Who wrecks the hopes and dreams of black boys?
Peer group pressure is a bigger threat to the progress of these children than racism or a lack of role models
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Your support makes all the difference.The black British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson is one of my greatest Britons. Still a fighter for justice, his raw energy, anger and integrity run through beautifully crafted poems making them blaze where other poetry merely shines. Sue Lawley was knocked off her chair this weekend when he chose Vivaldi to take to his Desert Island.
"What?" You could almost hear her cultivated mind panicking, "a black street man like you? Are you sure? What about something more suitable, you know, Rastaman stuff, or soul, sounds to remind you of what you really are?" She was well placated when he did go on to choose Marley.
A black man in Britain – with a handful of exceptions – has his identity thrust upon him every single day by whites and blacks alike. There are templates they must fit, roles handed down by history, negative assumptions which remain stubbornly in place even in the 21st century, when the first black cabinet minister, Paul Boateng, has arrived, the nation's most trusted newscaster is Trevor McDonald and Bill Morris has risen to exert extraordinary influence in the trade union movement and beyond.
Individual successes like these have made no impact on the way society perceives black men.
They are feared because they are expected to be into drugs, crime and violence, and for their sexual incontinence. They are assumed to be feckless and careless about family responsibilities. They are seen as genetically programmed to excel at sports, dance, music. They are thought to know how to pull women and have unbeatable prowess in bed. They have to be super-cool and have beautiful bodies. And weren't we just reminded of this when the BBC plastered huge posters all over town of four perfectly formed black bottoms of the talented cast of the series Babyfathers?
If only these were only dreadful and racist stereotypes without much substance. Depressingly, life imitates these images more, not less, as time goes on. And the worst effect is that they infect the lives and aspirations of young black boys. Afro-Caribbean boys are three times as likely to be excluded from school than any other group and their exam results are too often abysmal, leaving them drifting and susceptible to destructive choices.
Today, a conference organised by the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers will attempt to address this problem yet again, but this time the talk will go beyond the most common explanations given thus far – racism and poor teacher motivation. Both of these do still bear some responsibility for the catastrophic outcomes we are witnessing. But Tony Sewell of Leeds University School of Education (who is black himself and has researched this area better than anyone) has conducted a study which will make simplistic anti-racists very twitchy.
After studying 150 black 15-year-olds in five secondary schools, Sewell concluded that peer group pressure was a bigger threat to the progress of these children than racism or a lack of role models. Four out of five interviewees cited this as their main barrier to achievement. It is uncool to get good marks, the hard workers are "dissed" and the leaders of the pack pride themselves on how many girls they can pull and how easily they can threaten teachers, especially women.
In their excellent studyYoung Masculinities, published earlier this year, Stephen Frosh, Anne Phoenix and Rob Pattman found that in school Afro-Caribbean boys were expected to be super-masculine, super-virile, tough and promoters of authentic male style. They were positioned by others and positioned themselves as hard and therefore superior to white and Asian boys. This then led to greater discrimination against them by authority, ending in exclusions.
I wonder what chubby, tone-deaf black boys go through, or those who are anxious about their sexuality, or lads who want to go to church, like most of their parents and grandparents did. In what are euphemistically call the Inner Cities, such boys have no freedom to be or do what they want. They are pressed to conform to the tough subculture. Just last week the mothers of victims and perpetrators in Peckham, south London, had to change their plans to march against this violence because of serious threats from the gunfighters who value nothing and want everything.
These nihilistic peer group values are just as damaging for white working-class children or young Bangladeshis, Sikhs or Muslims. But the problem is at present most acute for young black men and boys, particularly of Afro-Caribbean and mixed race origin. To watch them live and die in the way so many are doing at present must break the heart and hopes of the entire community.
Just imagine what it must feel like to be born a nerdy black boy with a passion for physics and dreams to be the next Stephen Hawking? There must be some. Lots more bright, black boys could become bio-technologists, doctors, psychologists, poets like Johnson and the equally admirable Benjamin Zefaniah, painters, painstaking carpenters of beautiful furniture, sitar players, primary school teachers, space scientists, ballet dancers and all those hundreds of other occupations which young black boys can't even imagine as they think about themselves and their lives.
Racism disallows dreams. And that doesn't change whether you are a newspaper columnist or a renowned actress or a swank Lord in crimson robes. But these days, for black boys, the dream is wrecked by their own companions and heroes.
There are thousands of black boys around the country who will be thwarted by the twin evils of racism and peer group bullying unless they are helped to resist both, and this too is something Sewell and others are advocating.
It seems to me that we also need to pour some money into finding out what helped to make the difference in families from the Caribbean which, in spite of racism and other pressures, have produced fine and highly successful black men, men who have become beacons like Tony Phillips, the respected Radio 4 producer, and his brother Caryll Phillips, the novelist; Trevor Phillips and his novelist brother Mike. There are many, many more such clusters of achievement. Maybe it was easier then because the drug culture hadn't penetrated every aspect of life and parents could have more influence on their children than any of us has today.
The saddest truth is that if Stephen Lawrence had not been murdered, he would have been a misfit in many a gang of young black men. He was ambitious for a career as an architect. His bloody death has made him a hero, but he would have counted for nothing in the hard crowd had he lived. Among the street cred, true blacks, Stephen Lawrence the architect would have been a sell-out, a coconut, a bounty bar; brown coating, white on the inside.
The Lawrence inquiry ensured that racism in Britain was finally acknowledged. We now have new race equality laws to challenge the prejudices and cultures of schools and other institutions. Next April it will be 10 years since the death of Stephen Lawrence. Time now, I think, to tackle that other massive problem in our society – black on black violence, external and internal.
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