Divide and rule?
We've had riots in Birmingham between Asians & Afro-Caribbeans (always strange language, as there are a lot of divisions along national/ethnic/religious grounds amongst both the "Asian" and "Black" communities). It has challenged the assumptions of many people, who see "racial" divisions as a purely white/black thing. Nick Cohen is as spot on the ball as any.
Politics of the ghetto:The Handsworth riots could be the prelude to deeper segregation, something Tony Blair is abetting
Nick Cohen, The Observer, Sunday October 30, 2005
When I was a reporter on the Birmingham Post & Mail, I could guess anyone's politics by how they described the looting and murder that overwhelmed Handsworth in September 1985. If they talked about the 'Handsworth riots', I knew they were conservatives who had seen criminals going berserk after the police arrested local dope traders. Thugs of all creeds and colours had joined the fun. It was a yobs' orgy, not a political protest. As I'd ducked and dived to escape machete-wielding rioters, I took the point. When a couple cornered me and demanded my money, I was saved only by the honest conviction of my junior reporter's cry: 'But, but, I don't have any money!'
On the other hand, people who talked of the 'Handsworth rebellion' were clearly from the left. Before they became respectable, Herman Ouseley and Keith Vaz were fire-spouting revolutionaries who declared in a report for the old West Midlands County Council that the word 'riot' didn't begin to describe what had happened in Handsworth. 'The never-employed black under-class, interned in the workless gulags of Britain' had risen up against their oppressors, they insisted. Birmingham was seeing 'violent resistance' by blacks who believed they were being forced to live under 'a form of apartheid'.
The charred bodies of two Asians were found in the wreckage of the Lozells Road post office, but Vaz and his colleagues warned that you were falling for the ruling class's old 'divide and rule tactic' if you said there were divisions between ethnic minorities.
For all the hyperbole, I had sympathy for them as well. In Brixton, Tottenham and Handsworth, the classic riot of the period began after a real or rumoured assault on a black woman by the police. The rioters were poor young men without a future. To say the violence had nothing to do with racism and the mass destruction of manufacturing jobs in Margaret Thatcher's first recession was wishful thinking or Tory propaganda.
Twenty years on, I am back on the Lozells Road after another riot. Nothing has changed, but everything is different. The red-brick terrace houses are as pokey and dilapidated as ever. It remains a place where you can catch the smell of disappointment; a place where people stay because they've nowhere else to go.
Yet little else was familiar. The arguments of the Eighties about why young men took to the streets felt antique and irrelevant. Beyond repeating the platitude that workers with good jobs tend to be law-abiding, you couldn't pretend the 2005 riot was a protest against unemployment. The economic and law enforcement policies of official society - 'white society', to stretch a point - had nothing to do with the violence. Racism was on display, but not between blacks and whites. So were religious tensions, which I'd never given a second's thought in 1985.
What started the riot was not a bungled police round-up of drug dealers, but a racist rumour which swept black Birmingham. Everyone knew someone who could swear that an Asian shopkeeper had locked up a 14-year-old black girl he had caught shoplifting and then raped her with the help of his friends. The police have been investigating for a week. They haven't found the girl or the crime scene or the rapists. Unless that changes, and my guess is it won't, the rumour will be a grotesque libel that painted Asian shopkeepers as the bestial abusers of feminine innocence.
Warren G spread it on his show on a pirate station. Mr G isn't a standard DJ. He's a religious man and left the studio for a meeting about the rape at the New Testament Church of God. It stands on the other side of Lozells Road from Handsworth's mosque and it was hard to resist the illusion that they were glaring at each other like two fighters after a brawl.
The meeting ended and the riots began. Gangs hit each other and passers-by with petrol bombs and guns. One police officer and 35 civilians were injured. An Asian gang murdered Isiah Young-Sam, a 23-year-old black man, who, by a stroke of capricious fortune, was a school friend of Warren G.
As striking as the violence were the wild statements on the radio and in internet chatrooms. There was plenty of talk of Asian racism, and all sides accepted that there are racist Asians as there are racist blacks, whites and whatever. Ligali, a black African pressure group, went further and damned everyone. It called for a boycott of Asian shops. Not of the shop where the crime took place - no one knew where it was or if it existed - but of all Asian shops. Pickled Politics, a website run by a sharp team of Asian writers, picked up an email which was doing the rounds.
Tellingly, it, too, was about Asian shopkeepers. When I knew Handsworth, there were black traders. But while many Hindu, Sikh and Muslim families have followed the classic immigrant path of sticking together and building a business, many blacks have fallen behind. The emailer blamed a conspiracy. Asians succeeded in taking over hairdressers for black women by forcing them 'to buckle under unreasonable' competition. 'Black people need to realise that they are been shitted on by Indians who now supply them with the very food they eat, their cosmetics and health care.'
