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Thursday 20 November 2008

Liddle Britain

The pernicious politics of ‘identity’

Reading this bilge, you realise once again how deeply corrupting is racism and its negatively charged twin brother, anti-racism. How it twists and warps the most straightforward of debates, or imposes silence where debate should be. The current debate over the killing of these black youngsters, for example, has been couched in terms of ‘black-on-black violence’ — the occasionally voiced implication being that such violence is somehow worse than black-on-white violence. And you can understand why the ‘black community’ (something seen as distinct from the ‘white community’) might take that view, so relentlessly has it been bombarded with injunctions about identity and solidarity, the perfidy of the oppressive white ruling class, the need for resistance and so on. And yet these injunctions help to perpetuate both the gun crimes which have scared us so much these last couple of weeks and indeed racism, both black-on-white and white-on-black. There is altogether too much talk of identity, too much insistence upon taking pride in being born with black skin, upon consolidating black values and black culture. All of this helps to foster that sense of otherness, of a separation from the rest of society, which, taken to its extreme, results in a 15-year-old kid with a pistol in his hand pointing it at the head of some other child.

It is not black-on-black violence. Such a description conceals far more than it reveals. Black women, for example, have not been running around shooting anybody. Indeed, in more general terms, women of Caribbean descent are better educated, earn more money and are less criminally inclined than their white counterparts. Nor is it middle-aged or elderly black men with the handguns; it is primarily teenagers. And — yes — primarily black teenagers, although not exclusively so. Billy Cox, the young lad shot in Clapham, was of mixed race — Thai and white, apparently. More than it being a black thing, it is a young, male, underclass thing.

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