‘The anti-immigrant feeling in this country that echoes from the bad old days of racism,’ writes Dotun Adebayo

MAYBE IT’S because I’m a Londoner, but I hadn’t seen ‘white power’ graffiti for 20 or 30 years. So you can imagine my shock and horror the other day when ‘WHITE POWER’ was scrawled across the wall right outside my apartment up here in the ghetto of Salford or, as many people up here say, ‘the a**ehole of Manchester’.

On the one hand I had a grudging respect for the bullsh*t artist responsible for it. Because usually illiterates get it wrong. They usually spell it ‘Wite Powar’ or some other permutation of the phrase. Normally you would get three or four ‘Wight Power’ advocacies from a felt tip pen and they would all be spelt differently and all be spelt wrong. So I had to be impressed.

But I couldn’t help wondering whether it was the sign of the times that we let ourselves into with this whole EU referendum business that saw so many of us being led by the noose to the slaughter that we have helped unleash.
Hear me out.

Back in the bad old days of racism in this country (I’m talking the 1970s and 80s) I used to go out with a girl who lived on a council estate in the East End of London. This was back when the East End was the East End, the heart of cockney land, not the yuppie enclave it has since become.

GRAFFITI

Back then it was the National Front that flew the flag for racists everywhere. And, I tell you, I couldn’t walk onto her estate without being surrounded by NF graffiti and stickers saying ‘Wogs out’, or rather ‘Woggs out’. It was scary. Even though the estate was only 50 percent white you knew that you were walking into enemy territory every time you set foot on it to go and hang out and hug up your girl.

I wasn’t taking chances so I used to sneak onto the estate at night and leave at the crack of dawn. And even so, I would have to take the lift, which was covered with NF stickers promising to send me back to Africa.

Thankfully the National Front never got the power that they were looking for to “Send Them Back”. They didn’t have the strength in numbers to constitute a mandate. Even though they appealed to the 50 percent white folks on my girl’s estate, most white folks were too intelligent to fall for that old time racism. 

And so were we.

In those days the National Front didn’t get a single black vote. Not one. They didn’t have a single black member. Not one. And they couldn’t find a single black person to agree with their postulation that Britain was being “swamped” by Pakistanis and “woggs”.

The fault lines were clear. We knew who the racists were and where they were and we had to “smash their brains in because they ain’t got nuffink in ‘em,” as Linton Kwesi Johnson rapped.

Of course Mrs Thatcher blurred those lines when she became Prime Minister. When she said that the country was being ‘swamped’ by immigrants so mainstream Britain agreed with her and so did one or two ah WE. So much so that if the NF rolled up today, most ah WE would send a limousine to carry them come either way.

As Streatham MP Chuka Umunna points out, in the recent referendum campaign it was his black and Asian constituents who were bawling out to him that there are too many immigrants.

We don’t see ourselves as immigrants. In the 30 or 40 years since those bad old days of racism we have re-invented ourselves as Brits. True Brits. Whether cockneys or mockneys we talk like Brits, walk like Brits and share the prejudices of ‘true Brits, particularly when it comes to Eastern European migrants who come over here, take our jobs, take our women, and have no respect for us at all. They, we say, are the immigrants. Not WE.

Alas, it is not down to us to determine whether WE are immigrants or not. It’s down to those people who can legitimately claim ancestry in their sceptre isles long before our relatively recent arrival in large numbers. To the Brit who can trace their ancestry in this country back to the Edwardian days let alone the Victorian times WE are still immigrants. Until they say otherwise. We’re just not as immigrant as those Eastern Europeans that came over the other day and took our jobs and women without the requisite respect.

Every intelligent person knows that as soon as we send the Eastern Europeans, with their lack of R-E-S-P-E-C-T, back to whence they came, WE – that is YOU and I – once again become the a priori immigrants in this country.
Jews in apartheid South Africa knew this very well. Every single one of them knew that the racist National Party of the country was a Nazi party. And yet, they didn’t run away from the country when the National Party of South Africa took power in 1948 just three years after the downfall of Adolf Hitler, the most murderous of anti-Semites. 

Oh, Jews in South Africa knew fully well that once the National Party achieved its final solution of exterminating every black person within their jurisdiction and beyond that they would turn their attention to Jews. The cynics suggest that is why you had so many South African Jews supporting the anti-apartheid movement and the ANC, because it was in their vested interest that black people were not obliterated from the landscape. As someone who lived in the home of South African Jews (Lord and Lady Hoffmann) as a teenager, I am not one who shares this cynical view.

REALITY

It’s not so much cynicism as a reality check that is needed to explain the current situation of black Britons who have joined in the anti-immigration chorus of “Send them back”. They may as well sing “Send us back”. Because it is the same refrain that has increased the anti-immigrant feeling in this country that echoes from the bad old days of racism. 

It is exactly the same refrain that has allowed racism to rear its ugly head once more throughout the country and to allow the racists to come out boldly and claim that they are not racist but just anti-European Union immigration policy. 

Let’s be real now. That is the acceptable face of racism in the 21st century and WE have contributed to the ugly climate of abuse and fear that comes with it. WE are too blinded by the desire to not be regarded as immigrants any longer to see that WE are next.

And, by the way, that graffiti outside my door in the armpit of the North-West now reads ‘WHITE POWdER’. Didn’t I say they couldn’t spell?