Theodore Dalrymple, the pseudonym of a Birmingham doctor and writer, noted recently in the Telegraph that the shopkeepers were facing a modern variant of European (and now Middle Eastern) anti-semitism. Once, white Christians accused Jewish traders of kidnapping their children and draining their blood; now, black Christians accuse Asian traders of kidnapping their girls and raping them.
These prejudices are incredibly powerful because they combine race hatred of the alien, class hatred of the prosperous and religious hatred of the infidel.
In World on Fire, published two years ago and which deserved far more attention than it received, Amy Chua showed how globalisation had created an explosion of racism in the anti-semitic tradition. The new wave of capitalism had raised the living standards of ordinary people by a little and the rich by a lot, her argument ran. The supporters of free markets and democracy thought everyone was benefiting and hadn't noticed that their ideas helped fuel resentments in those countries where ethnic minorities dominated business.
Sectarian leaders from the Slobodan Milosevic mould were exploiting the double antipathy of race and class. Across the planet, you heard the same demonic accusations of blood-sucking, corruption and secret influence about the Chinese business class in south east Asia, the white farmers in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the Spanish 'whites' in Latin America, the Jews in Russia, the Ibo in Nigeria, the Croats in Milosevic's Yugoslavia and the Americans everywhere.
I said earlier that the 1985 Handsworth riots had nothing to do with government. That was true in all respects but one. With unforgivable recklessness, our leaders aren't diminishing the importance of race, but fuelling sectarianism.
In Handsworth, blacks complained that Asians were doing too well from the government's SRB6 grants programme. The naive might imagine that the job of government is to promote common citizenship. Yet in Birmingham, you see projects for the black unemployed, not all the unemployed; for disadvantaged Asians or Indians or Muslims, not all the disadvantaged. Across the country, wherever the BNP makes gains, you can guarantee it has been the beneficiary of white anger at grants and services dispensed on communalist lines.
As I'm sure you know, state-sponsored sectarianism is about to take off. We're to have religions redefined as races, which they're not, and opposition to religion redefined as race hatred, which it isn't. Meanwhile, the only coherent part of Tony Blair's education white paper is his promise to build faith schools that will segregate children and their parents by religion and race and, indeed, class in the case of top-end church schools.
I can see no more urgent task than taking the fight to those on the right and the left who are busily piling bricks on ghetto walls. If they're not stopped, I don't like to think what Handsworth or the rest of the country will be like in 20 years.
Politics of the ghetto:The Handsworth riots could be the prelude to deeper segregation, something Tony Blair is abetting
Nick Cohen, The Observer, Sunday October 30, 2005
When I was a reporter on the Birmingham Post & Mail, I could guess anyone's politics by how they described the looting and murder that overwhelmed Handsworth in September 1985. If they talked about the 'Handsworth riots', I knew they were conservatives who had seen criminals going berserk after the police arrested local dope traders. Thugs of all creeds and colours had joined the fun. It was a yobs' orgy, not a political protest. As I'd ducked and dived to escape machete-wielding rioters, I took the point. When a couple cornered me and demanded my money, I was saved only by the honest conviction of my junior reporter's cry: 'But, but, I don't have any money!'
On the other hand, people who talked of the 'Handsworth rebellion' were clearly from the left. Before they became respectable, Herman Ouseley and Keith Vaz were fire-spouting revolutionaries who declared in a report for the old West Midlands County Council that the word 'riot' didn't begin to describe what had happened in Handsworth. 'The never-employed black under-class, interned in the workless gulags of Britain' had risen up against their oppressors, they insisted. Birmingham was seeing 'violent resistance' by blacks who believed they were being forced to live under 'a form of apartheid'.
The charred bodies of two Asians were found in the wreckage of the Lozells Road post office, but Vaz and his colleagues warned that you were falling for the ruling class's old 'divide and rule tactic' if you said there were divisions between ethnic minorities.
For all the hyperbole, I had sympathy for them as well. In Brixton, Tottenham and Handsworth, the classic riot of the period began after a real or rumoured assault on a black woman by the police. The rioters were poor young men without a future. To say the violence had nothing to do with racism and the mass destruction of manufacturing jobs in Margaret Thatcher's first recession was wishful thinking or Tory propaganda.
Twenty years on, I am back on the Lozells Road after another riot. Nothing has changed, but everything is different. The red-brick terrace houses are as pokey and dilapidated as ever. It remains a place where you can catch the smell of disappointment; a place where people stay because they've nowhere else to go.
Yet little else was familiar. The arguments of the Eighties about why young men took to the streets felt antique and irrelevant. Beyond repeating the platitude that workers with good jobs tend to be law-abiding, you couldn't pretend the 2005 riot was a protest against unemployment. The economic and law enforcement policies of official society - 'white society', to stretch a point - had nothing to do with the violence. Racism was on display, but not between blacks and whites. So were religious tensions, which I'd never given a second's thought in 1985.
