August ‘Riots’ One Year On: A Black Power Perspective
The Uprising as a Framework for Contemporary Black and
Poor Resistance
Sukant Chandan
Sons of Malcolm
05 August 2012
Introduction and definition of terms
We are now one year on from the ‘August riots’ in England
last year, or what I prefer to call the Uprising of Black and Poor Youth. The four-day long Uprising was a historic
event. Not since the Miners Strike of 1984-’85 have we seen such civil unrest
in England. Little known to most there were a few Black miners in the 1984’85
Miners Strike, but the last politically comparable civil unrest to that which
took place last August was the uprisings of Black youth in 1981, where over a
dozen English cities saw our Black and Asian youth (with participation from a
minority of whites) rise up against the daily white supremacist harassment and
violence from the police and thugs and in revolt against the conditions of
oppression and poverty.
A few clarifications as to the political language used here,
especially as we are living in a time of relative confusion as to ‘race’ and
class, adding to this confusion is that the Uprising itself has been subject to
white-washing by the white power structure and those consciously or
sub-consciously affected by it.
When I refer to ‘Black’ youth, I am doing so as referring to
a united Black concept to ‘colonised peoples’, as Sivanandan said “Black is the
colour of our politics”; ‘Black’ in the political sense when used pertaining
to all non-white people, in the manner in which Malcolm X defined the ‘Black
Revolution’, as he explained in a defining speech outlining Malcolm’s
revolutionary outlook in The
Message to the Grassroots: “… the black revolution is world-wide in
scope and in nature. The black revolution is sweeping Asia, sweeping Africa, is
rearing its head in Latin America.”
Earlier in this speech he outlines in more detail this
concept of Black, and the development of this international Black Revolution:
“In Bandung back in, I think, 1954, was the first unity
meeting in centuries of black people. And once you study what happened at the
Bandung conference, and the results of the Bandung conference, it actually
serves as a model for the same procedure you and I can use to get our problems
solved. At Bandung all the nations came together. Their were dark nations from
Africa and Asia. Some of them were Buddhists. Some of them were Muslim. Some of
them were Christians. Some of them were Confucianists; some were atheists.
Despite their religious differences, they came together. Some were communists;
some were socialists; some were capitalists. Despite their economic and
political differences, they came together. All of them were black, brown, red,
or yellow.”
This understanding of Black must also include understanding
the ramifications of the historical and present way in which the white power
structure has created an unofficial caste and divide and rule system which
basically pitches the lighter skinned peoples against the darker skinned; divides and elevates Arabs, Asians and other non-African peoples against Black
Africans (most violently manifested recently in the on-going mass lynching of Libyan and
non-Libyan Black Africans by lighter skinned Arabs and with most Asian and Arab
Muslims either complicit or supporting this ‘revolution’), and a host of
other tricks to disunite us non-whites / ‘people of colour’/ Black and Brown
people / Black people. Two other examples of this in 2011 were the Lowkey/Ghetts
beef, and the Wiley/Jay
Sean beef.
I call the Uprising one of the ‘Black and poor’, as poor
refers to the white poor, who joined in the uprising once the Black
resistant-oppressed sparked it all of with their resistance after the lynching
of the young Black man, father, and Tottenham resident Mark Duggan (or
‘assassination’, in the words of Pam Duggan, his respected mother). The
involvement of the white poor in the Uprising has contributed to the
befuddlement in peoples heads as to the white supremacist / Black resistant
central component of the Uprising.
The Uprising did not come out of a vacuum
No organisation or movement for our grassroots youth for a generation
Much of the reaction to the Uprising, both negative and
positive have given the impression that the Uprising had no concrete and
obvious historical roots; it did.
Our young Black and poor youth have been trying to make
their voice heard for a whole generation, mostly in vain, or if their voice was
ever listened to it was only done so to continue and deepen the oppression and
alienation towards them. The obvious manifestation of this voice that people
have heard is the cultural voice through the medium of music, especially the
genre of Grime whereby Black youth have led a cultural articulation reflecting
the growing malaise into which they have been subjected by the white power
structure. Their voice has been ignored and their voice, their culture and
their activities have been further criminalised.
Issues such as community disintegration (through
gentrification, the housing crisis, and alarming levels of unemployment in the
African community as well as sections of the South Asian community), the
connected rise and local power of street gangs, the growth of substance abuse
and deteriorating or absence of healthy sexual relations amongst our youth from
pre-teens, connected rise of misogynistic attitudes and behaviour,
sexualisation of childhood, are all reflected through the music. The warning
signs all around us as to the situation of our youth was ignored for
a whole generation, ie., the generation that were born in the late 1980s and
early 1990s.
