know who were in Brixton during the riots were far more frightened by the police beating on their shields, whooping and screaming, than by the rioters. And there is no doubt that such militant camaraderie has racist overtones—blacks are the enemy, and the most frightening TV image from Brixton was the glee with which detectives snatched Rastafarians out of the crowds by their hair. The immediate exhilaration felt by young blacks in Bristol last year, in Brixton and Liverpool this year, reflected their belief that the police had been held off. For a night, they’d got away with things. Communities, though, cannot win riots. “The world is going to get mashed up tonight,” one kid said to another in Brixton last week. “I hope it’s not our house,” came the reply. The shock of the Brixton and Toxteth riots was the glimpse they gave of the desperation that such protest involves. And if the leading part in these riots was played by youth, the adult black community has given the subsequent defense committees solid support. ■n the West Indian youth riots the police were taken on as both the authoritarian • and the racist state. In other riots these strands were untangled. The trouble in Southall started with an invasion of East End skinheads come to see the 4 Skins, an oi band who were playing a local pub. After the skins rushed through the streets, stealing and punching, Asian youths gathered in pursuit. The police were caught in the middle, and the pub was burned to the ground. But here too anger quickly shifted onto policemen for apparently protecting the skinheads in a way they have never protected the Asian community. For years now Asians in Britain have faced harassment—windows smashed, slogans daubed, shops rifled, men beaten, and women jostled. Paki-bashing has been a skinhead passion since 1968. And in the last 12 months the anti-Asian terror has become more vicious as the openly violent British Movement has succeeded in organizing skinheads the way the respectable fascists of the National Front have since 1978. In Coventry, two Asians have been knifed to death in the last six months—a student killed in the city center on a busy Saturday afternoon, and a doctor the apparent victim of “a 15-pound bet that I couldn’t get a Paki.” Asian families on white housing estates have been firebombed; Asian workers on evening shift are escorted home as a matter of normal security. The police have, until recently, refused to admit that there was any evidence that these attacks were racially motivated, but they have advised Asians not to go into the city center on Saturday, when skinhead gangs gather in shop doorways to prevent Asian women from entering. I have some sense of what it was like in Germany in the early days of anti-Semitic thuggery. The irony of the Southall riot was that in any other circumstances the skinheads would have been fighting the police. The most violent antiauthoritarian music is made by oi groups like the 4 Skins, and Coventry’s oi band, the Criminal Class, plays for left demonstrations and has rejected National Front overtures strictly on the grounds of its hatred for the cops. Skinhead racism itself is an odd combination of bravado, style, and ideology. Recently it’s become a way of making sense of the white experience of Thatcherism. The National Front has a purchase on this section of white youth precisely because it seems to take seriously the daily assertions of respectable politicians that Britain has been swamped by “immigrants.” Skinheads find it easy to explain Paki-bashing—they have taken “our jobs.” But in other circumstances the skinheads’ “we” has a different referent—not white versus black, but youth versus authority. In the “copycat riots” that followed Southall and Toxteth, black youths and skinheads threw bricks together and passed each other the loot. These “riots” were an escalation of weekend battles that have been fought by youths and police for the last 30 years; as several local police chiefs agreed, what the press described as riots were routine disturbances. The young have always been bored. Their boredom has always focused on public places. The police have always tried to keep them from congregating. Teenage gangs have been visible in Britain for 100 years, and while the setting of gang violence has changed—dance halls in the 1950s, football matches in the 1970s—the search for some action has not. Ian Walker was in Brixton the Saturday night of the riot week: “Skinheads kept away but the rest of youth culture was out in force: mods, Rastas, punks, soul-boys, rockabillies, even a few New Romantics who stood their ground outside a Brixton underground station when the police tried to move them on.” A model of political organization based on the workplace, on the imagery of shop-floor solidarity, means little to people who have never been in a workplace, don't have bosses, and are excluded from trade unions. The socialist explanation for youth riots is unemployment—youth “rebellion” is f the measure of youth “oppression.” But, in practice, the left has made little sense of youth politics—the young unemployed have been drawn to nationalist groups but not to socialist ones. A model of political organization based on the workplace, on the imagery of shop-floor solidarity, means little to people who have never been in a workplace, don’t have bosses, and are excluded from trade unions. Youth unemployment is not experienced as a struggle for work but as a struggle for independence in which the state in general and the police in particular exercise power. For the young unemployed, leisure activities are not just breaks from work but Vihen it’s time to replace your woodstove, buy the one you won’t have to replace. ANCHOR TOOLS WOODSTOVES, INC. y 618 N.W. Davis, Portland, OR 9 7 2 0 9 (5 0 3 ) 223-3452 Clinton St. Quarterly 27
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz