When I first saw coverage of the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, it affected me at a physiological level – I remember being sickened and made cold by what I had seen. It was 1991, I was a child at the time, and I now know that I found those images triggering – a word I have only become acquainted with in recent years. The footage brought back memories of violence I had seen firsthand, at close quarters. I was already well versed in how power could be abused, and knew that being good could sometimes be a show adults put on. But I also assumed, in the way only kids can, that things would inevitably right themselves.
The footage showed policemen using “excessive force” against an African-American man and, even as a prepubescent, not much interested in news, I knew the officers were due to face a proper trial. What had happened to King was clearly horrifying and wrong – even all the white people speaking about it on TV said as much. And, importantly, the attack had been caught on camera. All this meant that King would receive justice. It was simple.
That belief was shattered in the moment the police officers were acquitted. I found it profoundly shocking that dehumanising brutality, like that displayed on tape, could ever be sanctioned and labelled as just by outside institutions. Especially the ones that, as an 11-year-old, I had hoped might one day protect the people I loved.
Media coverage of the ensuing LA riots only made things worse. The streets of the city’s poorest areas were ablaze, and I sympathised with the anger of powerless people who wanted, for the briefest of moments, to control something. To my child’s mind, cause and effect seemed clear. Yet this wasn’t how their actions were reported; they simply became mindless hooligans without a credible grievance.
In 2001, when riots erupted in my hometown of Bradford, I would hear the same dismissals of how racism could have created the conditions which led to this; in that case, the images on my screen were the streets I had walked through with family and friends, so I had some insight into the real picture. The King verdict proved significant to me because it sowed the idea that I must question what people on TV told me about my world and what was really happening within it. My political analysis is still informed by this today. When establishment voices are united against those who are seemingly dispossessed, I am quick to ask to who’s benefit.
Now, as an adult, I can see that words such as truth and reality are socially constructed and easily manipulated. Back then, as a child, this realisation was only a feeling of disquiet that I couldn’t possibly articulate. Part of why I chose to become a teacher, as I am now, was because the profession provided a golden opportunity to share alternative stories, to reframe the given narrative and enable young people to become critical of the world around them.
To be clear, the acquittal of King’s abusers wasn’t the moment I realised I was black or that racism existed. There was too much talk in my house of independence struggles in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa for that; my dad regularly invoked the names of Obafemi Awolowo, Steve Biko, Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah. They were my mythical heroes, standing up for what was right. But what came out of the acquittal was a nascent understanding that not only did state institutions value black citizens differently, but also that this was replicated across the world. In 1999, the Macpherson report into the “institutionally racist” Met wasn’t all that surprising to me. The King acquittal had already given me a chilling recognition of how unimportant black skin rendered me in a predominantly white society.
Feelings of alienation that stemmed from the acquittal showed me that I was, in some ways, as connected to black people who weren’t necessarily African as I was to Nigerians. The sense of diaspora that my family had always given me, their constant talk of “back home”, now had a new dimension: I felt discernibly closer to other black Britons. It was no good trying to argue, as was often the case, that our African-ness made us superior black people to Caribbeans. And up to then, black Americans had seemed like distant lucky cousins who’d made it to the Promised Land: the Jacksons, A Different World and the Cosby Show surely attested to that.
Now I could see that our shared skin colour made us vulnerable in the face of state institutions like the police and judiciary – ours was an oppression shared. I’m not sure if I considered our suffering to be exactly the same, but I could see deep resonances – and those connections remain today. The names of David Oluwale, Joy Gardner, Mark Duggan and Sheku Bayoh show us that deaths in custody, or following contact with the police, are a factor of black life in the UK too. More than 20 years later, we are rooted in the same spot. Again, we are recognising the transnational nature of our experiences as black people in predominantly white societies. Distinctions around “African” or “Caribbean” are meaningless when our differences are collapsed by a dominant society that sees us as only the simple adjective: black. And we are, as we were in 1992, still having to protest that #blacklivesmatter.
The acquittal sparked a wish to understand how institutions could perpetuate a different kind of racism from the type I’d witnessed individually. It prompted me to question received wisdom and explore how I was connected to others in a global struggle. The moment asked me to think about what justice means, and was a powerful lesson in how injustice operates. Ultimately, it led me to a life in which I seek, in my own small way, to play a part in realising a fairer society – however much it feels like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up that bloody mountain.
