Читать книгу No Win Race. A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport онлайн

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The Minter–Hagler fight flashed back into my head a few months later, when my television screen was on fire. That was all I could see, flames bursting through our 19-inch canvas. I had been lying passively on the floor, waiting for the blaze to engulf me. However, my television was not about to burn down. My house was in no immediate danger. I just couldn’t digest the images on the news. I felt troubled and anxious as I watched scenes from the 1981 Brixton uprising.

The ‘riots’ had been sparked by ‘Swamp 81’, a police operation launched in Brixton that allowed officers to stop and question anyone they thought looked suspicious of committing a street crime. The police stopped 943 people (over half were black) of which 118 were arrested in four days.⁶ ‘Swamp 81’ had followed years of over-policing in black communities and over-policing at any events or venues frequented primarily by black people. This had followed years of mainstream press linking crime to black people as if an inherent character trait. This had followed Thatcher’s warning that British people feared being ‘swamped’ by people from different cultures. This had followed the New Cross Fire in January 1981, when 13 black partygoers aged between 14 and 22 lost their lives. There was little or no mainstream press. No outcry, no mourning outside of the black and local communities. Despite New Cross being a hub for the National Front, police investigations had been swift, too swift, to rule the incident as an accident. To the wider public, the victims had no names, the incident went unnoticed. This led to the ‘Black People’s Day of Action’, a ‘general strike of blacks’ where 20,000 people marched from Fordham Park in New Cross to Hyde Park on 2 March. The march had been largely peaceful. Despite this, the Sun’s headline read: ‘Day the blacks ran riot in London.’