Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, has acquired a new piece of furniture in his south London offices - a crystal ball. Speaking to Civitas, a right-wing think-tank, he imparted new information which this astonishing piece of crystal had yielded. Britain, he said, will suffer Los Angeles-style riots unless black and Asian people integrate properly into British society. He hasn't fixed a date, time or place for these riots.
I know something of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. I was there. A black man, Rodney King, was stopped by police and beaten to a pulp. A resident videoed it and offered the footage to TV channels. In the twinkle of an eye, LA descended into violence. Several black citizens were killed.
I spoke at length to residents of the community that was once called Watts. The Los Angeles Police Department had been harassing and provoking the black population. Both the rebellion and the viciousness with which the LAPD reacted were inevitable. Phillips, unlike the residents of LA, implies this all happened because LA's blacks did not integrate, and that the same will take place in the UK for the same reason.
Civitas swallowed this gobbledegook. Here was a black man slinging all the mud he could find at fellow blacks. He trained his sights on local authorities that "want to translate, even transfer, the habits of Rajasthan or rural Jamaica to Blackburn or Brixton". This is crazy talk. Readers know I have lived in Brixton for 30 years and can say without fear of contradiction that absolutely nowhere in this adorable place does rural Jamaica exist. And I mean nowhere.
Brixtonians go to work. We shop for victuals in the market. Tesco is the port of call on Saturday, church on Sunday. We speak English, dress in ordinary clothes, dance to popular music and sing songs of freedom. Brixton is also the cornerstone of resistance to racism in the UK. We produce our own leaders and not one of them is state-sponsored in the way Phillips describes.
Multiculturalism, the CRE chief implies, rewards those with frozen identities - and the only identity worth freezing is that of white and black meritocracy. It is culturally impossible to freeze an identity in a historic moment of such fluidity. We are all, black and white, engaged in becoming something new, and blacks are in the vanguard of this process. No crystal ball for me. Just the harsh reality of this historical moment.
