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.
