english course work

Dear Ms Birbalsingh,

        I am writing to you because I disagree with one of your articles about the London riots and Mark Duggan -‘These Riots Were About Race’  published in 2011.

      Firstly, I disagree with the way you start your article “What colour is Mark Duggan?” Don’t get me wrong, everyone has the right to their own opinion, but you portray Mark Duggan’s death as though it’s just another black man getting shot. My question to you is: if it was a man with a white skin, would you have a different point of view? Because as a black kid living in London I definitely have another perspective to you. Living here, you learn to treat everyone as equal. Obviously in life people may be more successful than each other, but on the other hand my experience has also been that when it comes to skin colour it seems that treating everyone as equals goes out the window and black lives and white lives are looked on different terms.

       Perhaps it’s just too easy for you to blame the black community for the riots. However, what you’re not realizing is that when this shooting happened everybody had just had enough. Don’t underestimate the impact of poverty on the black community in today’s London. There are 32 boroughs here, and Tottenham has one of the highest levels of child poverty of all of them. And yet you wonder why youths are on the roads. Over a quarter of people living in London are living in poverty, compared with 20% in the rest of the country; 18% are paid less than the London living wage. For every one white person there are two black people living in poverty. And yet the most recent Home Office study (2006) revealed that “levels of offending and drugs use were lower for young people of non white ethnic identities”.

      I am a young black man living in south London and I go to school in the centre of the metropolis (Waterloo). I live in an area called Penge and from Penge to Waterloo it’s quite a distance. I travel a lot and get around because I have a lot of friends that live in different parts of London . However, because of our skin colour (Black), the fact is that we are seven more times likely to get stopped and searched by the police than any other ethnic group and 17.5 more times likely to get stopped than a white person .  When you write: ‘Either Duggan was shooting at the police or the driver of the minicab was’ you simplify a highly charged, highly complicated situation. Every day, black youths living in London have to re-negotiate their relationship with the police, and I know from being in London with my white friends that the situation is completely different if you are not black.

      You state that one of Duggan’s friends ‘makes it sound as if the police are killing black people every other weekend and finally someone decided to take a stand’. But the facts are not so far away from this. Institutional racism has been identified as a huge and still unsolved problem in the London police force dating back to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. You claim that black youths are more likely to commit crimes, but you completely overlook the problem of institutional racism. which means that in London black people are constantly under the the spotlight. Stereotyping them in this way creates a vicious cycle of racism which you yourself contribute to. After the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, it took five years for the public inquiry to expose the extent of institutional racism within the police force. In 2012, Jack Straw said setting up this inquiry was “The single most important decision I made as Home Secretary”. In May 2004, BBC News described The Lawrence case as “one of the most important moments in the modern history of criminal justice in Britain”. Finally, as recently as June 2015 Sir Bernard Hogan -Howe said in an interview for the BBC, ” If other people think we are institutionally racist, then we are. It’s no good me saying we’re not and saying you must believe me. That would be a nonsense, if they believe that.”

      Ms Birbalsingh, you point to Mark Duggan’s colour, and are quick to blame black youth for the riots that have happened in the wake of the shooting, but you haven’t looked back into the history of black oppression since the beginning of the British Empire or maybe even more importantly researched the facts of what has been ongoing with institutional racism in London over the last couple of decades.  The situation with black people in London is much more complex than you portray, and your article makes many assumptions. In fact remarks like ‘black youths once again have set London alight’ are potentially inflammatory and therefore I am surprised that you feel comfortable writing them. Not only is your article offensive, but in my opinion you would be naive of you if you thought people wouldn’t be upset by it or want to argue back . I hope next time you write on this subject or a similar one you will think about how what you write will affect the black community and not just your accepting audience.

     Yours sincerely,

Makai Byrne