Faith & Reason: Violent hatred and the soft suburban soul

THIS COLUMN in this week was always going to be about the Stephen Lawrence report. I had started jotting down a few notes beforehand, looking for something fresh among the usual church platitudes about racial prejudice. Then a copy of the report arrived: two pink telephone directories full of violent hatred and bureaucratic excuses. And now I'm writing something quite different.

What I had expected to say was that racism was indeed deeply ingrained in our society, and that this was hardly surprising, given human nature and the slow speed at which communities adapt themselves to new influences. But all this seemed hopelessly irenic when I started to look at the report. I read it in unusual circumstances: sitting in the audience of a charity concert at which my daughter was singing, held in a church decked with Lenten banners: "Have mercy on us Lord, for we have sinned." It seemed like a set-up, but the answer came out wrong. No, we haven't sinned, at least, not like that.

As has now been widely reported, the appendix to Sir William Macpherson's report contains 56 pages of a transcript from a secret surveillance video made of four of the five prime suspects. As they play with their knives, stabbing and chopping at the furniture, Neil Acourt, Gary Dobson, Luke Knight, David Norris and two other friends fill page after page with vile, raw, racist diatribe. One example suffices, from Acourt: "I reckon that every nigger should be chopped up, mate, and they should be left with nothing but fucking stumps." Nothing has been proved against these men, but as Macpherson says, "If these suspects were not involved there must have been five or six almost identical young thugs at large on the night of 22 April 1993."

I must have known that such people existed. I worked among them in an East End market. I know logically that racist attacks must have perpetrators. When I lived in Hackney, I would occasionally have to cross roads to avoid gangs of such people. I had even read excerpts from that videotape before now. And yet, reading through the whole transcript, I feel as if, uncomprehending, I am encountering an alien people for the first time, certainly more alien than those people I know from ethnic minorities. Soft and suburban like the majority of British Christians, I have to admit to losing touch with this particular sub-culture. I don't want to encounter it, of course, but my religion insists that I first understand and second, do what I can to help the victims of prejudice and hatred in my world.

Another section of the report that made an impact on me was the testimony of Duwayne Brooks, Stephen's friend who witnessed the attack. I live safely in a country where the first people at the scene of a stabbing "sort of shimmied away" because they thought the victim's friend might be going to rob them; where none of the police officers attempted any first aid on the victim, despite not knowing whether his wounds were fatal or not; where Brooks, so nearly a victim himself, was not asked whether he had been hurt, but was questioned instead about any weapons he might have on him; where his information about where the gang had run off to was ignored until it was too late. It has, of course, been denied that any of this treatment was because Lawrence and Brooks were black. All that can be said is that this story is familiar to other black people who have had contact with the police, not so familiar to whites.

There will be time enough later on to do the individual soul-searching that middle-class liberals and their churches do when challenged with racism. The comparison with drinking might well be accurate: that my small sherries of discrimination contribute in some way to the violent, drunken, racist wreck in the underpass. But for the moment that seems self- indulgent. To quote Macpherson, the sub-culture of violent racism must be tackled head on. "A high priority must be for society to purge itself of such racist prejudice and violence."

The talk has been that racism can reside in the structures of an organisation though I suspect that it is, in large part, a convenient euphemism for the racist attitudes inherent in some of the people in institutions. In the Macpherson report, it is a way of apportioning a racist cause to some of the incompetence in the police handling of Stephen Lawrence's murder, without directly accusing any of the individual police officers of racist attitudes and motivation (on which the testimony of Neville and Doreen Lawrence is more pointed). But this goes beyond the notion of racism being institutionalised within the assumptions and organisation of an institution. A different phrase is needed, something like corporate racism, or communal racism, to describe the chief sin of which we are all truly guilty: our failure to identify and root out the extreme and corrosive form of violent racism demonstrated by the Acourts and their friends.

This is why the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary were right to respond so quickly and so firmly to the report's findings, and why it is so vital to purge the police force of any racist elements, so that it can carry out its new anti-discriminatory tasks with vigour and the confidence of the black community. There is a way to go.