What started the riot was not a bungled police round-up of drug dealers, but a racist rumour which swept black Birmingham. Everyone knew someone who could swear that an Asian shopkeeper had locked up a 14-year-old black girl he had caught shoplifting and then raped her with the help of his friends. The police have been investigating for a week. They haven't found the girl or the crime scene or the rapists. Unless that changes, and my guess is it won't, the rumour will be a grotesque libel that painted Asian shopkeepers as the bestial abusers of feminine innocence.
Warren G spread it on his show on a pirate station. Mr G isn't a standard DJ. He's a religious man and left the studio for a meeting about the rape at the New Testament Church of God. It stands on the other side of Lozells Road from Handsworth's mosque and it was hard to resist the illusion that they were glaring at each other like two fighters after a brawl.
The meeting ended and the riots began. Gangs hit each other and passers-by with petrol bombs and guns. One police officer and 35 civilians were injured. An Asian gang murdered Isiah Young-Sam, a 23-year-old black man, who, by a stroke of capricious fortune, was a school friend of Warren G.
As striking as the violence were the wild statements on the radio and in internet chatrooms. There was plenty of talk of Asian racism, and all sides accepted that there are racist Asians as there are racist blacks, whites and whatever. Ligali, a black African pressure group, went further and damned everyone. It called for a boycott of Asian shops. Not of the shop where the crime took place - no one knew where it was or if it existed - but of all Asian shops. Pickled Politics, a website run by a sharp team of Asian writers, picked up an email which was doing the rounds.
Tellingly, it, too, was about Asian shopkeepers. When I knew Handsworth, there were black traders. But while many Hindu, Sikh and Muslim families have followed the classic immigrant path of sticking together and building a business, many blacks have fallen behind. The emailer blamed a conspiracy. Asians succeeded in taking over hairdressers for black women by forcing them 'to buckle under unreasonable' competition. 'Black people need to realise that they are been shitted on by Indians who now supply them with the very food they eat, their cosmetics and health care.'
Theodore Dalrymple, the pseudonym of a Birmingham doctor and writer, noted recently in the Telegraph that the shopkeepers were facing a modern variant of European (and now Middle Eastern) anti-semitism. Once, white Christians accused Jewish traders of kidnapping their children and draining their blood; now, black Christians accuse Asian traders of kidnapping their girls and raping them.
These prejudices are incredibly powerful because they combine race hatred of the alien, class hatred of the prosperous and religious hatred of the infidel.
In World on Fire, published two years ago and which deserved far more attention than it received, Amy Chua showed how globalisation had created an explosion of racism in the anti-semitic tradition. The new wave of capitalism had raised the living standards of ordinary people by a little and the rich by a lot, her argument ran. The supporters of free markets and democracy thought everyone was benefiting and hadn't noticed that their ideas helped fuel resentments in those countries where ethnic minorities dominated business.
Sectarian leaders from the Slobodan Milosevic mould were exploiting the double antipathy of race and class. Across the planet, you heard the same demonic accusations of blood-sucking, corruption and secret influence about the Chinese business class in south east Asia, the white farmers in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the Spanish 'whites' in Latin America, the Jews in Russia, the Ibo in Nigeria, the Croats in Milosevic's Yugoslavia and the Americans everywhere.
I said earlier that the 1985 Handsworth riots had nothing to do with government. That was true in all respects but one. With unforgivable recklessness, our leaders aren't diminishing the importance of race, but fuelling sectarianism.
In Handsworth, blacks complained that Asians were doing too well from the government's SRB6 grants programme. The naive might imagine that the job of government is to promote common citizenship. Yet in Birmingham, you see projects for the black unemployed, not all the unemployed; for disadvantaged Asians or Indians or Muslims, not all the disadvantaged. Across the country, wherever the BNP makes gains, you can guarantee it has been the beneficiary of white anger at grants and services dispensed on communalist lines.
As I'm sure you know, state-sponsored sectarianism is about to take off. We're to have religions redefined as races, which they're not, and opposition to religion redefined as race hatred, which it isn't. Meanwhile, the only coherent part of Tony Blair's education white paper is his promise to build faith schools that will segregate children and their parents by religion and race and, indeed, class in the case of top-end church schools.
I can see no more urgent task than taking the fight to those on the right and the left who are busily piling bricks on ghetto walls. If they're not stopped, I don't like to think what Handsworth or the rest of the country will be like in 20 years.
posted by Anglonoel | 12:43 am
1 Comments:
There are interesting photos of 1985 Handsworth riots on Flickr- they were taken by Birmingham snapper Pogus Caesar
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75913636@N00/497631194/
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