Other problems facing our youth has been the attack on and
attempts at negating Black pride, to the extent where young people are
parroting what the white power structure wants them to in terms of issues
relating to discrimination of darker skinned people and especially women and
young women, (current tragic and depressing obsession with “lighties” etc) and
a general internalisation and promotion of internalised white supremacy through
their music.
There is very little resistance to this, although there are
developing networks of Black Power and/or anti-imperialist networks and artists
that have been increasingly challenging these issues in the past several years.
Our Black youth have intermittingly rising up throughout the
last fifteen years or so.
This was seen at a grassroots level in Bradford, Burnley and
Oldham in the summer of 2000, when South Asian youth took to the streets to
fight white supremacist provocation from the far-right and their supporters.
Then Black and radical white youth in high schools and
colleges walked out en masse across the country in protest against the
war of aggression against Iraq in the spring of 2003, and there were all manner
of clashes with the police with Black mainly Muslim youth in this period,
seeing many youth being charged with ‘public disorder’.
Black youth again fought the police during the israeli massacre
of Palestinians in Gaza in December 2008 / January 2009. This was the first
time that pro-Palestinian and anti-war protests saw our youth pro-actively
develop a militant self-defence strategy, and they did this several times
throughout the three week assault against Gaza.
Since 2009 Black youth, again mainly Muslims but in alliance
with non-muslim radical anti-racist Black youth, have been defending their
communities from the far-right group the english defence league, who, with what
seems clearly like collusion from the police and government, have been
conducting violent street provocations against mainly South Asian and Muslim
communities several times a year since. The edl have been fought to a positive stalemate by the
spontaneous resistance of our Black youth.
The student protests, some of which turned violent, also has
fed into the culture of resistance developing amongst our youth. Student
protests are, like the rest of the left, boring affairs who meekly ask the
powers-that-be for this or that reform, however this time because of an injection
of our militant Black youth, the protests had a much more assertive and
combative air to them.
All these events happened without any organisation that can
relate to our youth, can support, mobilise or represents them.
The White left more often than not are a real obstacle and
hindrance to the interests of our youth, but I don’t want to waste too much
time on them here, as they are at best an absolute irrelevancy to our youth and
communities, and need to kept well away from us as they are totally stupid and
toxic and will sabotage anything they touch.
Our youth are still without any effective organisations that
can serve them and the communities in which they live. This is one of the
central challenges for those serious about Black struggle, resistance and
liberation: the necessity to build an organisation(s) and movement(s) that are
fit for purpose. No sign of this as of yet.
It was on this historical basis and experience that our
youth finally lost their patience, that seeing another Black person dead at
police hands and the deepening austerity into which our people have been forced
was the fuel that sparked the conflagration that we witnessed and that which
gripped england for several days in August 2011.
The Uprising, White Supremacy and the British White Power Structure
‘Whites turning
Black’, and the continuing relevance and importance of Black Power resistance
There has been an obvious campaign to white-wash the
Uprising, to turn it into anything but resistance to the deeply white
supremacist nature of this country. This is part of a complex process that the
white power structure has been implementing to blunt the effectiveness of Black
resistance since the 1980s (and before, as it’s a centuries long tactic!), and
unfortunately it has been more or less successful in this regard. A fuller
analysis cannot be gone into here, but it is something that needs closer
analysis and understanding.
It has been these tactics that has led to a situation
whereby our youth have been without effective guidance and has led to all
kinds of confusion with some Black youth having no problem with their white
friends using the N word; with Black youth joining the white supremacist edl;
with many Black and Asian youth thinking that white supremacy is no more, and
many other disturbing examples.
Mark Duggan was killed after several other high profile
deaths in police custody. Sean Rigg on 21 August 2008, Smiley
Culture on 15 March 2011 and Kingsely Burrell on 27 March 2011 were all killed
in police custody, with the evidence that is known so far pointing to the
deaths occurring at the hands of white police officers.
Mark Duggan was a Black man killed in a community well known
for its Black resistance - Tottenham –
and was killed by a mob of 31 white police officers, which sparked local Black
resistance from the youth. White supremacy is alive and well in england today.
The resistance and civil unrest in Tottenham spread to other
parts of London and then to many other parts of England. The developing
disturbances saw white youth participate, even mainly white working class
estates in north west england took up the fight against the police. In
Birmingham Black youth shot at police helicopters, and in Nottingham there was
minimal looting, instead Black youth there carried out guerrilla-style attacks
on police and police stations. All these young people have subsequently been
jailed.
