Okay, Okay. I just want to talk about this area of law that I'm moving into, and it's away from criminal justice. And I feel it's important to mention this because especially talking about mythology and associations of black people with criminality, looking for alternative ways that the community can be empowered. Zayan's Law is a recent campaign that I've become familiar with. And this is a harrowing case of. Of. So all across the UK there's contaminated land and people are harmed in all sorts of ways. So we have structural violence and all forms of violence, which you can see the echoings of the Broadwater Farm riots and how the situations that led to the riots happening in the first place. And in this case, it has nothing to do with the police violence direct. But there is an example of state violence. So Zane was at his home and he was 7 years old at home. Toxic fumes from a local landfill leaked into his home and killed Zane and left his father severely disabled. How do we hold the state accountable for these type of violences which are affecting socioeconomically disadvantaged and racialized communities in particular? And I feel that Zane's Law's campaign gives us an example of how Pope and A non reforms.
- [67:52]
A
Reform.
- [67:52]
C
If you were the family involved in this case, you could definitely see that we'd want punishment or to go down a way that would lead to empowerment of the police or empowerment of the state in some way to investigate this. And I think what's really inspiring about this case is how it would lead to the empowerment of the community. So what Daines Law is campaigning for is information, public information about where toxic land sites are based.
- [68:17]
A
Waste.
- [68:18]
C
Public information that's accessible and can be challenged and holding the state to account. So the state being responsible for toxic waste and what happens in the community. Coming back to Ruth Gilmour's Non Reformers Reform, what we see here is an empowerment not of the state, but of the people. It's a different way. It turns the lens on how we tackle state violence, racialized violence and systemic injustice. Smith and I urge you to look at this today. Thank you.
- [68:52]
D
I.
- [68:53]
C
Sorry, I completely forgot.
- [69:03]
B
Thank you to all of our speakers as food for thought. Try not to be very pessimistic about the legacies and where we are. We've Talked about riots. We've had many of Those since the 1980s in which race has often been implicated. We've had many more wrongful convictions. We've had many more examples of violence by the police and by border agencies. We now have some time for questions, both from the audience here and also our online audience. So as a reminder, please, can you state your name if you have a question for our speakers and also your affiliation? So the floor's open. Thank you. So we have 1, 2, 3. Thank you. Can we get the mic to. Thank you.
- [70:00]
C
So I'm Christina, and I come from.
- [70:03]
A
London Academy of Excellence.
- [70:04]
C
And my question is for Dr. Clark.
- [70:08]
A
And it is, do you feel that.
- [70:09]
C
The justice system is racially rooted when giving sentences?
- [70:15]
D
Thanks for the question. Absolutely. So I think legal history suggests that. I think more recent cases show that as well. Some of Roxanne's work you were looking at as well, kind of evidences, you know, cases, joint enterprise, the user kind of wrap in kind of criminal kind of convictions. So it seems to me there is still a kind of swell of unfairness, injustice, racial injustice in the legal systems that is really kind of targeting young black men in ways that are being challenged by legal scholars and beyond, as well as some on this kind of panel now. But I think there hasn't been, to be pessimistic, much difference in how we assess the 80s and now. I think maybe the approaches are more sophisticated and hard to actually identify, but the actual impetus of the racialization of young men through the criminal justice, I think, remains as they were in the examples you can have shown.
- [71:19]
B
Thank you for your question. Here, please. Thank you. Hello, my name is Profit, and I'm.
- [71:26]
A
Studying inequality here at the lse as a master's student. My question is to all of you, I suppose, and I wrote some notes.
- [71:34]
B
Just on violence as a concept.
- [71:38]
A
And I feel that we tolerate forms of violence structurally in all sorts of different ways that are perpetrated against those who are marginalized, those who are deemed inferior, who are supposedly deserving of this violence, and this violence is justified and is targeted through dehumanization, subjugation. I'm wondering why we only scoff at and condemn violence as not legitimate when the marginalized repurposes this violence in the interest of their own liberation. I'm wondering how and when do we move away from this neoliberal conception of nonviolence to achieve liberation? When legal wins and when these legal winds of rights often fall short in delivering sustained changes materially to communities, and also when meaningful state accountability Continuously slips away from us as the state is often the one policing itself. Yeah, so I guess overall I'm just wondering, you know, how and when do we move away from this one sided conception of violence? Especially when that one sided conception is usually used to further subjugate the people.
