Witch Hunting
Out of some sense of morbid fascination, I’ve been waiting for any kind of real information to emerge about the build up to the Lozells Road riots in Birmingham in October. This Guardian article is one of the first I’ve seen that actually goes into any depth about the subject.
The story seems to be roughly what you’d probably have guessed: rumours growing out of control and then being used by influential people in the various communities to further their personal agendas. People then go along with this as it gives them an excuse to act on their prejudices, without any inconvenient analysis of the situation to hold them back.
There still isn’t any conclusive evidence for whether the alleged trigger event - an Afro-Caribbean teenager being raped by a group of Asian shopkeepers - actually happened. From a broader, social, point of view, it almost doesn’t matter now whether it happened or not. The perception of the issue has far more ramifications than the reality.
I also suspect that there’s a further story to be told about the police’s handling of the situation. There’s very little reportage about it, and what little there is suggests that at best it was desperately incompetent and at worst could be painted as actually being complicit in building up the tension.
I suppose that I’m rambling about this because since moving down to London, the racial and economic tensions in the area have been much more overt than I was expecting. Granted, this is coming from someone moving down from Edinburgh, which isn’t anywhere near as diverse, and I’ve never seen anything actually result from the rumbling, but there are definitely noticeable undercurrents. Lots of reaction and no reflection. It’s all deeply depressing.