Racism runs riot

Blog post by Lambros Fatsis, City, University of London, UK. Cross-posted from The BSC Blog.

“Riots Engulf Britain”, “Under Siege”, “Summer of Discontent”, “You Will Regret This, Starmer Warns Rioters”, “Rioting Thugs Must Not Be Allowed to Win”. This is how the violence that recently broke out in multiple cities across England became headline news.  What kind of violence was this though? Is any of it new? Is more policing the answer? These are some of the questions that have circulated widely in the aftermath of those events, especially in the Twittersphere. A closer look at them, therefore, seems appropriate—as an attempt to go beyond sensationalist reporting and irresponsible punditry that traffics in info-wars, but does not really aid our understanding of the historical, ideological, political and socio-cultural dimensions of such ‘rioting’.   ​

What we usually and mistakenly call ‘riots’ are really uprisings against rent-a-mob racism, state violence and police oppression—reserved for those who don’t belong to the national self-portrait. 1958, 1981, 1985, or 2011 quickly come up in conversation as examples of such outbursts of anger. What we witnessed this time around, however, are not acts of resistance to ideological or political repression. They are an embodiment of white supremacy running riot: a volcanic eruption of racist violence that otherwise just simmers unnoticeably in the background. They are not angry expressions of any legitimate political cause, nor are they exasperated cries of an unheard and ignored demographic. They are a visible manifestation of the white supremacist worldview that we are educated and socialised into, but conveniently consign to the past and willfully ignore in the present. This is how a ‘nation’ that still defines and projects itself as an imperial-colonial miracle thinks, acts and exists in its educational curricula, political institutions and material resources. This summer’s ‘rioters’ may be economically dispossessed and politically disenfranchised, but they did not rise up against class injustice. They traded in the ideological currency of whiteness to attack those who they see as an unwanted and unwelcome presence, not (necessarily) as job-stealers or queue-jumpers. Such “white riots” have an ideological and political history and it tells us more than we think about the way we ought to think about such incidents.

“N***** Hunting in England”
​The first ‘race riot’ of this kind, took place on Tyneside in 1860 as an escalation of conflicts between seamen, that was not at all uncommon at the time. The first most known full-scale ‘race’ riot, however, took place during the summer of 1919 in Newport, after a Black man was alleged to have made an offensive remark to a white woman—several decades before the brutal murder of Emett Till who was lynched for the same reason in Mississippi. Not unlike the aftermath of WWII, the origins of lynch mobs and racially-driven, violent attacks against Black people coincided with labour shortages after WWI. Black labourers were seen as a threat even though shipping companies chose to sign on only white foreign labourers. Attacks, stabbing and beatings became common, as did the wrecking, looting and setting houses where Black people resided on fire. And they would continue unabated especially from the 1950s onwards in an almost predictable pattern reflected in 1948 in Liverpool, where racist attacks on Black people and their homes were dubbed “Liverpool’s Racial Disturbances” by The Times. This is the backdrop to the ‘riotous’ 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, although anti-immigration legislation and policies that were introduced to turn Black people away played a major role in setting the conflagration of racism alight. Attempts to divert Empire Windrush so that it would not reach ‘our shores’, ‘colour bar’ policies in workplace, housing and entertainment venues and multiple British nationality and immigration acts designed to favour the ‘white Commonwealth’ and exclude Black British subjects, are all part of that history. And it was not ‘evil Tories’ that made racism legal, normal, formal and institutional(ised). Labour and labour unions did too. Attlee and Callaghan both made their anti-immigration feelings publicly known and the Transport and General Workers’ Union passed a resolution in 1955 recognising “the grave situation which is revealed by uncontrolled immigration”, a decision which they regretted in 2013 when Unite, which had merged with the Transport and General Workers’ Union, apologised for supporting the colour bar. The lynching of Charles Wooten (also known as Wooton) in 1919 and Kelso Cochrane in 1959 by racist mobs, the police hounding of David Oluwale in 1969 (whose nationality was recorded as ‘wog’ at the police station), the New Cross Massacre, the Battle of Lewisham, the racist murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar and Altab Ali, the police shooting of Cherry Groce in Brixton, the police killing of Cynthia Jarrett in Tottenham and the racist murder of  Rolan Addams, Rohit Duggal and Stephen Lawrence—they are all part of the same (hi)story. And it does not end, or begin, in the 1990s with the Macpherson report on the Stephen Lawrence murder. It continues apace with Jean Charles de Menezes, Smiley Culture, Mark Duggan, Sean Riggs, Sheku Bayoh and it is all perfectly legal: made possible by police powers (e.g. Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022; Public Order Act 2023) and anti-immigration legislation (e.g. Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act; Nationality and Borders Act 2022) that institutionalise the very forms of racism that continue to exist, but are nevertheless denied.

“Too manie of these kinde of people”
It is against this snapshot of racist history that the most recent riots of white supremacy must be read. They are not class wars. They are festivals of (xeno)racism, bigotry and white, imperial-colonial-nationalistic pride. They are not the outcome of media propaganda, political demagoguery, social media radicalization, or 14 years of Tory rule. Such incidents may of course be affected by these factors, but the views that such racist violence express have been here for much longer. Queen Victoria complained about “too manie of these kinde of people”. Samuel Estwick called upon Lord Mansfield to introduce legislation to prohibit the entry of Black people in Britain to “preserve the race of Britons from stain and contamination”. The White Defence League decried the “evils of coloured invasion”, “mass interbreeding” and the emergence of “mulatto Britain” that apparently signals the “downfall of the civilisation and culture of our country”. Enoch Powell railed against ‘wide-grinning picanninies”, an “immigrant-descended population” and their “dependants” and Margaret Thatcher ventriloquised people who are “really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”. I could go on. The point is that the ideology and politics of racism that manifested itself this summer was not invented by the far-right in the 24th year of the 21st century. It was the justifying dogma of imperial-colonial rule about which little continues to be known and much that is willfully ignored. People are taught about kings and queens, but not about Empire and imperialism—other than as a source of pride and a marker of national(istic) identity, predicated on the perennial “greatness” of “the Empire”, minus its legacy of violence.
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If criminology, or any other social science discipline, has anything of value to say about it all, it must be said within that ideological, historical, socio-cultural and political context. Anything else is a mere, and pitiful, exercise in pure logic, making us think like positivists even if we are not. As W.E.B. Du Bois recollected in one of his autobiographies: “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved”. Worse still, defending policing as a response means advocating for institutionally racist forces to protect the very racially minoritised communities they otherwise harass and kill. Clearly, this must be seen as ideologically, politically and ethically bankrupt. Not only do such calls mistake cops for defenders of social equality. They also mistake law and order for rights and justice. And while I am not suggesting that we all become abolitionists, although nothing would make me happier, it would nevertheless be factually correct, ethically just and socio-politically fair to stop lying to ourselves and others. We owe this much to those who are victimised by and resist state-sanctioned racist police violence daily.

About the author
Lambros Fatsis is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at City, University of London and the winner of the first-ever ‘British Society of Criminology Blogger of the Year Award’.

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Image credit: British Movement march in early 1980s: Vron Ware.

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This blog post was originally published by The BSC Blog on 21 August 2024.