- [72:40]
B
Who rightfully express it for their own liberation.
- [72:43]
A
Sorry, very long winded.
- [72:44]
B
But thank you, Roxana.
- [72:50]
D
I mean, I broadly agree. I've got no contestation with your observation there. I think the way that we, we apply the kind of policing of violence has always been pretty kind of one sided towards the kind of those who are kind of being marginalized. And again to be pessimistic, I'm sorry, but like you don't see much kind of change from the kind of, the previous kind of areas we're looking at to now. I guess for me as a kind of cultural studies person is how then do you address that? I think that becomes a much more kind of capacious kind of question. I can't really answer them. I mean, mobilization has helped definitely, but that's not always been enough historically. So I take a bit more of a skeptical position, unfortunately, how we get to address those things. They're so deeply ingrained and rooted. You go back to the earliest kind of days of, you know, racial protest, you know, violence was kind of used against those kind of marginalized, so kind of protest against our own kind of violent kind of experiences. So. So I struggle with the kind of methodology to kind of work out of that.
- [73:59]
A
Yeah, I'm not quite sure of the question, but I think that when people perceive injustice, they will find ways of responding to that injustice. And in fact justice involves violence and there is no mitigation of their circumstances. Then as a last year's award, I think people will respond with violence. Obviously it's unfortunate, but as I says, you can't really see how that cycle is going to be broken if that's what your question is aimed at. And I think as I said when I spoke, if, if people feel as though the system is stacked against them in such an obvious way, they will eventually react. And often it is about Oxley community that have no other way of reacting. They have no power, they have no money, they have no other way of fighting back than to use the violence that is directed at them. So I think that's all I can say.
- [75:12]
B
I mean, I guess I would just also add that there's always the trap. Right. Because the way in which violence is characterized, you know, that was at the heart of what Clive was Talking about means that there's always a means by which it can be turned back on those who do express their violence. And that's always a challenge, given the fact that the most influential organizations within all forms of media remain right wing in essence, and probably even further than just straightforwardly right wing. So there's always that kind of balance in act that it's ready to be turned in a particular way, which then sort of militates against the kind of political impact of that violence in the way that you're suggesting could be valuable. So it's always that kind of fine balancing act. If we can take the question at the back. Next, please. I think.
- [76:10]
D
Thank you very much indeed. I do, of course, remember the disturbances. I live in Haringey, and I was at the time a member of the Customs and Excise Investigation Division, which of course had responsibility for tackling drug trafficking. The war on drugs was lost, was already lost by then, and we're still trying ineffective solutions to it, which just don't work. Serious lack of imagination there. But my question is, do you see any signs that there are meaningful efforts across what you might call the political class and the administrative class to bring together the need to protect society against violence while tackling misuse by law enforcement to deal with both? Because, sadly, tackling injustice, we've got a long haul. This is going to take decades, and we haven't really done enough. We haven't done enough quickly. But even the best solutions, if there are any, are going to take decades. So how can we mitigate and hopefully go the way to solving, but recognizing.
- [77:41]
A
That'S going to take a long time.
- [77:42]
B
Thank you for your question. Don't know if that fits with what you were talking about, Roxana, in relation to different kind of levels of engagement?
- [77:51]
C
Yeah, I think so. I've researched into violence in the UK context and also in Cameroon. I think what's really interesting is that we think of poor and racialized communities as resorting to violence as a last resort. But what's quite fascinating with ethnographic studies is the normative uses of force and how force and violence is actually limited or used in ways that are. It's amazing how often violence isn't used. You know, the times violence is used is a tiny minority of terms like why aren't people more violent? And that's quite fascinating. And the strategies communities adopt helped the threat of that. I could use violence, or we can use violence can actually be used in ways that move the state to respond. For example, the. I'll give an example from my home community and an ethnography. The way the state can't respond in certain instances if someone's accused of the crime, there's not enough evidence for it, but the community knows this crime has been committed. You have vigilante justice and what's vigilante justice? Well, the community comes and they come outside someone's house and use the threat of violence to get the state to get the person who the community is angry with because say they've harmed a child, they have to get off the estate or they've harmed an animal, they get off the estate and the police have. They're forced to act. It's making the state react in ways that they're not designed to react. And this is interesting, I think, how the threat of force and the use of non violence is actually used to, in. In interesting ways to kind of make the state act when they don't want to.
