Remaking Whiteness in the ‘Postracial’ UK

Abstract

The riots of August 2011 that swept through London, spreading to cities across the UK, including Manchester and Birmingham, marked the latest episode of urban unrest, following on from serious disturbances in 1981, 1985 and 2001. Having been triggered by the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, a black British man in Tottenham, the riots reveal the enduring racialisation of crime and disorder, antagonism between black communities and the police, as well as enduring patterns of racial disadvantage (Solomos 2011). Well-worn narratives of family breakdown, welfare dependency, gang culture, criminality, cultural dysfunction and moral degeneracy that have historically been attributed to both black and South Asian populations in the wake of prior incidences of urban unrest, featured heavily in the media coverage of the riots. Max Hastings (2011), writing in the Daily Mail, declared those involved to be ‘wild beasts’, symptomatic of the emergence of a ‘large, amoral, brutalized sub-culture of young British people who lack education because they have no will to learn, and skills which might make them employable… They have no code of values to dissuade them from behaving anti-socially or, indeed, criminally.’ The Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke MP, agreed, declaring the riots to be the result of the unruly behaviours and cultural practices of a ‘feral underclass, cut off from the mainstream in everything but its materialism.’ (Lewis et al. 2011).