White and black apples in a cart

I was watching the news with two white friends last Friday, when a story came on about a woman who had been blinded by her boyfriend. The man and woman, both white, had been involved in fights before, but this time he "went too far," according to the woman. It was a really sad story. There was a particular moment that was really heart wrenching - when asked how she felt about what happened, the woman responded that she felt like a ghost, as she is totally blind and can't see anything (not her two children, and not even her hands). Tears began to flow from both eyes, and she said sorry to the interviewer as she dabbed them with a handkerchief. 

This is the kind of story that makes me want to do something (write an article, contribute to a cause, be on the lookout for signs of domestic violence, etc). I don't know how my friends felt, but I was sad and angry at the same time - sad for the woman, and very angry with the man. Nobody has the right to hurt, talk less of blind, another human being! I was so angry that if I had come across the man later that evening - which was very unlikely given that he had been arrested - I would have likely approached him and given him a piece of my mind. 

But as I reflected on my conflicting emotions, something occurred to me. My white friends spoke more about the sadness of the woman's condition, than the injustice of what her boyfriend did. It was almost as if they had accepted (rightly, I guess) that there are sick white people in the world, and that these things happen. I found myself wondering what their reactions might have been had the man been black. Would they have reacted the same way by focusing more on the victim than the assailant? I do not know. But I do know what I saw and heard during the London riots last year - white friends of mine mentioned to me that black kids often end up as gangsters that cause trouble, and that the police should come down hard on the rioters to deter other would be gangsters.

And that's when it occurred to me that when a white person commits a crime, most whites tend to see that person as the bad apple in the cart. The system deals with him or her, and the rest of the apple cart remains safe (at least till the next bad apple turns up). However when a black person (or a group of black persons) commits a crime, conservative whites tend to see that as justification of their suspicion that all the apples in the black cart are bad. And their response is almost always to ask that society deal with the individual apple(s), as well as all apples in the cart (the former through the formal justice system, and the latter through informal, institutionalised racist practices). 

My friends that I watched the news story with are not conservatives, but sitting and watching the story with them, I could not help but wonder how our discussion could have gone had the perpetrator been black. Because he was white, we spoke about the individuals involved. But I suspect had he been black we would have spoken about the races or "communities" involved, and I might have had to once again explain to white friends that black people are not all the same (like I found myself doing several times during the London riots). My white friends also know that white people are all different; it's obvious from years of interacting with other whites at home, school, work and play. They also know this from history and the media. Yet even some of my educated white friends are totally ignorant about the differences between black people. And the same problem applies in larger discussions in the media - note for example the common references to Africa, even when speaking about issues that are specific to certain countries (see an earlier post about this here). 

I believe this ignorance leads to the lumping of black people together when issues are being discussed, which in turn makes it easier for conservative white Brits and their minions (Nirpal Dhaliwal, for example) to do something as daft as trying to criminalise all black people in England for the actions of Mark Duggan and the 1,000 people (representing less than 0.07% of the black population in England) who showed up at his funeral (see Dhaliwal's article here, and see my response here). 

This kind of negative rhetoric does not help matters. For better or worse, blacks and other minorities are now part of multicultural England. And blacks (including African Americans, black Canadians, black people from the Caribbean, and black people from 55 African countries) have so much to contribute to The Big Society (with different types of music, cuisine, art, dance, literature, etc). But it is hard to make these contributions if the larger society keeps putting all black people into one cart, and labelling that cart as being likely full of bad apples. We are all in the same cart, and there are bad white apples, as well as black, amongst us all.

My response to a reductionist article in the Evening Standard about the "black community" in England

Referring to Nirpal Dhaliwal's article in the Evening Standard of March 29, 2012, titled "Where is the black outrage over Thusha's shooting?" (which you can fine here), his argument seems to be as follows: (1) young black men should not dress or act in ways that make them look suspicious; (2) the "black community" should accept and welcome stop-and-search for its own good, as it reduces the level of black-on-black crime; (3) the "black community" should also accept the fact that there will be occasional casualties like Mr. Duggan, as the Met strives to save black communities from themselves.

