More on riots, moral panic and black people

Teddy boys! Who is responsible for this outrage?

Following on from my last post 'Should we be scared of black culture's influence on white kids?', here's an excellent article in the Economist about how all the things we're hearing in connection with last week's riots are hardly new, with quotes from older reactions to criminal youth and rioting: 'We have been here before'.


Here are the best ones about the topic of being scared of black people:

Brixton is the iceberg tip of a crisis of ethnic criminality which is not Britain's fault — except in the sense that her rulers quite unneccessarily imported it.
Sunday Telegraph, November 29th, 1981

It's the desire to be able to give this kind of reaction that led to some people deciding on not very much evidence that the white people rioting last week were 'wiggers' or somehow had become black.

It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro's revenge.
Daily Mail front page story, 'Rock 'n Roll babies', 1956

And, from the Economist article, concerning a House of Commons debate from 1842:

Still, at least no Jamaican patois, eh? Ah no, the same Commons debate saw an MP denouncing parts of the country suffering a "preposterous epidemic of a hybrid negro song".

That's 1842, my friends.

So, none of this stuff is new at all.  When sweating nervously and worrying about what makes young people and the working classes so very violent and rebellious, some will always choose some outside scapegoat to absolve us of the responsibility for trying to see what we might be doing to make some people so angry, or face up to the possibility that this might just happen from time to time.

Sometimes that's a genre of music, or a new technological advancement that poor people's tiny little minds are too fragile to be able to deal with, and sometimes it's black people. Even when it's white people misbehaving.

And while I'm making up posts mainly of great stuff written by other people, here's a point made by Iain in the comments to my last post about kids speaking in 'Jamaican Patois' that I wish I'd made myself:

The children who grew up in inner London in the 1960s and 70s didn't speak the "gaw blimey apples and pears" Cockney of their grandparents; they developed a slang and accent which grew into what's now described as Estuary English. That in turn is being replaced in urban London by an accent derived from the background of those urban Londoners. Not just Jamaican influences, but also that from urban USA, from the Indian subcontinent, and also from more traditional London. Even the infamous case of saying "innit" at the end of every sentence is derived from a similar construction in Hindi.

In all this worry about kids speaking in Jamaican patois, we seem to have forgotten that it's not even Jamaican bloody patois. It's something with lots of influences.

Go and have a look at the full Economist article. Go on! Go! It's better than anything you'll read here.