Despite promoting white supremacy non-stop through its state
institutions, mis-education system, and media, the white power structure was
obviously shaken by white working class people joining in with Black people in
the Uprising. This led white supremacist historian David Starkey to try and
explain this by saying “the whites have turned Black” on bbc’s newsnight
program. Starkey meant this to denigrate Black communities and culture and
sought to divide whites from Blacks, to try and pull back whites to a loyalist
position to the english white power structure.
There was however some truth in Starkey’s comment in as much
that Black culture has become a pole of attraction for those seeking rejection
and resistance to oppression and exploitation. Whereas Starkey sees this
rightly as a threat to the system, Black Power activists and radicals can see
this as a potentially positive development as well as raising the challenge of
keeping as clear as possible that white supremacist ideas and prejudices are
not washed away just because people dress, talk and act or act-up in a certain
way.
This situation becomes more complex when we see people like
PlanB and others play the white-washing role for the system in deleting white
supremacy and Black resistance from their narrative towards the Uprising. This
is that much more problematic as PlanB and other white artists use Black
culture (Rap and Grime especially) to convey white-washed analyses of the
Uprising and other social issues, and for this the system is fine and happy
(including tories) for PlanB to promote his views in the mainstream film and
entertainment industry.
One of the most problematic manifestations of the way whites are using Black culture to perpetuate racism was the
outright white supremacist track and video by Maverick
Sabre and Professor Green’s Jungle (Maverick Sabre subsequently
apologised on twitter for his role in Jungle).
There is still little clear leadership on these issues,
however there are artists and a growing number of Black Power activists who are
addressing these issues as they arise.
Indicative of the political situation we are in, the
Uprising has not led to any real development of radical Black music and
culture. It has actually been a problematic white artist with a problematic
white analysis – PlanB – who has said anything about the Uprising through his
creative work. The white power structure media and institutions echo PlanB’s
position, with the Guardian and LSE producing not too dissimilar analysis to
that of as PlanB towards the Uprising.
An obvious point to make is that Black artists and cultural
activists seem not too feel comfortable enough to express themselves about the issues surrounding the Uprising, pointing to another
form of white supremacist oppression that leads to a near silence from Black
cultural voices as to the burning issues facing them.
The Uprising was a Black uprising at root, borne out of
resistance against white supremacy. That whites got involved is both a positive
thing and a challenge, a challenge because its important that one does not get
carried away by white involvement which has the danger of then some of us down
playing or negating the very real white supremacist society and dynamics which we
have to requires a constant and vigilant fight against it.
The Internationalist perspective
Lack of revolutionary international leadership and struggle negatively impacts our youth
The british white power structure is the oldest and most
sophisticated and hence most dangerous, sly and tricky of all modern
imperialist powers. Its domination and agenda has been international in scope.
Malcolm X once said we cannot understand what happens in Mississippi unless we
understand what is happening in Congo. To develop and apply this understanding
to today: we cannot understand what happens in Tottenham, Brixton, Peckham,
Handsworth, etc unless we understand what is happening in Africa, Asia and
Latin America.
This generation are one of the first generations not be
exposed to a growing world resistance leadership to white supremacy as
generations before them were. The generations before them could not but be
influenced by the international struggle of the Black and militant
anti-imperialist revolutions of the Black
Panthers and Nation of Islam, ANC and PAC
in Azania/South Africa, of the IRA in Ireland, of ZANU and ZAPU in Zimbabwe,
the Sandinistas (Nicaragua), PLO (Palestine), Vietnam, FRELIMO (Mozambique),
SWAPO (Namibia), MPLA (Angola) and so on.
These liberation struggles directly influenced our
youth, these struggles fed into the Black Liberation Movement in the usa and
west Europe, with millions of our youth being politicised by popular Hip-Hop
groups such as P-Dog (Rap group Paris)
and Public Enemy, and with the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and Khalid
Muhammad sampled and popularised so every youth knew militant quotes from these
Black militants, such as this sample from Public Enemy’s Night of the Living Bassheads from the album It
Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back: “Have you forgotten that
once we were brought here, we were robbed of our name, robbed of our language.
We lost our religion, our culture, our God...and many of us, by the way we act,
we even lost our minds.” (Khalid Muhammad)
The current world situation is without clear revolutionary
leadership as it used to be, and the white power structure has defeated the
Black Power element in much of Hip-Hop and Rap, and turned the genre in many ways
as carriers of white supremacy into the minds of our youth and children since
defeating the high-profile conscious current in it by the late 1990s.
