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Quote of the Day: Is It Time for England to Confront Its Race-Related Issues?

Posted by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief in Economy, International, Religion.
Aug 10th, 2011 | 4 responses

Our Quote of the Day is actually part of a must-read post in The Huffington Post by Lola Adesioye on the ongoing riots in England:

In 2011, it’s shameful that any of England’s citizens feel that violence is the best way in which to express frustration. Watching live online footage of yesterday’s rioting in Tottenham from America, I was thrown back to yesteryear.

This is what happened in Tottenham in 1985. Then, it was the Broadwater Farm riots which came about as a result of the death of a black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, who suffered a stroke while police conducted a search of her home. It was also what happened in Brixton that same year, shortly before the Broadwater Farm riot, when Jamaican Dorothy Groce was also shot (and subsequently paralysed) by police. I was five years old, but I remember watching the riots on TV at the time.

One would have expected that, over 25 years on, there would be more effective ways of dealing with such tensions and frustrations. The trouble is, there aren’t. And while it is shameful that some of Tottenham’s residents responded to the shooting of Mark Duggan by rioting, it’s also disappointingly unsurprising.

Although I am a black Britain who is based in the US, I continue to be concerned about the future of the black population in my home country. In 2011, as in 1985, the underlying issues – in particular a sense that black Britons are routinely ill treated by the establishment, the police especially – still have not been resolved. Tensions between black youth and the police in the inner cities have not dissipated. On the contrary, suspicions are endemic. Black leadership is desperately lacking, and the country refuses to tackle these major challenges in any substantive way.

Black people – youth especially – around the country are being left high and dry. The result? Growing violent crime (with black men being overrepresented as both perpetrators and victims) and increasing social and political disaffection. If you re-read reports from the riots of the late 70s and 80s, the very same factors are still at work. The bottom line is that the UK still does not take its issues related to its black British citizens seriously and it is paying the price.

An example of the unwillingness to confront what’s really going on here is evident in the commentary that has been provided about last night’s Tottenham riots.

GO HERE to read the rest.

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4 Responses to “Quote of the Day: Is It Time for England to Confront Its Race-Related Issues?”

Allen says:

August 10, 2011 at 1:04 am

Yes when the government cannot provide for the needs of the people, then the people begin to revolt. They don’t sit around and suffer for the convenience of everybody else, they Act and rightfully so. What point is it to be a loyal and faithful member of a nation that disenfranchises you? There is no point and that is why there is violence. Because you cannot just stand there and starve while waving the flag with joy in your heart.
superdestroyer says:

August 10, 2011 at 8:08 am

Once again, Joe refuses to believe that blacks should ever be responsible for any of their own actions and that whites should be responsible for the pathologies of the black and immigrant communities.

Maybe when everyone should expect blacks to act like adults instead of like little children things will get better. But as long as their are progressives like Joe who will enable any form of bad behavior o blacks, nothing will ever get better.
JSpencer says:

August 10, 2011 at 11:08 am

Once again SD believes that people who have been marginalized, treated with injustice, and who face a bleak, despairing future with no representation should quietly go to ground and accept their fate. Get real.
DLS says:

August 10, 2011 at 2:26 pm

[sigh] Time to post this again, in the hopes some who need to will learn(!). What’s in England is not any leftist myth or delusion, but an underclass, compounded by a welfare-state entitlement mentality.

It’s not the economy, nor is it “the cuts” (in expenditures)…[nor stupid leftist racism accusations, or "inequality," et cetera]

Not only is it completely non-sensical to blame the Tottenham riot on the cuts [or on "racism" [sic] — DLS], it risks inflaming an already volatile situation by letting lawbreakers off the hook. Last night, copy cat riots broke out in Enfield and Brixton and there were pockets of lawlessness across London, including Shepherd’s Bush, less than a mile from my house. Opportunistic young criminals are more likely to exploit the tense atmosphere in the capital if they hear Left-wing politicians on the television and radio making excuses for the lawbreakers in Tottenham. As they smash shop windows and start helping themselves to designer clothing and electrical goods, they can tell themselves they’re victims of this heartless “Tory Government” rather than common-or-garden thieves.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100099866/blaming-these-riots-on-the-cuts-risks-inflaming-an-already-volatile-situation/

[W]hile many of those involved in the weekend’s unrest were not even been born when the previous riots took place, many of the social problems remain unchanged.

The north London community forms the core of the London Borough of Haringey, one of the most deprived areas in Britain, blighted by gang culture, drugs and gun crime.

Police have for decades fought in vain to counter the area’s numerous postcode gangs – most notably Tottenham Mandem – whose feuding and drugs wars have resulted in scores of deaths.
In the past year alone, the Metropolitan Police has had to tackle 88 gun crime offences in the area – down from 141 the year before – and dealt with eight murders. The borough sees around 5,000 violent offences committed annually. [...]

Underpinning Tottenham’s crime statistics is a host of social and economic problems, despite millions of pounds being poured into tackling them.

Teenage pregnancy rates in the borough are among the highest in Britain, with around 53 girls aged 15 to 17 in every 1,000 becoming pregnant annually.

The local authority’s social services department has come under the spotlight in recent years, most notably over its handling of Baby P, who was tortured to death at the hands of his mother Tracey Connelly, Steven Barker and Jason Owen at his home in Tottenham.

Tottenham is also facing an unemployment crisis with more than 10,500 out of work and claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8687487/Tottenham-riot-a-community-blighted-by-drugs-and-gun-crime.html

Between 1965 and 1992, the American public (black and white) lost its sympathy for rioters. For many liberal historians, that’s always been a subject of pain and anger. They presume that the American middle class was turned against Bobby Kennedy’s brand of compassion by unscrupulous race baiters and venal anti-tax campaigners. In fact, there’s only so much self-destructive violence that the silent majority will suffer before it will use the ballot box to elect a government prepared to put the country in order. The sense of liberal ambition that permeated the country in the 1960s was discredited by soaring inflation and unemployment in the 1970s, in spite of the dramatic expansion of the federal government post-Watts. During the Ronald Reagan revolution in the 1980s, conservative economics and Old Time Religion caught on. They’ve never lost their grip.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100099840/tottenham-riots-the-history-lesson-from-los-angeles-is-that-the-modern-middle-class-wont-tolerate-mob-rule/