Reni Eddo-Lodge

Despite its best efforts to pretend otherwise, Britain is far from a monoculture. Outward-facing when it suited best, history shows us that this country had created a global empire it could draw labour from at ease. But it wasn’t ready for the repercussions and responsibilities that came with its colonising of countries and cultures. It was black and brown people who suffered the consequences

handicapped by their colour

Though often divided by work disputes, both management and the trade union found themselves united by racism

Anecdotally, anti-racism campaigners insisted that black people were being unfairly targeted by sus laws. The notion of who does and who doesn’t look suspicious – particularly in a British political climate that just ten years earlier was denying black people employment and housing – was undoubtedly racialised

The fear of mugging was imported, too

The first red flag was that the college wanted to put an emphasis on multiculturalism rather than anti-racism. ‘I was not very happy, as a black sociologist,’ he explained. ‘I wanted an anti-racist approach to it. Because the problem is not a black problem. It’s not my culture, not my religion that is the problem. It is the racism of the white institutions.’

the extremity of a riot only ever reflects the extremity of the living conditions of said rioters.

While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race

Faced with a collective forgetting, we must fight to remember

When Gary Dobson and David Norris killed Stephen, they were teenagers. By the time Dobson and Norris were jailed, they were adult men, in their mid- to late-thirties. While Stephen Lawrence’s life was frozen at eighteen, theirs had continued, unhindered, in part aided by the police