“I’ve shown you the crib, how I chill, I’ve shown you the cars . . . I think I’ve shown you everything.”
Rapper on MTV Cribs
The storm clouds, a while now gathering, are fit to burst. Over the past few years, few can have failed to notice the emergence of an “underclass” discourse in this country, analogous to that which began in the US during the Reagan years. Here, like there, the chief subjects of this discourse are black folk. A 1996 study by Ceri Peach of Oxford University predicted that, whereas Asians in this country could look forward to an upscale, “Jewish” future, blacks faced a blue-collar, “Irish” future.
Since then, there has been an annual debate over the poor exam results of African-Caribbean boys, visa requirements for black visitors from the Commonwealth, and any number of police operations mounted with the express aim of countering black street robberies and gun crime. The latest, egregious example of “black-on-black crime” – the shooting of four girls outside a party in Birmingham – will further entrench what I’m sure a number of whites secretly feel: “There’s something about these blacks – a violence, a fecklessness in them. You can’t change it. Look at Africa. Look at wherever they go . . .”
How did we get here, to this place where all those hoary stories seem true? Two images, two photos that have run in most of the press, are vivid in my mind. The first is of the two murdered girls, Charlene Ellis and Latisha Shakespeare, smiling, standing in a sitting-room, with their glad rags on. They’re dressed in what you’d call a Jamaican “downtown ” or “bashment” style. Their dress style reminds me that when we talk as we usually too loosely do about black British culture, we are more properly talking about Jamaica-derived culture. The majority of black Britons – three in five – are of Jamaican origin; one in five from the rest of the Caribbean; and one in five from Africa. The backgrounds of most of those Fifties Jamaican immigrants is rural working-class. In the poor inner-city environments in Britain that most of us found – still find ourselves living in – working-class Jamaican norms and codes have come to dominate the black British vibe: territorial gangs, mothers too young properly to mother their children – and guns.
The second image I am thinking about is of the “Muswell Hill Mob”, a gang of armed London car thieves convicted shortly before Christmas. The four of them, with a female friend, are posing like Al Capone-era gangsters in fedoras and suits, brandishing replica guns. The picture has been read as the most damning indication of their brutishness, but I see in it a childish reproduction of an image cherished by young Jamaicans. The stance of one of the boys, two guns held across his chest, is almost a carbon copy of the album cover The Harder They Come, soundtrack to the seminal Jamaican 1970s film, which told the story of a “rudeboy”, a young, proud man who takes to the hills to become an armed outlaw when his fledgling music career is scuppered, and is eventually hunted down and killed by the police.
Guns started coming into some of Britain’s black communities in the Eighties and early Nineties, mainly for Jamaica-based “yardie” gangs to enforce their British drug operations. Since then guns – be they real or replicas that can be easily modified – have become readily accessible locally and, at £200, cheap.
This explains why guns are now so familiar in the black community. I see this in how kids talk about guns when I go into inner-city schools. They laugh about how anybody can tell the difference between a real gun and a fake, because a real gun is shiny. They have nicknames for certain types of weapon, like “spray and pray” for the Mack 10 machine-gun, the weapon that may have been used in Birmingham.
The kids’ casual attitude stems from the entertainments they watch and listen to. All over the popular music shows, such as MTV Base, the R&B and hip-hop music programme that so many black youngsters watch, the images are predominantly of gangster culture – of gun-carrying men who gleam with success and are surrounded by beautiful women.
And this equation – black success comes with a gun – is pervasive. A black friend of mine, early twenties with a perfectly straight job, bought himself a gun a couple of years ago. He said it was for his “self-protection” and he wanted to take it with him to the Notting Hill Carnival. I do not think he seriously feared for himself – but gun culture was what he, as a self-respecting, street black guy, felt he should buy in to.
In the end, the gun-waving is about buying yourself the respect that the “establishment” authorities cheat you of: you, and your parents before you, have met only with disrespect from “racist” teachers and “racist” police officers. I have experienced this at first hand. I attended a party at a hair salon in Tottenham, north London, recently. I had words with three youths – all about 18 – when they started chatting up my girlfriend. One of them motioned to his jacket and pulled out a gun. The security men immediately pulled him away – but I had recognised his instinct: shoot the bastard who made me lose face.
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