Africa has seen the white power structure devastate it, especially when the socialist countries of the USSR and East Europe collapsed leaving Africa without its main and generally fair trading partner, and supporter of its liberation movements and nation building. This left Africa at the mercy of the ‘washington consensus’ which means crippling privatisation and indebtedness and an attempt to destroy the sovereignty of African states.
Africa has seen the white power structure devastate it, especially when the socialist countries of the USSR and East Europe collapsed leaving Africa without its main and generally fair trading partner, and supporter of its liberation movements and nation building. This left Africa at the mercy of the ‘washington consensus’ which means crippling privatisation and indebtedness and an attempt to destroy the sovereignty of African states.
The western white power structure has made sure that
Africans on the continent have been gripped by civil wars masterminded in
london, paris, washington, brussels and so on. As long as our Black youth are
without a clear revolutionary leadership from the ‘third world’ or GlobalSouth,
as long as they see our people killing our people and not our common enemy, our
youth in the west too will similarly continue to fall for the white power
structures tricks and manipulations and will not focus on our common enemy but
instead focus their trauma and anger against each other.
Once our youth see our peoples in the homelands uniting and
fighting our common enemy, they too will start to shift their focus away from
fighting each other to our common enemy.
This is partly why the Uprising has such historical
importance, that for the first time throughout the country Black youth and
their allies focused on the manifestation of the common enemy: the police, who
by their own admission are white supremacists, or in their white-washed
language: “institutionally racist”.
The Uprising did what no one has been able to for a generation,
halt the youth-on-youth crime and violence, and unite them against their common
enemy.
The fact that literally the day after the riots our youth
returned to maiming and killing each other is another example of the weakness
of our subjective political situation, ie., of the lack of leadership and
organisation for our youth.
It is one of the challenges of Black Power and
pro-GlobalSouth activists to popularise the continuing struggle of our peoples
which the white power structure demonises, be it the
successful Black land seizures of white settler land in Zimbabwe by ZANU,
the struggle
of the peoples of the Niger Delta against western oil companies, the
militant Black struggle in South Africa personified in Julius
Malema and the continuation of struggle personified by Winnie
Mandela and the rank and file of the ANC and ANC Youth League; of Gadafi
who was lynched by nato and their rebels because he was ensuring
African-unity was supported in very real and meaningful ways; of the resistance
in Libya, Syria, Lebanon to nato’s plans for domination; of the Native and
socialist movements and leaderships in Latin America and so on.
Once these international struggles are understood, once our
youth understand that their situation is connected to the struggle of our
people against the common enemy that is making all our lives a misery, we will
then see our struggle develop by leaps and bounds.
It is also worth remembering that if brits are willing to
facilitate, support and arm those who lynched and continue to lynch Black
people in their masses in Libya, then they are ready to do the same to us and
actually do the same to us. What was the killing of Mark Duggan if not a
lynching of a Black man in broad daylight by white supremacist police?
At exactly the same time the brits were massacring
dozens of Libyan children (August 08, in Zlitan, Libya) by their air force, and
the majority Black Libyan town of Tawergha was
being totally wiped out by their ‘rebels’?
The only two countries in the world who supported the rights
and interests of our youth during the Uprising was Libya
and Iran,
with the Libyan statement made after this author and a colleague at the time
encouraged them to do so, they didn’t need much encouragement, as Gadafi and
Libyans were always enthusiastic to support Black and radical movements around
the world including the west (IRA, All African Peoples Revolutionary Party,
Native American Movement, Aboriginal
rights movement and many more). This is the kind of internationalism our youth
need.
That a mass lynching of Blacks took place on the edge of
europe in north Africa directed by the brits and nato, which was met by
complicity and support of the english left and ‘anti-war’, but crucially that
we did not make these links as clear as we could, again points to a great
challenge of internationalism that faces us.
Reactions and Results of the Uprising
Best social analysis of england was the Uprising itself
There are events that smacks you in the face so hard with
reality that it clarifies things that no amount of studying and reading can
achieve, the Uprising was just such an event.
The Uprising showed who the most radical elements are in
england. It showed who are the most courageous, determined and militant in
facing the white power structure. It also showed the lack of wisdom in some
senses too of those who participated, but more of that later.
The Uprising showed that the youth who took to the streets
to battle the police were the fundamental social basis of a radical struggle in
this country, this doesn’t mean suggesting they should be recruited or
encouraged to carry out acts of violence against the police, but they are the
youth who are most in need of an organised and wise Black Power struggle, and
that anyone wanting to build such a struggle should be oriented to representing
and supporting these young people.
