Racial Wounds

What hit Brixton and why

It started after both blacks and whites in Brixton, a depressed district in south London with a population that is 36% black, demanded greater police protection from rising street crime. Then young blacks, angered by heavy-landed "stop and search" measures vigorously enforced by the police, went on a rampage with stones, bricks, iron bars and petrol bombs. The disorders spread to many other communities in Britain. When it was over, an estimated 3,000 people had been arrested and 1,500 policemen injured.

In a 137-page report on the Brixton riots released last week and commissioned by the Conservative government last April while the streets still smoldered, Lord Scarman, 70, a senior judge, concludes, "There was a strong racial element in the disorders. But they were not a race riot. The riots were essentially an outburst of anger and resentment by young black people against the police." Lord Scarman concedes that while "institutional racism" does not exist in Britain, "racial disadvantage and its nasty associate racial discrimination have not yet been eliminated. They poison minds and attitudes. They are, and so long as they remain, will continue to be, a potent factor of unrest." Another incendiary element is Britain's continuing recession. More than half the blacks under age 19 in Brixton are jobless. To ignore such economic realities, writes Scarman, "is to put the nation in peril."

In addition to more jobs, the report recommends better housing and improved education for Britain's blacks. To reduce glaring inequities, it also endorses the concept of "positive discrimination," known in the U.S. as affirmative action, especially with regard to police hiring. Only .5% of police in London are black. Scarman closes by quoting from Lyndon Johnson's foreword to a report on the racial disorders that racked the U.S. in the 1960s: "We should attack these conditions--not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience." qed

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.