Racism, Skinheads, and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in 1970s British Schools
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) recently reported that kids as young as ten in England have taken to whitening their faces in an attempt to fit in after repeatedly being the target of hate crimes and being told to “go back to your own country” in Brexit Britain. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.
--
At twelve, my best friend was a white boy named David, who lived across the road from us. David and I walked to school together, went berry picking with his dad in summer, slept in each other’s house or pitched a tent in the backyard just for fun in stormy weather.
One day, David became ‘an accidental Skinhead’ when the barber gave him a lopsided haircut. I didn’t laugh when his white mate, Steve, said he looked just like a plucked chicken. David went back the next day and had his head shaved. He never spoke to me again after Steve had his hair chopped off, too, although I lived on the same road in the same house and went to the same school for four more years. He developed Skinhead associations in steel-toed boots and drainpipe denim.
This instant separation was the ‘normal’ pattern of racial division in South London as we moved from the primary school innocence of multi-racial friendships into a comprehensive education system reflecting the myriad concerns of a racist adult world. Consequently, the black boys tended to band together, as did the white boys and the few Asians. There was safety in numbers, we felt.
Our particular group of boys liked the same music. We shared our teachers’ over-enthusiastic push for us to take up sports. We suffered their ‘limited expectations’ of our potential educational and vocational achievements. A point underlined by the over-representation of black students in the low-ability ‘C’ and ‘D’ band classes. Of the approximately 160 black youngsters in the first year (40%), there were only three in ‘A’ band classes (3,3 %). At the start of term, there had been just two.
My Primary School teacher had developed a notion that I was ‘educationally subnormal’ (ESN) and in need of remedial classes (Special Ed.) The term ‘ESN’ was then a popular label given to black children, particularly those new to British schools. As low expectations lead to low achievements, this ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ may well have become a fact had it not been for my mother’s tenacity, regular elocution lessons, and private one-to-one tuition from a band of strict Catholic nuns. Three weeks into school, I moved from the ‘C’ to the ‘B’ to the ‘A’ band. One year later and a black girl also joins our ranks. We are now four black pupils out of 90 ‘A’ band students.
We saw Hyacinth in classes only, but Marsid, Steven, and I hung out during and after school. Since Steven’s mum would not let him roam too far from “Snobs Ville” where they lived, more often than not, we traded him for Andrew — the school’s champion sportsman and a ‘B’ band student. Times had changed. It was 1979, and Margaret Thatcher had just become Britain’s first woman prime minister. We were now turning sixteen, gaining in confidence and approaching manhood. Like the new prime minister, we too, wanted to explore new territory to experience things our parents had never dared consider. We were black, but we were born here. There was nothing we felt we could not do in our own country. Then as the pulse of black ‘disco’ and ‘dance’ music began to permeate the club scene of Britain’s major cities, we found in its rhythm our raison d’être.
Zoom-Zooms nightclub was nowhere near where we lived. We had each travelled our various miles to get there, but since they played the best Jazz-Funk in a ten-mile radius of Lewisham Town Centre on a Monday night, all the ‘dance freaks’ came out this way to party. We three knew that if we were lucky, we would get the last night bus outside the club and straight to the safety of multi-racial Lewisham, where we could bus, taxi or walk it home. We kissed our white girls goodnight, but Lady luck was not on our side. We had to wait for a bus on a dark street in Eltham.
If you were black, sixteen, and travelling across London in 1979, you quickly learnt to sense where your face was not wanted. Eltham was such a place. Until recently, it was one of the few parts of South London where the traditional “British Bulldog Spirit” could still be seen in all its ferocity. Most black South Londoners ‘won’t set foot there’, but we did not know that then. So, when the skinhead tapped me on the shoulder from behind, I turned to face him, and he broke my nose. His five friends charged, howling, ‘Niggers!’
We ran! We were in danger and outnumbered, they were swinging metal chains, and we ran. Even when we flagged a police car and thought it would stop to protect us, we kept on running. Then while the officers inside gave us the finger sign for “Up-Yours!” we turned a corner and banged on a door.
A frail, frightened, white woman cracked a peek from behind curtains and glass. Her fear was no match for our insistence. She grudgingly allowed us to call the police. She then made us wait outside not to have my blood soak the red of her blood-red carpet. The police came late if they came at all. That winter night changed our lives. We never went back to Zoom-Zooms. I was never again in Eltham.
On the night of April 22, 1993, Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death by a gang of white youths on the streets of Eltham. He was a black 18-year-old student with a very promising future and everything to live for by all accounts. His death could have happened to any of us fourteen years earlier. It was patently clear to all in Britain that the attack was racially motivated, apparent to everyone except the police.
After an initial investigation, five well-known local criminals and racists were arrested but not convicted. Many black folks expected no other outcome. Some even suggested that Stephen should have known better than to get off a bus in Eltham at night. I admit I knew something Stephen did not know. Something he had yet to learn. For me, the lesson came at a similar bus stop in Eltham that night in 1979. Run! Except Stephen did not run. Nor could he see that his life was in danger. He was not a boy of the streets.
If
from the chains
of our broken dreams
we fled
across opal seas
Then why to this country?
If riding through the snow-white cities
we had seen dead men
their lives lost on strange excitements
Would we have stayed?
But we did not see the daggers in their smiles
as we moved into their indirect streets
Or sense the fear cloud their animal eyes
like once when under intense light
a dead boy struck me
I feel
I fell
I suffer still
And Time
as under a rock
Trapped me there.
