Tag: Gus John

Sanitising racism past and present: Gus John at odds with the BBC

On By Tony TaylorIn Politics, Youth Work1 Comment

 
A week ago I attended from afar the streamed New Cross Fire 40th anniversary memorial service. Through my close friendship with Malcolm Ball, a leading Lewisham youth worker and activist across the decades, my frequent visits to Deptford and indeed the St Andrews Centre, I felt I had an inkling of the grief and anger sparked by the tragedy. A week ago too Gus John was interviewed on BBC radio. You will find below his passionate, perceptive and uncomfortable account of the issues raised by the encounter. As Gus argues, ‘There is a serious debate to be had about all of these matters.’ Responses encouraged and welcomed to tonymtaylor@gmail.com

Gus writes:

OWN IT!

From ‘Nigger-hunting’ to ‘Paki-bashing’ to Police Murders….Very British Pastimes.

On 18 January 2021, on the 40th Anniversary of the New Cross Massacre, I did an interview with Robert Elms, BBC Radio London

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p094dbfp

At the start of the interview, I was setting out the background to the New Cross Fire and the history of neo-fascist activity in London and the country generally and said that there had been years of neo-fascist activity in our communities including ‘Paki-bashing’ as the perpetrators themselves called it’…. And before I could complete the sentence with ‘and ‘nigger-hunting’, Elms interrupted saying ‘please don’t use that language.  We cannot use such language on the BBC’.  I determined that it would be more productive to move on to the core subject rather than remonstrate with him, but after the programme I wrote to the producer as below. His reply was both instructive and deeply concerning.  What I said and Elm’s objection to my saying it have been elided from the recording in the link above.

I believe the BBC’s position is untenable and to invoke the potentially hurt feelings of their own black staff in support of dodgy editorial decisions is just disgraceful.

I joined the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) in 1965 and a couple years later I was one of those going around London and Leicester gathering evidence of the most vicious race discrimination, evidence which helped in no small measure to convince Harold Wilson and his government of the need for the 1968 Race Relations Act. 

 

I saw my father stumble into our house that same year, bloodied, cut and bruised all over because he had been set upon on his way from work just after 06.00 on a winter’s morning and nearly beaten to death by a group of racists with baseball bats, motorbike chains and sticks.  They seemed to come from nowhere and all he heard was ‘one less nigger’ and they were all over him. He had the presence of mind to run into somebody’s yard, pick up a bottle of milk, smash it and cut off the ear of one of his assailants, at which point they saw that he was ready to kill or be killed and they all ran off.  

A matter of weeks later, my 16 year old brother was arrested for riding his bike in the park not far from our home.  The police took him to Acton police station because he was ‘lippy’ and one of them defecated in a toilet and then pulled him out of a cell (he had not even been charged), took him to that same toilet and two of them held his head down in the faeces while they flushed the toilet.  He nearly drowned in that filth.  They then kicked him out of the police station.  He arrived home totally traumatised and couldn’t eat for days.  He remained traumatised for the rest of his short life.  He went to prison for assaulting police a couple years later and was constantly having problems with them.  He took to drink and died aged 49.  Having drunk too much on his birthday, he fell down the stairs in his own flat and broke his neck.  

My father came here in 1957 and by 1972 he and my mother were back in Grenada, having vowed never to set foot in England ever again.  They both passed on without ever visiting the UK thereafter. They must have been among the earliest returners of their generation.

Thanks to socks-studio.com

I fought off ‘nigger hunters’ in Notting Hill in 1968, especially after what had happened to my father and was angry at how nonchalant the police were about their activities, while being ever ready to frame us for having offensive weapons.  As a youth worker in Ladbroke Grove at the time, I and other youth workers constantly walked young people home or to their bus because of the relentless harassment and provocation they suffered at the hands of the police.

I of all people therefore do not need the BBC to tell me how offensive terms like ‘nigger hunting’ and ‘Paki-bashing’ actually are.  I conducted the Burnage Inquiry into the racist murder of 14 year old Bangladeshi student Ahmed Iqbal Ullah with Ian Macdonald QC and colleagues.  Having stabbed Ahmed to death, his 14 year old white student attacker ran around the school shouting hysterically ‘I killed a Paki, I killed a Paki’.

There is a serious debate to be had about all of these matters. 

One disturbing feature of the New Cross Fire story is the number of people in our communities and in the country generally below the age of 50 who have no knowledge of it.  They have no knowledge either of the firebombing of premises in New Cross, Deptford, Ladywell and Lewisham generally and attacks on Asian families in their homes and on the streets that had been perpetrated by white terrorists and neo-fascists for more than a decade before the New Cross Fire.  Such activity had a history that dated back to the 1919 racial attacks upon black service personnel demobbed from the First World War, through to ‘nigger hunting’ in London and elsewhere in the 1950s and ‘Paki-bashing’ right up to the present.