- [79:17]
D
I mean, I think your questions are kind of parenthesis to the question I think you asked as well. And I've got a simple difficulty with it in that it's a kind of chicken and egg situation. You know, what comes first, you know, the kind of injustice or the kind of violence. And I think various political parties have tried to square that circle and failed. I mean, I guess the kind of earliest kind of examples of kind of liberal response that would be, you know, Tony Blair. Think about tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, which is the kind of central tent of the new labor third way approach. Structuralization. The issue there became more kind of focused on the crime, one that's going to cause this and that's been continued with other kind of governments as well. So I think there's a balance there that hasn't always been kind of struck by governments in how you actually kind of deal with the kind of structuralization issue and how much emphasis you can place on the crime. But the structural causes, usually the latter rather than the former.
- [80:12]
A
Yeah, I think I'd be more concerned about the possibility of things going in a rather different direction to the ones that you were suggesting. Particularly if we look across the pond at what's happening in the United States at the moment when the armed forces are being sent into communities to resolve political problems, in effect. And you do wonder, given the state of our politics at the moment, whether there might be motivation on some people's part to copy what is happening at the moment in the United States. That would be a tragedy if that were to happen here. And I dread to think what the Response of some communities would be should such an approach be replicated in this country.
- [81:15]
B
Thank you. If we can take a question from someone online and then we'll have time for a couple more questions.
- [81:22]
A
So we just have one question online.
- [81:25]
D
So it asks about.
- [81:27]
A
We've seen a lot of pockets of action and resistance over the last 40.
- [81:32]
D
Years, but how do we turn that into.
- [81:35]
A
To assist and movement for change?
- [81:40]
D
So how do we turn the fragments of contestation into a more sustainable kind of movement? I mean again, a very, very kind of brief kind of response would be, I think the unification of marginal voices into a kind of coherent body. I think there's been a fragmentation across identity lines maybe in the past, you know, race lines, class lines and beyond as well that I think some parties have actually centurated for kind of their own kind of game. I think if we can find a way to really articulate and you know, visualize a political or civic movement that includes, you know, the binaries of kind of class and race alongside other kind of injustice as well, you may get a more kind of sustainable momentum. I think there's been again like small kind of vignettes of that but fail because they can't reconcile particular identity politics. So you know, thinking back to the 80s when there's a much more kind of ossified approach to politics where you did recognize, you know, class and race car differences kind of quite entwined, I think we've kind of lost some of that ability. But I do see areas where it's coming back that I think will take another kind of 10 years to make that actual kind of real political strategy. So that'll be my kind of brief response on that.
- [83:04]
C
And related to the elite capture as well and the identity politics like even when non reformist reformed is implemented. So when you have this way of being that is about solidarity and mutuality and coming together the way it gets co opted and I think there's this recognition within communities about the strategies that are being used. The identity politics is a great example, but reclaiming that, spotting it and seeing and yeah maybe directing who is the.
- [83:33]
B
Who are the forces.
- [83:35]
C
I do think Ruth Gilmour's non reforms reform gets us to kind of thinking about where ought the target line.
- [83:43]
B
I mean the other part of the challenge of that though is the kind of political context right now and and a body, a movement of well, it depends on how it gets characterized by the media but an essence of that kind of common sense racism that there are these people that were marching alongside Tommy Robinson who you know they're real decent people that have concerns about immigration. They're not necessarily occupying a position of the old far ride and I think that makes that connection even harder. At the moment we have time for two more questions and there's six hands up. I'm going to go for these two people here. My apologies. So, yes, the guy in the middle in the black with the mic, we need the mic to come over here, please. Thank you.
- [84:42]
D
Thank you. Hi, my name is Asta Said.
- [84:45]
A
I'm a student here, a master student.
- [84:47]
D
Studying set design and social science. And my question is mainly aimed towards you, Clive, but I guess the rest of the panel, if you feel like you can answer them, by all means. So the question is mainly. So naturally, because of my age, I'm not as familiar with this Broadwater farm.
