The Stephen Lawrence legacy

I first met Doreen and Neville Lawrence at a fundraising concert at the Waterman’s Art Centre in West London in 1994. This was two years before they had met Nelson Mandela, who declared that ‘as in South Africa, black lives are cheap.’

There weren’t many people at the concert, those that were there, were mainly local Afro-Caribbean and Asian young people, who had come to listen to the local reggae band Misty in Roots and learn more about the justice for Stephen Lawrence Family Campaign. This was a time when the anger and the sense of injustice was limited in the Afro-Caribbean and Asian communitie, and both Doreen and Neville struck me as being incredibly humble, a little lost but determined.

As a employee of the TUC, I coordinated the Trade Union support for the Stephen Lawrence family campaign. This included Doreen and Neville addressing TUC Congress, raising political and financial support, and then organising supporting rallies such as during the Macpherson Enquiry in Elephant and Castle.

What struck me during the campaign was that for a moment in British history, anti-racism had become a mainstream subject and not just limited to the Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities. White people and institutions were moved to act. For example, the Daily Mail, not necessarily a friend of ethnic minority people or working people, took the incredibly bold step to identify and use the word ‘guilty’ with those then allegedly and now – in some cases – proven responsible for Stephen’s murder.

Everybody can understand direct racism, for example, verbal or physical abuse because of the colour of your skin, or indirect racism when an action like requiring a particular uniform has a disproportionate impact on ethnic minority people, who have a particular dress code for religious or cultural reasons. The Macpherson enquiry raised the profile of the idea that organisations and institutions could have cultures of racism.

This concept was familiar to many anti-racist activists, first highlighted by the Black Panthers movement in the West Coast of America, but also by the Apartheid regime in South Africa. It was and is a difficult concept to understand. But if we go to the basic situation when Stephen was stabbed and lay in a pool of blood, the reaction of the Police Officers that first arrived on the scene was to see not a member of the public that needed their professional help, but somebody that was the victim of a gang fight or drug deal: they immediately assumed all the negative stereotypes of being a young man of African heritage. The key question that arose from that moment was, what is it in an institution that sustains this type of negative and racist thinking, undermining professionalism and perpetuating racism?

Many organisations including local government, the health sector, and voluntary organisations and some in the private sector (for example the Ford Motor company where I later worked) tried to address the issues of cultures of discrimination. Unfortunately, the process of tackling
institutional racism was taken over by technocrats and consultants and undermined by the current coalition Government in their refusal to adopt the public sector equality duty which if conducted and used effectively could illuminate racist discrimination.

I feel now that there is a sense that racism is a “done” issue – that it is no longer important. It has got better but much still needs to change, as the latest statistics on stop and search, and continuing evidence on racism in and out of employment shows – this couldn’t be further from the reality of many British people of Asian and African heritage.

London is a fantastically, culturally rich capital – and as many communities of Asian or African heritage are now fourth or fifth generation, other capitals in Europe could learn a lot from it.