Throughout that period, also, hundreds of black people have been killed by the police with none being brought to justice since the murderers of David Oluwale in Leeds in 1969 were charged, not with murder or manslaughter, but with grievous bodily harm.

British historians have typically airbrushed the history of the barbarism of African enslavement and of British imperialism across the globe. Now, the media is leading the way in sanitising the barbarism of British racism, even as the police continue to kill black people indiscriminately while enjoying the full protection of the state and the judicial system.  One could justifiably conclude that black people, males in particular, have an unnatural propensity to die of natural causes while in the custody of the police.

So, in a society where it is deemed offensive to spell the word ‘nigger’ and the word ‘Paki’ in full in any context, black people are routinely killed by the police without the state or the nation batting an eyelid.  That is why this nation and its institutions reacted as if they needed a George Floyd event to trigger their epiphany, oblivious of the fact that we have ignored hundreds of British George Floyds, despite years of campaigning for justice in plain sight across the country. The hope is, no doubt, that it would soon be forgotten that there was a time when black people were called ‘niggers’ and ‘wogs’ and anyone who looked like they might be from the Indian subcontinent attacked and killed on the streets or in their homes with impunity.  

Racism has been sanitised and recast as ‘unconscious bias’.  British social history is being sanitised to expunge un-British activities such as ‘nigger hunting’, ‘Paki-bashing’ and police murders of black people. The expectation no doubt is that history will absolve the nation for this induced amnesia.

The email exchange following the broadcast:

From: Gus John <profgusjohn@gmail.com>
Sent: 18 January 2021 15:18
To: Jamie Collins <jamie.collins@bbc.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BBC Radio London / Robert Elms

Hi Jamie

I am glad I had the opportunity to help put the events of 40 years ago in New Cross in proper historical and political perspective and I have full admiration for the way Robert conducted the interview.  Please pass on my thanks to him.

When you reminded me to watch my language, I did not for one moment imagine that you meant I should not mention what the NF, Column 88 etc called that barbaric activity they indulged in up and down the country against the South Asian community.  I am not naive enough as to expect you and Robert Elms to change BBC policy, but as a social historian, I do worry about the full scale attempt by broadcast or for that matter print media, to sanitise the nasty and unadulterated racism to which black people are subjected in this country by not reporting such phenomena as historical fact.  In my writing and my lectures, I remind people of campaigns in the 1960s by myself and others against landlords and hoteliers who posted signs saying:  ‘No Coloureds, No Dogs, No Irish’, or ‘No Wogs, No Dogs, No Irish’, or against what the neo-fascists themselves called ‘Paki-bashing’ and ‘nigger-hunting’.  To report the barbarism of the Far Right and the atrocious terminology that they used AND THAT THE MEDIA REPORTED at the time is important in my view because Britain needs to be reminded about that history and about the fact, as I was saying in the interview, that the state did not react proportionately, or at all, to those barbaric attacks which left scores of people of the African and Asian diaspora dead.  If I say that the activities of such Far Right groups resulted in the deaths of people who were targeted only because of their ethnicity and that the perpetrators called their actions ‘Paki-bashing’, I am neither appropriating that language myself, nor using it to inflame passions within the Pakistani or Bangladeshi communities. Context is everything, even in broadcasting.  I cannot understand why the BBC should want to so infantilise its listeners as to assume that they cannot tell the difference between describing neo-fascist activity and what that activity was called by neo-fascists themselves on the one hand, and the same term(s) used contemporaneously by myself or anybody else.

The murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959 was a consequence of the routine ‘nigger-hunting’ that black communities in Notting Hill and elsewhere endured at the time.  What is of consequence it seems to me, is not the fact that that terminology was and remains deeply racist, offensive and oppressive, but that white neo-fascists were allowed by the state and its police to indulge in those murderous activities with impunity.  That fact is incontrovertibly more obscene than the words themselves.   

The question is though, where in the BBC is this debate taking place and whom does it involve?

Turning to matters over which you do have some control, please send me a recording of the interview and a link to it so that I can share with others here in Wales and elsewhere.

Best wishes,

GJ

From: Jamie Collins
Sent: 18 January 2021 16:43
To: Gus John <profgusjohn@gmail.com>
Subject: RE: BBC Radio London / Robert Elms
Importance: High

Hi Gus,

I thought you were great – extremely important and poignant considering to this day many of the issues faced by those then are still having to be fought against and survived to this day. We received several messages and calls from listeners that appreciated the way we highlighted the anniversary on the show and you were integral to this.

We as an editorial team and the wider station have had numerous conversations on the use of words such as the n word or p word in full – even for illustrative purposes as you did. While I fully understand and accept why you feel it is important to say it – many of our listeners of colour and indeed staff members are offended by the full use of the word and can find it triggering. And so the reason we do not use such words is so as to ensure it does not offend those minority communities- but we also recognise that this in itself divides opinion.

