“A group of thugs were lying in wait in a car as15 year old Zachary Olumegbon arrived for lessons.
The gang leapt out and chased the youngster and a 14-year-old pal into an alley. They cornered Zachary and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest before chasing the other lad into the school grounds. They knifed him in the arm before fleeing from school staff.”
The Sun.
I usually relish my role as an apologist for young black boys who I believe are dealt a raw hand by British media and British society in general. I deplore and I am usually the first to protest at the myth of the peculiarity of “black on black crime” as often propagated in the media and transplanted into our psyches when we all know that poverty is the overriding determinant. I agree with Professor Ben Bowling that this seedling of an idea -that black men are inherently evil, bestial, inferior, unintelligent, ruled by desire and prone to violence- has been hawked since Elizabethan times and continues to be promoted. I often quote Baroness Scotland, our then Attorney General, who debunked this old wives’ tale with cold hard facts and statistics a couple of years ago: fact is that eighty six per cent of homicides are committed by white people against white people. I use the example that when white Derek Baird tragically shot his brother and many other white victims in Cumbria, race was not a significant criterion- no one spoke about “white on white crime”. I made a written complaint when Rod Liddle, last year, in his Spectator piece asserted that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community” and was glad to see him being fined for presenting his puerile, stereotypical, unfounded opinion as fact. I was happy that Dr Tony Sewell criticised the underreporting of crime when the victim was black.
So convinced I am of the root cause of crime among black youth being social exclusion, I wrote an entire treatise on the subject entitled “The Audacity of Despair”. Young black boys, I argued, are overrepresented in the criminal justice system because they are more likely to be stopped and searched, and three quarters of them are on the criminal DNA database which makes it easier for them to be convicted. I argued passionately that young black boys are disproportionately subject to socio-economic disadvantage and underlined the fact that there is significant educational underachievement and disaffectation because of an educational system that marginalises our young men and tells them that there are regressive and aggressive from the age of 3. To the Tony Blair outburst on taking responsibility for black crime, I countered that our boys live in a society which expects very little from them and which reminds them of this every day. I argued that the absence of fathers and the vacuum in discipline (we are told that traditional punishments are not suitable for Western Society without being offered a suitable alternative for our children) played a very large role in the numbers of young men who joined “posses” and street gangs. I posited that poor housing, the overrepresentation of black families on council estates, the and the desire to earn money by any means necessary in the face of endemic deprivation was a but for cause in the pipes of violence that occasionally spurted on London’s streets. Disenfranchised, without our own businesses to pass down to our children, quality education that would remove them from the laps of poverty and a sense of community, wasn’t it predictable that there would be blood?
I am, however, tired of apologising. My lips are now pursed in a giant “steups” every time I hear about stupid little tiffs and arguments involving black boys over postcodes that in a few years time their parents won’t even be able to afford . I feel embarrassed and ashamed. Is this why Rosa Parks decided to move from the back of a bus to the front? Is this the reason why Martin Luther King wrote that one day little black children would roam the streets freely and be judged by the content of their character? Is this the reason why Malcolm X died? So that young black boys would have the right to join street gangs, to create “beef” over trainers, the colour of their headscarves, a random “diss” and illusionary territories? Just outside the school gates, in my borough of Lewisham, this young black boy, ghettoised as “Lil Zac” and a member of the “T Block gang” was fatally stabbed a couple of weeks ago, by a group of boys. This was the 13th stabbing to take place in London this year. Most involved black youth. Where are the parents in this equation that refuses to be balanced? Have West Indian and Caribbean parents lost a grip of their children? It was telling that this school was a school that was constructed specially for the rehabilitation of excluded children. The teachers and cleaners in that school reported that there were frequent fights, systemic bullying and no respect at all for authority. In short- a mini jail, a prep-school for the University of Prison. It enrages me that the minority of these little boys who engage in gun crime actually have a great impact on our reputation and perception in the UK: these twenty one boys make the nation believe that our families are facing a great existential crisis, hence the reason the media found it derisible that Diane Abbott claimed that Caribbean parents would go to the wall for the children. They should not have or be entrusted with this power.
It has been recognised that many steps should be taken to counter the root causes of exclusion- including changes in the education system and housing allocation. However, in my opinion, it is imperative that whilst we wait for these changes to filter through, radical next steps should be taken to ensure that these silly battles do not persist. It is evident to me that if these boys only had a rich sense of our culture and our history, they would never act in a way to compromise what is our long standing culture of respect for authority. It is obvious that there is no pride in culture and pride in roots- we were never a warfaring people, in fact the black race has always placed a premium on the spirituo-cultural.
Black boys who are at risk should be made to complete a mandatory course in Black History and Culture so they can have pride in something other than the “freshness” of their trainers. This should be followed by voluntary service in deprived areas: earthquake ravished Haiti, the refugee camps in Somalia, so that they can fully comprehend the real battles human beings face on a daily basis and learn that the fight is against something bigger than their own myopic disagreements. I fully support initiatives such as rites of passage for young black males as advocated by The Institutes for Rites of Passage- which would equip adolescents with social, economic, behavioral and other life skills. This would serve as better rehabilitation than any Park Campus school, where all children with all types of behavioral problems are lumped into the same wreteched facilities. Our estates also need to return to the concept of a village raising a child. Community watches and community organisations need to be established forthwith and any evidence of illegal activity need to be reported. For this to be successful there needs to be a culture of trust between law enforcement and residents. And a culture of trust among the residents themselves that rides above lines of allegiances of Nigerian, Jamaican and Somali.
The effect of displacement of fathers also needs to be addressed head-on and right now. It is also true that black men from the Caribbean are still learning to be fathers; most of them never truly learnt how as they themselves probably did not have fathers and their fathers in turn did not know how to be fathers- legacy from plantation life. Child benefit and social housing and other forms of state help should include a criterion of involvement in a child’s life. For young black males who are at risk, this involvement should be made mandatory- at least 5 supervised contact hours a week. This enforced parenting might be unconstitutional but I do not care about the constitution when our society is on the brink of committing a self induced holocaust- this would certainly assist in easing the parenting pressure of black women who work longer hours than any other ethnic group in Britain and provide young boys with some measure of stability and visibility.
These are only my suggestions but I am sure that the experts have many more. The success of any scheme will depend solely upon our collective will. Are we ready to take ownership of our boys and by extension, our streets? Or are we resigned to the fact that they will keep on needlessly killing each other- as Biggie chillingly prophesied: “just another one?”
Do consider giving a monthly contribution to one of these charities that support the anti gun and knife crime initiatives in our communities and support positive mentoring:
The Damilola Taylor Trust
The Disarm Trust
East Potential
The Black Leadership Initiative
