The Case of Stephen Lawrence

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Here is a joke that was popular in Eltham around the time of the murder: Question: ‘How long does it take a nigger to shit?’ Answer: ‘Nine months.’ And here is some popular Eltham world history: ‘My aunt said AIDS only got over in this country ‘cos a black man fucked a monkey, right, and then he fucked a white person, and then . . . ’ Both of these were collected in the year after Lawrence’s death by a group of researchers led by Roger Hewitt of the Institute for Education at the University of London. Hewitt went to Eltham to look for racism. His surprise was not that he found it–in 1996, police in the borough of Greenwich recorded 440 incidents of racial harassment, one of the highest numbers, district by district, in the United Kingdom–but that it seemed almost eager to be found. In his paper, ‘Routes of Racism', Hewitt wrote: ‘In some neighbourhoods it seemed that open and unapologetic racism was wall to wall amongst adolescents, with almost no gaps.’

Hewitt and his team found that this hostility to non-whites (of Asian as well as African-Caribbean descent) was not a birthright–it had not been learned from parents, handed down from a more bigoted time. Instead, it had been generated and sustained by the young. Hewitt wrote: ‘The racism of adolescents was a world of its own, policed from within through criticism of anyone who flirted with interracial friendships, and of those “wiggers”–“white niggers”–who came near to embracing black youth culture.’ Many white children encountered black people of their own age only when they reached secondary school at the age of eleven or twelve. The schools asked them to conform to strict anti-racist policies. Many came to feel, according to Hewitt, that ‘too much attention’ was paid to the problems of black people, that black people were protected by special rules, that ‘ethnic minority’ cultures were taken more seriously than theirs, or even that they had no culture of their own. One boy complained: ‘Say you ’ave a fight with a black person, I reckon the school itself is racist towards white people. Like, you see, they always take up a black kid’s side and they don’t wanna know what your version of the story is.’

In many areas of London–of Britain–non-whites form a far larger percentage of the population than in Eltham. In Greenwich as a whole their proportion is only thirteen per cent. But manifestations of racial hatred do not rise in unerring proportion to the number of non-whites in any given area–the more blacks, the more acts of hostility and harassment from whites. The opposite may be the case. According to Roger Hewitt, it wasn’t an accident that many white youths in Eltham spoke and behaved as they did. Eltham was predominantly white, but it bordered, to the west, on the more racially mixed areas of inner London and, to the east, on the middle-class white suburbia of Kent. A white youth in Eltham could see himself or herself holding a front line: they shall not pass. ‘People who move [in] round here that are black, they get knocked off this estate ’cos they don’t like ‘em,’ one girl told Hewitt's group. Her friend added: ‘And they go. They can't put up wiv no more so they ‘ave to go.’

A nearly literate scrawl on a church gate declared: WATCH OUT COONS, YOUR NOW ENTERING ELTHAM.