I fully understand the worry that by censoring the words in this context might dilute the threat, violence and racism faced by the Black and Asian community at the time by those groups. I also recognise that a white person using the words for illustrative purposes is hugely different to a person of colour who is doing the same.

The editorial decision has been made to edit out that portion of the interview when it goes live in iPlayer/BBC Sounds and I’m planning on clipping the interview separately for our BBC Sounds page and will send you the link as soon as it’s up.

If you would like I would be happy to refer you to the Editor and Assistant Editor if you would like to discuss further – and I would sincerely like to thank you once again for your contribution – it made a real impact.

Jamie

Professor Augustine John
International Consultant & Executive Coach Visiting Professor  –  Coventry University
Honorary Fellow and Associate Professor The UCL Institute of Education – University of London

You Cannot Right Racial Wrongs by Doing Wrong Things More Competently – Gus John responds to the Windrush Lessons Report

On By Tony TaylorIn Education, PoliticsLeave a comment

 

In a week within which it is revealed that that Alexandra Ankrah, the most senior black Home Office employee in the team responsible for the Windrush compensation scheme resigned earlier this year, describing it as systemically racist and unfit for purpose; in which it is revealed in the words of a senior case worker that “The Home Office are not empathetic towards claimants. It’s just a name on a piece of paper – it’s not people” it is timely and vital to post this link to Gus John’s withering critique of the limitations at the heart of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review.

In enclosing his paper to promote wider discussion Gus comments:

I’m amazed at how little public debate there appears to have been on this report, especially as in spite of what she found Williams failed to come to some bold and pretty obvious conclusions.  It’s an indication that she herself has no concept of the racialisation of immigration and of successive governments over the last six decades wilfully manipulating the British population on the issue of immigration/race, as if those of us who made Britain our home in the last 100 years are still unwanted newcomers who had no previous connection with this nation. 

He opens his critique by taking us back nearly 20 years to the time when post-Macpherson the Home Office commissioned training, which was to transform the insensitive and prejudiced occupational culture within the police force.

In 2003, my organisation was commissioned by the Home Office to evaluate that training and its impact upon forces’ operational practices and relationships with black communities. Part of my methodology was actually observing how that training was delivered and how it was received. That turned out to be one of the most awful experiences of my entire professional career. The organised and vicious resistance to the training; the targeting of trainers personally and making them account for the conduct, criminal and political, of black people in communities; the venomous accusations of ‘black people wanting to be treated differently’… ‘why do you lot always feel you’re being picked upon’, etc.; the heckling; the disengagement (with certain attendees opting to read a book or do paperwork of some sort during the training); anecdotes from senior police officers telling of warnings they received from senior command to the effect that: ‘police/community relations is a career graveyard, so, get out of it and soon as you can if you want to progress in this force’. Women trainers had to endure unadulterated sexism in addition, and all trainers had to provide metrics to indicate that they had met their training targets, even in the face of such organised resistance. Needless to say, few ‘hearts and minds’ were won and my assessment was that the training left many police officers more resentful and openly racist at the end of the training than they were at the beginning. Disturbingly, however, it left many trainers totally traumatised and needing professional help to cope with what they had been subjected to by those police officers. They complained to me that at the end of such training days, there was no one assigned to them to whom they could go and offload/debrief and get help to put themselves together again. Instead, they were often left losing sleep at the prospect of having to face yet another day of the same, with the existing or a new cohort of police officers.

In summary, the most damning part of my evaluation to the Home Office is that the nationwide training was little more than a hugely expensive and damaging exercise in ‘dipping sheep’ and proof, if ever it was needed, that training could never be a panacea for systemic ills and institutional and cultural practices that are pickled in racism. That training programme sacrificed the messenger – the black trainers – in the process of attempting to deliver the message: how to be a police service that acknowledged and understood racism and its impact on citizens’ rights, on delivering justice and keeping the peace and one that took responsibility for eliminating institutional, cultural and personal manifestations of racism.

With this sobering experience as a backcloth Gus continues:

So, let us examine those two recommendations by Wendy Williams on which the Home Office, almost two decades later, is seeking to deracialise its staff, this time in relation to immigration rather than to policing.

Recommendation 6 – a) The Home Office should devise, implement and review a comprehensive learning and development programme which makes sure all its existing and new staff learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world, including Britain’s colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration and the history of black Britons. This programme should be developed in partnership with academic experts in historical migration and should include the findings of this review, and its ethnographic research, to understand the impact of the department’s decisions; b) publish an annual return confirming how many staff, managers and senior civil servants have completed the programme.