- [85:04]
A
Right.
- [85:05]
D
However, there was one, not directly standard out Broadwater Farm, but from one of its residents in 2018. Levin Obviously Mark Duggan and I feel like imagery and what transcends from these events, the imagery behind it sometimes is more important or has a longer lasting effect than the event itself. So like the, the picture of Silco, I feel as though the long lasting.
- [85:29]
A
Effect of that and what has, what.
- [85:32]
D
That'S allowed the media to perpetrate afterwards in the wake of that, that has given rise to most of the stuff.
- [85:41]
A
That you see in the media now.
- [85:42]
D
The villainization of people of color. On top of that, you then see the exact same villainization of Mark Duggan. That picture of him holding the memorial for his daughter, however they cropped that out. So my question towards you is, as.
- [85:56]
A
A man of colour, as a black.
- [85:57]
D
Man of color in the UK, how does it make you feel seeing that 40 years old on, 30 years on, nothing really changed. That's an amazing question. I've tried to be concise as well, to allow other people to kind of join in. I mean, I remember, you know, being on kind of Green Lanes on the Sunday, you know, seeing a kind of burning bus and doing a U turn and I went to the marches and, you know, I remember what it was like. I think for me, what angered me about that was the iconography of a burning bus or burning buildings that meshed with the kind of image of the deceased and his family and the castigation of him a priori. It really spoke to me about the political culture at the time and how again, thinking about the structure, agency issue I mentioned with hugging a hoodie or, you know, tough on crime, tough on causes of crime, you know, we had a political culture then which was you know, meant to be kind of one nation conservatism, this kind of paternalistic, kind of interesting kind of young people, but really that kind of in lawed things such as, you know, the use of kind of ASBOs and you know, the idea of broken Britain and the pushing away of responsibility for inequality from the state to civil society, you know, and communities. I think all that we kind of saw in that moment in time in 2008 was I think the kind of epitome of that crisis of political culture future, but also of a breakdown of responsibility from power. So I think about it in terms of lamentation in that, that whole kind of period, you know, we got lost on the actual root causes and we're focused so much on the kind of, you know, again, the bizarre imagery of, you know, burning buildings and young people of color looting. Yes, that was part of the problem. It wasn't the main issue. And it's the reason why I take such kind of offense to aspects of David Lammy's book which came out around the time, because it really kind of missed a trick there about really having a deep dive into structural causes and not focus so much on consumerism as a kind of easy kind of example. So my response to you would be lamentations how I felt at the time.
- [88:10]
A
You know, I appreciate it, thank you.
- [88:12]
C
And just thinking, isn't it interesting, Carl, the image, you say? The image of criminality. How with George Floyd, how actually you can co opt an image and it can become an image of resistance. The image appears. You see it in Germany, you see it in places where you don't expect uneasiness, anti racist movements and suddenly an image that's so long been associated with criminality and even the press, the powers that be attending as, you know, he was a criminal. He does, you know, it was co op. It led to a worldwide movement of resistance as well. And I don't know, I'm always looking for this hope that maybe we can have the power to reclaim the image.
- [88:48]
B
But I guess the point about Floyd was also that it was unpredictable, that it was to operate in that way. So that. So some of what you're suggesting is about the kind of, you know, the. The kind of formal organization. But sometimes things. It's about the spontaneity and of the. Yeah, the timing, the fact that there were a lot, you know, because we were in Covid and there were lots of people at home and it captured a kind of the imagination. And if I'd been asked to bet all of my savings on Whether that would have happened, I wouldn't have bet that that it would have played out in the way that it did. So there's always something about spontaneity and unpredictability as well, which is maybe a way of being a bit more optimistic. So we're kind of running out of time, but I think we can take maybe two more questions. So hopefully the mic's coming towards you and then if we can take one from over here. Thank you. Hi, my name's Tiana and I'm a.
- [89:46]
C
First year undergrad at LSE studying geography. My question was more so towards Roxanna, about. I think you mentioned using environmental justice together with racial justice in terms of addressing some of the issues that affect people of color and marginalized communities.
- [90:03]
B
One thing I was thinking about when.
