Читать книгу No Win Race. A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport онлайн
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My reality was not so bad in comparison to other black and brown people in Newham. Blacks and Asians had been regularly terrorised throughout the borough. There had been unsolved racially motivated murders, school children violently beaten up inside the school gates (not just outside), arson, and frequent unjustified assaults and arrests by the police. You never knew the names of the victims. No one, it appeared, was ever caught. Didn’t seem to make the news. Only made the news if blacks and Asians fought back, which would then be reported more as a reason for moral panic than a right to protest.
Black and Asian families had also been historically discriminated against by Newham Council and other local services. They were systematically put to the back of the housing priority line. They faced problems at work, often enduring the worst conditions. They had to cope with an education administration that followed the Minister of Education’s policy that ‘no one school should have more than 30 per cent of immigrants’.2 I didn’t know there had been a policy that problematised black and brown kids. I didn’t know that black and brown kids were regarded as a threat to cohesion. I didn’t know that schools were deliberately excluding black or brown pupils to keep numbers down or sending them to schools for the educationally subnormal. That’s what alternative provision for ‘troubled’ pupils was called back then. Always wondered what happened to some of my school mates. They didn’t do what was best for black pupils. We were treated as unwanted statistics.