racially motivated violence.
Fright.
The fight sullied my impression of sport. Couldn’t quite re-live sport in my mind anymore. Couldn’t quite use sport to alleviate the boredom of school anymore. Couldn’t quite hide as freely behind my daydreams anymore.
Distrust. Fright.
A year after the fight, my sisters were talking about a fight at Little Ilford where a white girl had called a black girl a ‘black bitch’. When I heard this, I laughed. Paula, my eldest sister, turned to me and snapped, ‘Why are you laughing?’ I didn’t know. I probably thought the word ‘bitch’ was naughty. ‘Don’t you understand?’ Paula said, before explaining that the term was a racist insult. I didn’t understand and walked off in a sulk.
The Minter–Hagler fight flashed back into my head a few months later, when my television screen was on fire. That was all I could see, flames bursting through our 19-inch canvas. I had been lying passively on the floor, waiting for the blaze to engulf me. However, my television was not about to burn down. My house was in no immediate danger. I just couldn’t digest the images on the news. I felt troubled and anxious as I watched scenes from the 1981 Brixton uprising.
The ‘riots’ had been sparked by ‘Swamp 81’, a police operation launched in Brixton that allowed officers to stop and question anyone they thought looked suspicious of committing a street crime. The police stopped 943 people (over half were black) of which 118 were arrested in four days.6 ‘Swamp 81’ had followed years of over-policing in black communities and over-policing at any events or venues frequented primarily by black people. This had followed years of mainstream press linking crime to black people as if an inherent character trait. This had followed Thatcher’s warning that British people feared being ‘swamped’ by people from different cultures. This had followed the New Cross Fire in January 1981, when 13 black partygoers aged between 14 and 22 lost their lives. There was little or no mainstream press. No outcry, no mourning outside of the black and local communities. Despite New Cross being a hub for the National Front, police investigations had been swift, too swift, to rule the incident as an accident. To the wider public, the victims had no names, the incident went unnoticed. This led to the ‘Black People’s Day of Action’, a ‘general strike of blacks’ where 20,000 people marched from Fordham Park in New Cross to Hyde Park on 2 March. The march had been largely peaceful. Despite this, the Sun’s headline read: ‘Day the blacks ran riot in London.’
The New Cross Fire had been vague but haunting to me. I knew of it, but without detail. ‘Thirteen Dead and Nothing Said.’ The Brixton ‘riots’ had been more vivid. But my mind could not absorb the extreme violence and rioting taking place in my city. I was only eight and didn’t know much about anything. All I knew was that I had never seen the night distorted so alarmingly as I watched the images on the news of overturned vehicles set alight, and blackened and shelled buildings. There were hundreds of police cowering under riot shields, pelted with Molotov cocktails and bricks, distressed black people dragged by coppers in riot gear, a pub with an erupting roof, incessant sirens, rushing crowds and confusion.
The morning after the uprising, the streets were dusty and empty, as though desperate for sleep. The skeletons of cars threw mournful shadows. Shops and houses were doorless, windowless and war torn. Brixton looked haunted and exhausted.
On the final day of the ‘riots’, I was having a late afternoon bath when my mother entered the bathroom. I stepped out of the bath while the washing machine, which was in our bathroom, was convulsing. My mother helped me dry myself. As I stood there, damp and naked, I said, ‘Mum, I want to bleach my skin white.’
‘Why?’ my mother replied calmly, although startled by my confession. ‘People don’t like us,’ I replied. I was too scared to say white people through fear they might be listening. She replied, ‘Listen, your skin is beautiful, dark and smooth. You must always be proud of your skin and who you are.’
I listened. I took note. But I was entering a phase when racism would become part of my daily reality.
For some time after the Brixton ‘riots’, I could not sleep. Paranoid, I would listen for sirens. Couldn’t hear much. But the slightest sound would make me shiver as if someone had been breaking into our house. Walking to school, I inspected nearby shops, trying to detect any visible signs of damage. My eyes flickered constantly as if someone had been waving a sword an inch from my face. My skin terrified me. Everyday experiences of racism, the period when rumour turned to reality, made me even more cagey, even more withdrawn, never quite knowing where I stood, never quite knowing how people perceived me. What did white folks really think of me? Didn’t know. But my skin tone made me feel apologetic, guilty, watched, scrutinised, as if a constant Spotlight had been covering my every move.
I didn’t know at the time, but this had been the double-consciousness American sociologist W E B Du Bois referred to, the conflict between trying to develop your own character while being cognisant of how you are perceived by white society.
Fright.
During my final years at primary school, as Hagler bullied his way through the middleweight division and Minter faded into retirement, racism had become an everyday struggle. Shopkeepers frequently told me to leave their shops for no reason or they would call the police, bus drivers refused to let me on their buses, old ladies clutched their bags in my presence and police stopped and searched me for no reason (ignoring my best friend, who happened to be white). I had an older white youth threaten to slash my throat with a bulb if I didn’t shout a racist obscenity, and another older kid, a neighbour who I had invited round to my house to play, pin me down in my own living room and call me a black bastard.
It wasn’t just the frequency of these incidents that troubled me. The settings, the timings, added to my distress. These incidents happened in the daytime, in sweet shops, at bus stops, on the way to school, on the high street, outside the school gates, in my home.
I tried to minimise my presence when out in public. Walked soft. As I was attempting to do so, Newham’s black and Asian youths had started to fight back. This time I knew their names and I could see their faces.
Fight.
A group of elder Asian youths had taken to protecting younger children from racist attacks by accompanying them home from Little Ilford school. On 24 September 1982, three ‘scruffily dressed’ white men in bomber jackets and jeans jumped out of their car and started abusing this group of young and elder Asian youths, which led to a fight. Uniformed police were on the scene swiftly, resulting in eight Asian youths being badly beaten and taken to Forest Gate police station. It turned out that the ‘scruffily dressed’7 white men were plain-clothes policemen. The community mobilised swiftly around what became known as the Newham 8. This led to demonstrations largely frequented by Asian children and young people. The resulting national media coverage exposed Newham policing for what it had been at the time: meek in the face of racism and aggressive in its policing against black and Asian communities. The police had been placing the blame on the victims.
By the summer of 1984, racist violence had not subsided. I had been transitioning from primary to secondary school. At this point, Little Ilford had a mobile police unit situated within its school grounds. It had also erected spiked metal frames on the periphery of the school. My parents decided that it would be safer sending me to Langdon Secondary School in East Ham, some 30 minutes away from our house, instead of Little Ilford.
Disgust.
On 7 August 1984, a group of white youths randomly started carrying out acts of violence against black and Asian people. In one incident, a disabled Asian youth was hit on the head with a hammer. A group of Asian youths decided to confront the alleged white culprits outside the Duke of Edinburgh pub. A fight ensued but whereas five of the Asian youths spent seven weeks on remand for offences that did not warrant such length, their white counterparts were immediately let out on bail.
On 29 November 1984, 16-year-old black youth Eustace Pryce was stabbed in the head outside the Greengate pub in Plaistow. Pryce, his brother Gerald and some friends had confronted racists, which led to a fight in which Eustace was fatally stabbed. The police, on