- [90:05]
C
You discussed that is oftentimes when there are campaigns towards, I guess like environmental regeneration restoration specifically, I'm thinking from a London perspective, oftentimes when it does occur is as a result of gentrification. So oftentimes the communities that would most benefit from these new green spaces or this environmental restoration end up being priced out of the very areas that they campaigned for this to occur in. So obviously, you know, using environmental justice, it is a hopeful way of like obviously addressing racial justice, but at the same time with the way that it's carried out by local councils and by the government. How would you possibly address making sure that the people who should be benefiting from those policies and from that regeneration actually do benefit from it? Yeah, it's a really good point. Yeah, it's a really good point. And you're talking about gentrification and when things are made good, it's kind of then all of a sudden the black and people of color are kind of pushed out of that. And Greenpeace did a report looking at toxic waste and landfill sites and actually it was where incinerators are going to be put all across the UK and it is in black and poor communities where the waste is going to go. And this is where the toxic waste seems to be, where the landfills are and the environment and how unclean that is. And so looking at as well on a global scale, there can't be racial justice without environmental justice. The way things are going, the pollution and the migration and forced migration, racial justice is climate justice. And I think you spot on there as well how it gets co opted. What does environmental justice mean? And we can think it's about regeneration of certain spaces, but actually it's so much more than that. It's Huge. And it's structural and it's endemic. Yeah, absolutely. Need.
- [91:53]
B
Thank you. We'll have to take the last question now.
- [91:56]
C
Hi, I'm Ms. Mahan, I'm a graduate.
- [91:58]
A
From LSC and I work in criminal defence. So I'm just wondering. 40 years on, it seems every single year we're seeing new statistics about black boys are being stopped eight times more.
- [92:07]
B
Than the rest of the population.
- [92:08]
C
We see black women in the magistrates courts are being sent to custody more. So what can we do immediately?
- [92:13]
A
Do we focus on the picture police.
- [92:15]
C
In the way that they do their.
- [92:16]
B
Stop and searches in the way that they.
- [92:18]
A
Or do we give them mandatory bias.
- [92:20]
B
Training or do we move to the.
- [92:21]
C
Sort of legal system trying to make reforms there?
- [92:24]
A
Thank you.
- [92:25]
B
That's a great question. I might jump in first. So I wonder about whether a paramilitary organization like the police is that you kind of respond in. In like ways. So actually it's about performance management of those people that have really high stop rates and because that's the way the kind of command structure of the police work works. I mean, diversity training has really been shown to be ineffective in many ways, actually might actually entrench negative attitudes. So I think that's one of the ways in which you might respond in relation to the police. I think the courts, maybe Roxaner might come in there. But there are ways in which you can really undermine the neutrality of the law and point out the ways in which it works in very racialized ways and that that might be used strategically by prosecutors. And we already talked about some of those examples. It's not a great answer to the question, but. But I guess I certainly wouldn't put much resource into diversity training as a means forward. Maybe that others disagree.
- [93:46]
D
Very, very quickly, please check out some work by a mutual colleague of ours, Abena Owusu Bempa, who's scholarly in law here, done amazing work on the use of kind of grime and wrapping criminal procedure against black young men. And for her the issue really sits at the cps. These are getting through the CPS and going to kind of trial and we question the reasons why. So I think the police is one thing, but the actual kind of the processes by which they have to go in front of the courts is another kind of unexamined area. And I think some more focus on the CPS rather than the kind of police may be one way of actually squaring that circle as well.
- [94:20]
C
Yeah, and Court Watch, there's some brilliant organizations in London, like for these joint enterprise cases and conspiracy cases, go in and watch them and record it and document it. And if you're interested in this work, there's a law clinic that's just been set up at LSE and they're doing amazing work now and training students to go and do this court watching and documentation of environmental protest of racial injustice and so on. So there are lots of things that we can do. We document, we record, we collectivize and we just keep fighting.
- [94:48]
B
That's a great point to end on a more optimistic note about the possibilities of interventions. So thank you so much to our speakers for giving your valuable time and thank you to all of you for joining us this evening as well.
- [95:04]
C
Well.
- [95:13]
B
Thank you for listening.
- [95:14]
A
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