Recommendation 11 – The department should re-educate itself fully about the current reach and effect of immigration and nationality law, and take steps to maintain its institutional memory. It should do this by making sure its staff understand the history of immigration legislation and build expertise in the department, and by carrying out historical research when considering new legislation.

I would urge you to investigate both Gus John’s response to these recommendations and his unfolding historical and contemporary analysis of ” a string of human rights and equality act violations, which need to be addressed”. See the full piece below.

doing-wrong-things-competentlyDownload

He concludes:

Wendy Williams’ report paints a picture of a government department where the political and electoral agenda of the party in government drive the formulation of immigration policy and the implementation of immigration legislation. It is a government department displaying fault lines on a massive scale, including managerial incompetence, an opaqueness if not complete absence of organisational values and a culture which undergirds the ideology of racism upon which immigration law making is constructed.

At the base of all that is systemic racism in the society and successive governments’ failure to put racism and the urgency of engaging with the legacy of empire high up on its political agenda

In the light of her findings, the evidence of the suffering that has resulted from the hostile environment and the continuing implications of the impact of implementing immigration policies upon the black/global majority, the government must be pressured to do three more things in addition to William’s 30 recommendations:

  • pronounce an immediate amnesty be pronounced, thus allowing all those of the Windrush generation who were in the country before 2014 to stay and be given the necessary documentation
  • set up a body to examine the genesis and provisions of the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts in the light of the Williams’ findings and make proposals for annulling or amending them
  • take immediate steps to kick start consultations on state reparations for the enslavement, genocide, dehumanisation and exploitation of African people and the continuing underdevelopment of the former colonies in which their descendants were abandoned by Britain, especially after it became a key player in the European Union.

Professor Gus John is a lifelong campaigner for children’s education rights, a visiting professor at Coventry University and associate professor at the UCL Institute of Education. In 1999, he co-founded the Communities Empowerment Network (now INCLUDE, which he currently chairs), a charity that provides advocacy and representation for excluded students and their families. He was the first black director of education in the UK (1989-1996) as director of education and leisure services in the London Borough of Hackney.

Clipping the wings of Black Lives Matter? An interview with Gus John

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Education, neoliberalism, PoliticsLeave a comment

Following on from my last post, ‘Is anti-capitalist youth work next?‘ Gus John’s complementary, challenging perspective focuses in particular on the authoritarian threat to Black Lives Matter, whilst also questioning sharply what he describes as ‘the alternative provision industry’.

Clipping the wings of Black Lives Matter

In this wide-ranging interview on the Institute of Race Relations web site, veteran educational campaigner Gus John draws connections between initiatives currently pursued by three government departments (education; children and families; culture, media and sport), and lays out what the government has in store for anti-racism, particularly Black Lives Matter. 

He concludes:

Gus John: In summary then, this is the increasingly authoritarian state trying to tell BLM ‘we’re coming for you’. They are letting black campaigners know, we want to put you on the Prevent list and treat you as enemies of the state and of wider law-abiding society.

This, I fear, is the thin end of the wedge as far as the drift into totalitarianism is concerned. I would be delighted to be proven wrong, but it would not surprise me in the least if at least 50 percent of the strictures that have been introduced as a consequence of COVID are not written into law to hem us in for all time, thus curtailing many of our hard-won freedoms, while civil society feels it has to be similarly authoritarian, snooping and snitching on neighbours and seeking to criminalise every single non-conformist behaviour.

So, we must never fail to be vigilant and to see the connection between these seemingly consensual things. Above all, we need to take collective action and demonstrate to Boris Johnson and his government that we will not stand by and let them harass and curtail the freedoms of Black Lives Matter.

Professor Gus John is a lifelong campaigner for children’s education rights, a visiting professor at Coventry University and associate professor at the UCL Institute of Education. In 1999, he co-founded the Communities Empowerment Network (now INCLUDE, which he currently chairs), a charity that provides advocacy and representation for excluded students and their families. He was the first black director of education in the UK (1989-1996) as director of education and leisure services in the London Borough of Hackney.

Being Black & Dead While Excluded

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Politics, Youth and Community WorkLeave a comment

IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK

gus john Professor Gus John

In the context of the tragic killings of young people in recent weeks and months, we have been sent a powerful statement from the Communities Empowerment Network by their co-founder, Gus John (youth worker, scholar, author, and the first black education director in England). It begins:

On Tuesday 8 January 2019, 14 year old Jaden Moodie was stabbed to death on a street in Leyton, East London.  It is alleged that he was deliberately knocked off the moped he was riding and was stabbed repeatedly by three men who had been in the car that rammed him. Moodie had been a student at Heathcote School in Chingford and had been excluded  weeks earlier … This is the latest shocking incident in which an excluded black male school student was killed as a result of serious youth violence.  Given the regularity with which black young people are killed by other…

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