At the same time we should understand that there are many of
our Black youth who did not actually fight, but for every one who did, there
were many others who positively understood what was happening and supported the
fight back against the police.
The negative and often vitriolic reaction from nearly all
quarters to our youth who rose up is indicative of the collapse of the radical
grassroots movements, of the manner in which progressive and leftist ideas have
diminished and hit rock bottom in this country.
While its not really any surprise that white society reacted
so negatively to the riots, of particular concern was the way in which the
Black (African-Carribean and African) and Asian communities reacted in such a
right-wing manner, with calls for the army to be used against our youth common
at the time. This is a reflection of the fact that we allowed the radical and
united Black struggles in this country to peter out by the late 1990s and since
there has not really been any discernable leadership in our communities to
critically engage with our peoples as to their united interests against the
white power structure.
Our communities have become fractured, divided, weakened,
all manner of opportunists and careerists have replaced the community
activists and assertive radical organisations that we used to have.
There were very few radical Black voices a the time of the Uprising. Amongst those who took a leadership position in terms of articulating representing assertively the Black community was veteran Black
militant, Stafford Scott in
Tottenham, and veteran Black radical Darcus
Howe managed to get some good points across in that messy bbc interview.
But a new generation Black radical leadership was and
remains to a large extent, absent. However, brothers like Swiss and Akala made some great points and
analysis on the Uprising.
What have been the results of the Uprising? I have said
recently in a talk that whereas we can see the justness of the Uprising I
am not sure it was a wise Uprising.
When our Black communities rose up through the 1960s, 70s
and 80s we had a real movement: we had many grassroots radical organisations
that pushed for our interests, and many Uprisings of Black communities saw the
authorities make some reluctant admission that the Uprisings were reactions to
poverty and police harassment and brutality. Then often we pressured the powers-that-be to invest in our communities which they did as temporary bandages
to cover up the root causes. We also had effective defence campaigns for those
criminalized in the Uprisings.
Today, our grassroots is relatively nearly dead, hence there
is no grassroots pressure on the system, we have no effective defence
campaigns, and some 4,000 of our youth have gone through the courts, many
imprisoned, all clearly pointing to the low position from where we are right
now.
Conclusion
The necessity and urgency of building the Black Power movement
It is important that people don’t get the impression that we
are in an impossibly negative situation. Our youth show confidence,
assertiveness and politically articulate themselves and their experience in
society through their culture and also in the way they directly politically
intervene as explained above in the section on the recent history of youth
militancy.
Also there has been a small but noticeable shift in the
situation in the last three of four years, with the responses from family
campaigns in relation to deaths in police custody such as Sean Rigg, Smiley Culture, Kingsley
Burrell and all the other campaigns for justice for Black and working class
families who have suffered deaths at the hands of the police.
Many in the Black community continue to struggle since the
1990s and before and try and raise the attention of our people to our condition
and struggle to overcome, and a great amount of respect and admiration goes out
to them.
At the same time there has been a profound generation gap
that has occurred. This is no surprise, as this generation were socially and
politically left to fend for themselves.
Nevertheless, there has been amongst the youth important
developments that have helped to clarify things through culture, political
events etc such as that role played by artists especially Akala, Swiss and Jaja
Soze amongst others.
For the first time in my political life I have seen the rise
of Black and anti-imperialist radical politics as a phenomenon amongst our
youth, a process which Sons of Malcolm and others have contributed and continue
to do so. It’s a small start, but it is out there and slowly growing and needs
a lot of careful attention and support if it is going to continue to grow.
We are still relatively far from developing a real
sustainable anti-white-supremacist anti-imperialist and Black
Power youth movement.
Constructing the right conditions for this is a hard
process, especially in our times of cultural superficiality and where our youth
have so many pressures and distractions. But the necessity of struggle remains,
as the white power structure is always deepening and intensifying its war
against us.
Along with the process of constructing an organisation or
organisations, of developing a movement and movements, this should not stop us
from continuing to speak up against injustice, to develop defence campaigns and
other campaigns to defend our peoples, to support those campaigns that are
doing good and important work out there.
The Uprising last year was another major wake up call to us
to fix-up our political situation for our youth. No one has really stepped up to the mark. If we don’t develop a
Black Power youth movement, no one else will.
If we do, we can intervene in situations like the Uprising
in a much more positive manner, if we don’t, our youth will continue to be
devastated and give back a little devastation back to society in the form of
another Uprising. Which will come again.
========================
Sukant Chandan is a London-based Black Power activist,
filmmaker and political analyst. He can be contacted at sukant.chandan@gmail.com, or follow
on twitter @sonsofmalcolm
No comments:
Post a Comment