Violence in South-East London.
Laban Tall points to these two pieces about the growing twin problems of black anti-white racism and the violence and criminality of so many British blacks.Now, I lived in Peckham till I was about sixteen — went to school in New Cross — and I have to say that times seem to have changed in the last fifteen years. My two best friends at my London primary school (I was only there for one year, having moved in from the sticks) were Jason and Jason. Jason was black, and Jason was white. There was never any suggestion that anything about this was odd. Jason didn't have a problem with my being a bit "posh" (I'd come from Hertfordshire, was middle class, and my parents had a bit of money) and neither did Jason. It never occurred to me to give a shit about how poor they were or what colour they were. I hated most of the black kids at school, but then I hated most of the kids at school, white or black. I used to go out and play unsupervised all the time around the streets and parks, and, though I did quickly have to become more streetwise than I'd needed to be back in Stevenage, I was generally OK.
Me and my dad lived in Choumert Grove, in Peckham. Nice place. Some of our neighbours were black, some were white. While my dad was house-hunting in the area, his car got broken into or vandalised quite a few times. When he moved in, Eddie, the old black guy from a few doors down who spent all his time out in the street polishing his Vauxhall Chevette, came and had a word, to the effect of, "Now you live here, you're one of us. You don't need to worry about locking your car. No-one's going to give you any trouble." And it was true. There was never any suggestion that Eddie might care that my dad was a white middle-class professor. The only factor that mattered was that we lived in the same street.
My dad can be a bit absent-minded and, at times, tactless. He once, during one of the blistering London summers of the early Nineties, had a conversation with a black market trader, along the lines of "Being black, does this heat bother you any less than it does me (you lucky bastard)?" From what I can see, these days, this would have landed him in court, if he were lucky enough not to be assaulted because of it. But not back then. Maybe the guy thought "What an idiot," but they had a perfectly cheerful exchange. (The answer was, unsurprisingly, "No, I bloody hate this bloody heat." Black or white, the British are united by their hatred of the weather.)
At my secondary school, I wasn't one of the cool kids. I got bullied a bit, and some of the bullies were black. But some of them were white, too. As far as I am aware, I was never once picked on for being white — just for being uncool and weak.
Gangs of young men in the streets were, obviously, to be avoided. But they were to be avoided no matter what colour they were, white gangs were just as likely to give me trouble as black gangs, and most of the gangs were, in fact, composed of a mixture of ethnicities.
I've not been back to South London in a long, long time, but news reports from the area have been bothering me for a while. When I was there, there was violence, there was crime, but there wasn't that much racism. Something seems to have polarised the place. I have no idea what, but I strongly suspect that what we're looking at here is the Law of Unintended Consequences as applied to the well-meaning interference of the politically correct anti-racism lobby.
The front page.