Liddle Britain

The pernicious politics of ‘identity’

24 February 2007

Why do black people keep shooting one another? And is there anything the rest of us can do to remedy the situation, or should we just leave them to get on with it? These are the crucial questions which need to be answered following the murder of three young black males in south London — apparently by other young black males — in the last fortnight. I live in south London and am appalled and chilled by this homicidal violence taking place less than a mile from my bourgeois front door. Every morning at about one o’clock I am awoken by the frantic nur-nur, nur-nur of the police car and the baleful drone of the helicopter; yep, I muse sadly in my bed, that’s probably another one of them dead. Quite often it is. My disquiet, however, is mitigated by the fact that the black murderers don’t seem to want to kill me. The choice of target is pretty much exclusively young black male drug dealers. It may well be that the next day, when the news programmes first report the killing, the victim is said to be a promising young architect or brain surgeon who attends church every Sunday and looks after his sainted mother and young siblings, but later reports usually offer a somewhat different form of eulogy. But either way — and callous as it might indeed seem — I’m all right, Jack.

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