“Please stay inside and don’t speak to anyone.” “You all need to take extra caution outside. Don’t ‘bite’ to anything anyone says to you in the street." "This is going to spill over — please keep the kids in for a few days.”
By early last week, the first messages had already started trickling in from my family WhatsApp group chat. At first it was out of an abundance of caution — spread out across Manchester, Blackburn, Liverpool and London, we were all growing slightly concerned about the increasing numbers of far-Right mobs descending on English towns and cities. But, as more and more footage from the riots began to circulate online, it quickly became clear that our warnings to one another were entirely justified.
On social media, video after video surfaced of brown and black people being attacked and beaten in the streets. Footage saw Muslim and ethnic minority-owned shops destroyed, houses with their windows being smashed, two hotels housing asylum seekers set on fire and daubed in Islamophobic graffiti. Gangs of racist thugs were patrolling the streets, chanting racial slurs and doing Nazi salutes. An Asian man dragged out of his car in Hull, racially abused and thrown to the floor as his vehicle was smashed up next to him. A black man attacked by a large group of white men in a Manchester park.
It was impossible to look away. For my generation, these scenes of blatant, violent and organised racism are entirely unprecedented and unimaginable. The unease and distress now being felt within ethnic minority communities is something that people my age have never experienced — and never imagined we would. We grew up with the promise of a Britain proud of its multicultural excellence, the self-described “most tolerant country in the world”.
We must start by diagnosing the problem for what it is
Now, I am fearful for my family going outside alone, walking down the wrong street at the wrong time. My grandparents, aunties and uncles told stories like this from Blackburn in the early Sixties, during the days of “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish” and when the community was virtually all-white. Now, we have our own stories too.
As the ashes from the weekend’s destruction simmer, many have been asking what has led to the resurgence of such naked, violent racism. Seventy years on from the infamous riots targeting immigrant and minority populations in east London and Notting Hill, how is it that people of colour again do not feel safe in the communities they have lived in for decades?
The answers are complex, the post-mortem must be lengthy. The complicity of social media platforms in peddling misinformation, the extreme language increasingly normalised by Right-wing politicians, the consistent scapegoating of migrant communities — all must be meaningfully interrogated.
But where we must start is by diagnosing the problem for what it is. These riots were not simply “thuggery”, “pockets of violence” or “pro-British protesters”, as they have been variously described. Language matters, and what we have seen over the last week is racist — and largely Islamophobic — terrorism.
When politicians fail to call a problem by its name, it legitimises the very rhetoric of the far-Right who consistently argue that these problems do not exist. While the Prime Minister’s statement on Sunday was forceful, he has thus far failed to described actions like the violent targeting of mosques as Islamophobic.
It is a betrayal of ethnic minority communities who are being targeted for the colour of their skin to prevaricate on these terms. It is not an extreme position to call out racism for what it is. It does not alienate working class communities, as some have suggested, or stoke division. It is an urgent responsibility. If we have learned anything from the last week, it must be that conceding political ground to extremists will certainly not solve our problems.
