Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain by Jason Arday;

Author:Jason Arday;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

Understanding racialised boundaries within British society

During a time of high political struggle, the 1990s did raise a generational awareness of racialised campaigns, most notably from the inspirational plight of Winnie and Nelson Mandela’s rise to prominence as the mother and father of a New South Africa to the success of the Stephen Lawrence campaign, which brought much-needed focus to anti-racist campaigns nationally and globally. The emergent rejection of racial inequality provided a catalyst which sought to dismantle racism and the power and privilege that accompanies this as the normative orthodoxy. The emergent theme which arose from the murder of Stephen Lawrence illuminated how the police conspired to handle this particular case. Subsequently, this transcended perceptions about the effectiveness of anti-racism movements and campaigns. The pressure exerted by the Lawrences and the impeding change of government at the time played a major part in understanding how major British societal institutions had been complicit in historically and judicially failing ethnic minorities, consequently perverting several cases of justice whilst perpetuating racial inequality and discrimination (Yuval-Davis, 1999). This was best exemplified in the attempt to assassinate Lawrence’s character and racially ascribe him as a proponent of criminality. It also exposed the Conservatives as a party that had entirely no interest in tackling racial discrimination and improving race relations within Britain. We can therefore safely assert that the Macpherson Report and subsequent race relations interventions that followed would not have come to fruition under Tory governance.

The anti-racism campaigns of the 1990s facilitated a tectonic shift in anti-discriminatory discourse which endorsed new ways of viewing British national connectedness. However, the continual criminalisation of Black males did create a hesitance in the gradual acceptance of Black and ethnic minority individuals into British society (Gilroy, 1987; Solomos and Back, 1996). Unfortunately, during the 1990s and beyond, this continued to be an enduring ‘hallmark’ of racial profiling and ascription. Contrastingly, the criminalisation of White ‘football hooligans’, many of whom had been closely affiliated with the Extreme Right, were celebrated as nationalists defending Britannia. Comparatively, the continued characterisation of young Black males as ‘criminals’ became desensitised to divisions of class, in essence ‘Blackness’ became a symbol of criminality (Hall, 1998). During the time, stories typically involved and reported Black males as being routinely stopped and searched without basis, reason, or foundation. The Home Office was notorious for being typically slow to respond or prioritise this as a matter of national or state urgency. This indecisiveness to act garnered a public response of indignation concerning the way Stephen Lawrence and his family were treated by the police, as they attempted to proffer an anti-racist discourse that was contradictory to their discriminatory and confrontational engagement with ethnic minorities. The wrongful attempt to portray and perpetuate a negative and criminalised stereotype of what became the atypical Black man within British society was distinguished at every possible juncture by the Lawrence family. There was a determination to dismantle the dominant discourse and provide a discourse that disrupted such an ignorant and racialised supremacist notion (Mirza, 1997; Solomos, 2003).

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