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.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.