On Ferguson, Black Culture and Media Racism

Even when there’s a man lay dead on the pavement, nobody wants impartiality. Not where race and murder is concerned. The New York Times observed this mantra of mainstream reporting when profiling the late Mike Brown. A lurid epitaph – ‘no angel’ – for a defenceless youth, with no criminal record, shot six times by a police officer. The NYT has since apologized for its ‘blunder’, but any display of regret is irrelevant. A family and a community have been scarred; the justification craved by the vicious and ignorant has been provided, and the assailment of black culture endures.

Whilst the scenes on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, could well have been mistaken for a contemporary re-telling of “Bull” Connor’s brutal repression of Civil Rights activists in 1960’s Alabama, much commentary has hung upon the character of the deceased. Brown has been portrayed as a violent criminal and a habitual drug-user who had taken to writing ‘vulgar’ Rap lyrics. Fox News perpetuated these contrived descriptions by claiming that Brown was ‘high on drugs’ when he was killed – the salient fact that he was unarmed was almost entirely ignored. The focus, instead, was on molding a public perception of Brown which slotted neatly into the typical stereotype of a dead-black-youth.

Bombardment of the US public with depictions of black immorality and violence, in both film and print media, goes back to the early 1980’s. After the emergence (in the consciousness of America’s white population) of the nation’s underclass as a social ill, the systematic demonization of black youths started. The dark ghettos, devoid of hope, left behind in the post-industrial cities, were vilified by muckraking reporters for the monstrous black minority that were trapped within. The exploitative elites blamed black inner-city problems on federal welfare dependency, and the right-wing media happily continued to launder racial propaganda.

In a situation like Ferguson where people are scared and angry and demanding answers, public reaction can be reversed if only it can be persuaded that the victim, in any way, deserved to die. Following the Tottenham riot, in 2011, Mark Duggan was described as a thug and a gangster. Whilst the police execute the man, the press set about annihilating his reputation. In the immediate aftermath of the London Riots, whilst appearing on BBC2’s Newsnight, David Starkey – after smugly harping back to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech – declared that “the problem is that the whites have become black”. For right-wingers, like Starkey, it was easier to attach the pandemonium to a “nihilistic” black subculture. Racist bile of this sort only compounds disaffection and alienation and fury. What are these young people to do? The spread of ignorance – by right-wing news – means that they are continually lambasted for reacting against a twisted system. When bricks were thrown through windows and bottles hurled at riot police on those frenzied August nights in 2011, politicians, and conservative hacks alike, were petrified of asking the necessary questions.

Was it really “pure criminality” by a bunch of yobs with hatred in their hearts, as David Cameron put it, or was it a reflection of the upper echelons of society? That economic elite which relentlessly perpetuates and consolidates its own personal wealth, whilst imposing austerity measures on the poorest. Those kids who looted and destroyed, what example did they have – what was the world that they saw outside? They saw feral politicians cheating their expenses and feral bankers ransacking the public purse, mugging a generation of any aspirations it may have dared to hold.

But none of that mattered. No. It was those black kids – or those white kids acting black – refusing to obey ‘British values’. When things go wrong, when a cop murders a teenager, when the marginalized and bullied lash out, people get scared. The state’s answer is to blame the victim. To continually scapegoat the same group of people; to not allow black culture to be understood, to make it frightening and alien to a morally outraged public. The race card is kept in the oppressor’s top-pocket – ready to be deployed whenever things get serious.

Manchester Historian: Benefits Street isn’t anything new; the poor have been demonized for centuries

‘The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feelings of stagnant meaningless decay.’ Those were the words of George Orwell in his hugely influential social survey, The Road to Wigan Pier, when recounting the bleak realities of life amongst the industrial working class, in 1930’s Britain.

Over the past month, in light of Channel 4’s Benefits Street, similar language has dominated the nation’s press and social media. However, whilst Orwell’s objective was to enumerate the unjust squalor and deprivation suffered by the impoverished, the James Turner Street documentary has largely perpetuated modern day ridicule of the poor – a derision which is evident throughout history.      

Mass repression of the lower classes can be traced back so far as the High Middle Ages. The expansion of population in Europe – from around 35 million to 80 million – between the years 1000 and 1347, witnessed the growth of a rural peasantry which accounted for 90% of the continent’s inhabitants. Due to the developments in agricultural techniques, most peasants were no longer located in isolated farms, but had assembled in small communities.

However, as subjects to the nobility, commoners were obliged to pay rents and labour services – this quickly evolved into a system of exploitation. Despite not owning the land outright, the feudal system ensured that the nobility were granted rights of income – hence preserving their own position and continuing to confine those below.

As a result, economic and political tensions gripped England, culminating in the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt – often referred to as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion. Attempts, by royal officials, to collect unpaid poll taxes led to widespread violent confrontation across rural society. The rebels pursued a reduction in taxation, the cessation of serfdom, and elimination of the King’s senior officials and law courts. In June of that year, the dissenters, upon entering London, attacked the gaols, destroyed the Savoy Palace and the Temple Inns of Court, set law books alight, and killed any person allied with the royal government.    

Manifestations of cynicism, toward brutally exclusive institutions, in Medieval England, were promptly stifled in the way of military overpowering. By the end of June 1381, over four-thousand troops were deployed to restore order and quash resistance from below. Historian Michael Postan describes the uprising as a “passing episode” – the restoration of the normal processes of government, soon after, illustrated the preservation of control over a peasantry which was rendered feral and unknowing. 

Throughout the ages, the lower classes have found human progress, and social betterment, to be two very distinct processes. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution, whist transforming Britain in the mid-eighteenth-century, encompassed dramatic social and economic changes for enormous sections of the populace. Mass-production methods demanded the migration of thousands from the countryside to new industrial cities – colossal changes in lifestyle ensued.

Textile factories, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were characterised by the deplorable conditions, long working hours, and low pay, which were enforced upon the labourers. Children, many as young as five-years-old, were made to work shifts of up to sixteen hours per day; earning as little as four shillings per week. Moreover, the squalid living conditions of the workforce, who were left in crude shanties and shacks, were in stark paradox to the splendour of the homes of the industry owners.

The backstreets of Manchester, and other mill towns, were documented by Friedrich Engels, in his 1844 study, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels observed that the industrial workers had lower incomes that their pre-industrial peers; and were forced to live in graver conditions – noting that mortality rates, in English industrial cities, were four times higher than in the surrounding countryside.

Ninety years on, from Engels’ writings on the slums of the Industrial Revolution, Orwell was in search of Wigan Pier. Of course, the great writer knew, as he trudged the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, the ‘pier’ had never existed. A coal jetty, once mistaken, in the blotted landscape, for ‘Wigan Pier’, had become local folklore. For Orwell, it was a metaphor: for the decay of British society in its abandonment of the poor.

Over the past month, at 9pm on Monday evenings, the 21^st century incarnation of poverty in Britain, has been played out to millions. Yet, today, prejudice towards the deprived is extensive – shows, like Benefits Street, follow a predictable formula. In a stampede for scapegoats, modern day Britain has left the impoverished isolated and marginalised. How they could do with an Orwell, or an Engels, now.