Violent Crime in London

Originally, the section of a European city to which Jews were restricted. Today, commonly defined as a section of a city occupied by members of a minority group who live there because of social restrictions on their residential choice.

LONDON–Wading into one of the final controversies of his 10 years in power, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has ignited a fury by blaming a distinctive black culture for a rash of knife and gun crime in London since the start of the new year.

Admitting he was "lurching into total frankness" in his final weeks in office, Blair was quoted yesterday beneath a banner headline in The Guardian as saying the violence would not be stopped "by pretending it is not young black kids doing it."

Blair's remarks came during a lecture in Cardiff, Wales, where he downplayed poverty as a factor in a spree of teenage violence that has claimed the lives of seven young people since January.

"Economic inequality is a factor and we should deal with that, but I don't think it's the thing that is producing the most violent expression of this social alienation," Blair told reporters after the address.

"I think that is to do with the fact that particular youngsters are being brought up in a setting that has no rules, no discipline, no proper framework around them," Blair said.

"We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong – it has not – but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need specific measures to be brought back into the fold."

Blair's comments were met with blanket condemnation from community leaders, who told the Toronto Star they felt "sideswiped" by the prime minister's suggestion that they alone bear responsibility for the issue. One accused Blair of "dishonestly attempting to absolve himself from the chronic lack of support for community efforts to create solutions."

"I am infuriated. Nobody in the black community is denying there is a problem. Even I acknowledge we have our `iffies.' We have a problem with our young kids, a very small minority of whom are out of control with knives and guns," said anti-gun campaigner Cheryl Sealey, co-ordinator of the London-based Victim Aid.

"But there is an entire catalogue of reasons for this violence and an entire catalogue of solutions. And Tony Blair, in the spirit and tone of his remarks, is completely ignoring the fact that his government has all but abandoned the community workers who are trying so hard to turn things around."

Blair said his controversial remarks were inspired by a recent conversation with a black pastor of a London church during a Downing Street summit on knife crime, who told him: "When are we going to start saying this is a problem amongst a section of the black community and not, for reasons of political correctness, pretend that this is nothing to do with it?"

Community activist Stafford Scott dismissed the comment, telling the Star: "Blair has made a career of surrounding himself with idiots, fools and sycophants who are all too ready to provide fodder for declarations designed for spin rather than substance.

"He is right that the so-called black community must take some responsibility. But the British leadership must also take some responsibility for creating this environment of continuing marginalization, which has been allowed to fester for decades." [...]

Apr 14, 2007 02:30 AM
Royson James

"I learned more about my history in the last month than I did my entire life"
– A black broadcaster on the BBC, March 25, 2007.


Travelling the past two months between Toronto, Ghana and Britain has reminded me that we know precious little in Canada about the origins of our black citizens, and think about it even less.

Such is the virtual invisibility of their lives – crime reports notwithstanding – that blacks themselves know little about how they got to this country, their real names, and the genocidal historical forces that continue to shape their lives.

The fact that most blacks in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean cannot trace their family tree beyond a few branches that end in a slave ship on the Atlantic speaks to this blotting out of a people, in history books and in our minds.

Here's what they taught me at school in Jamaica in the late 1950s and 1960s, even as America burned with racial upheaval, a few hours north: "Christopher Columbus discovered Jamaica in 1492. He arrived with the Nina and the Pinta."

The Arawaks and Caribs beat Columbus to the West Indian colonies. But I don't remember ever being asked to think about who they were or what happened to erase their very presence from the islands.

"Jamaica, Jamaica, Jamaica, land we love," we sang at independence in 1962. I was Jamaican. No thought of an ancestral home off the island; little word of slavery and life on the plantations – except oblique references to the Maroons and Cudjoe and the killing of Annie Palmer, the white witch of Rose Hall.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in 1968, I got my first lessons in racism. I listened dumbfounded to radio clips of his speeches. Where had I been? Why didn't I know any of this?

The only exposure to Africa was not as the motherland but as the jungle, home to Tarzan and Jane, savages and witch doctors. And when I was about 19 and a fellow worker at Grand & Toy told me that there were glorious African kings and sophisticated African civilizations before the white man arrived, it threw me for a loop.

They didn't teach me that. They taught me about Vasco da Gama and the heroic pirates and Captain Morgan and Drake and the Queen. We celebrated our captors.

Independence brought a dramatic change in the curriculum. My younger cousins learned much more Jamaican history. The abolitionists Nanny of the Maroon and Sam Sharpe were celebrated, meaning the history of slavery was starting to be heard.

But Africa was still a foreign continent, not home, not Mama Africa – not until Bob Marley started drumming that into our consciousness.[...]