I have four major issues with this line of argument. They are as follows:

1. Who determines what is deemed suspicious? Is a white boy with "a hoodie, gold teeth and jeans slung low" suspicious? Depends on where you are! Are Sheiks in turbans suspicious? If Mr. Dhaliwal got his mind out of his obviously Eurocentric worldview he would know that the larger society (western in this case) decides what is suspicious (ask Muslims about their experiences after 9/11, or ask Jews what they have experienced through the ages). So should all Muslims cut their beards to appease whites? Should all Jews change their names to avoid anti-Semitic behaviour?

2. What is this "black community" that he refers to so often? Are all its members of the same educational background and income level? Do they share the same political leanings? Do they all speak patois? There are over 1 million black people in England. Surely Mr. Dhaliwal cannot be suggesting they are all part of this black community. Is Jermaine Defoe a member of this community? Is Tidjane Thiam a member? I do not understand why people like Mr. Dhaliwal refuse to accept the diversity and multiplicity amongst black people. Not all of us like reggae music or rap. Not all of us vote Labour. Some of us have different sexual preferences. There is no black community, but there are communities made up of predominantly black people. Not the same thing.

3. I can't argue with the fact that carrying out stop-and-search on suspects may deter crime. I recall seeing a woman called over by the police at Euston station because the police dog caught a sniff of something in her bag and followed her. I didn't go on an outrage, and was glad the police was keeping an eye out on potentially troublesome people. And it's fair game if the police do this in areas that have a record of high crime, regardless of the skin colour of the people in the area. So yes, searches may reduce the prevalence of crime in all high crime areas, and not just those with lots of black people. But here comes the rub - how do the police determine who is a suspect when there is little to work with besides what they see (going back to point 1)?

Which brings us to (4) - black people of all persuasions and stripes rally around issues like that of Mr. Duggan because deep down we know it could have happened to any of us, no matter how posh we are, or what we do for a living. All we have to do is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That is not to suggest Mr. Duggan was an angel, but the way he was killed raises a lot of questions. Would it have happened that way if he was exactly the same, but white? I don't know.

However I do know of young black children who have been blamed by teachers in schools for fights they didn't start. I have seen white teachers come down harder on black children for infractions white students get away with. So black people rallying together to address the institutional racism that they experience at school, work, and even play should not be misconstrued as advocating for Mr. Duggan's lifestyle. And neither should the lack of such rallying for Thusha be construed as indicative of black people not wishing her well, or not willing to support the fund raising drive (how I wish we could get a breakdown of donations by ethnicity from HSBC!).

To recap, there is no central planning agency that decides how black people should respond to issues like that of Mr. Duggan's killing. Just like everybody else, we all have different views on things. As such, there is no black community that even we can point to as representative of all of us - we come from different countries, backgrounds, and have different aspirations. It may surprise Mr. Dhaliwal to hear that just like Indians and Pakistanis, we don't all get along. Searches to deter crime in high-crime areas are perfectly fine, as long as they are applied across the area's populace equally, and suspects to stop and search are picked on a mix of relevant criteria, and not just colour. Lastly, young white males dress just as "gangster" as young black males, but anecdotal evidence suggests they are often viewed as oddities, and not as suspicious characters. Why? Because the colour of the skin seems to say more about what is deemed suspicious than the clothes. Case in point, using one of Mr. Dhaliwal's examples - a black man in a doctor's white coat and stethoscope meeting a patient for the first time may be incorrectly perceived as being less competent than an accompanying white doctor simply because of his ethnicity, even if the former is the latter's superior.

Race matters, Sir, let's not pretend it doesn't. What we need to do is to see the complexities involved so we can deal with them, and reductionist articles like yours will not help matters.