Society
Urban life - Darcus Howe defines Britishness
Published 09 January 2006
Racial violence, aimed at destroying love, defines Britishness as we know it
I will remember 2005 as the year in which we were force-fed the virtues of Britishness - fair play, democracy and generosity of spirit. Those of us who form the new communities were expected to shed our past and don the garments of this marvellous civilisation, in order to be wholly accepted. The black and brown elite joined in, demonising the places where we live as ghettos in which we seek to recreate rural Pakistan and the backwardness of the Caribbean. Yet our chief experiences during this past year undermine every word of such propaganda.
In the last minutes of 2005 I sat in my local pub in Brixton, the Angel, on Coldharbour Lane, as we mulled over one horrible moment of the year. A young man, Anthony Walker, with his girlfriend and cousin, had walked along the streets of Huyton in Merseyside. The black man with his white girlfriend so incensed two white working-class boys that one of them left an ice pick embedded in his brain. We recalled that in the early days those of us who had white girlfriends, yours truly included, had to walk behind while the girlfriend proceeded several paces in front to avoid savage beatings from white men. Racial violence, aimed at destroying a simple act of love, defines Britishness as we know it.
Not that we in the new communities are innocent of some of the barbarism that eats at the heart of this nation. The events of 7 July are a case in point - the mad bombing spree, as I call it. Our leaders continue to pursue the Iraq strategy, while millions of citizens hang their heads in shame as our strongly held views are ignored. Democracy indeed! And at the closing of the year, Hazel Blears, a minister at the Home Office, told us that the police have been given a near-absolute power of arrest. I know of nowhere in the UK where the police can escape involvement in racially prejudiced judgements.
Alas, we enter 2006 having to bear the heavy weight of this sad time. Fake Britishness is not dead. It harasses, undermines and corrupts, at every turn, the possibility of constructing the new.
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