2021 IS our year of reckoning: The 40th anniversary of the New Cross Fire is this January.

The 40th anniversary of the Black People’s Day of Action is in two months. And the 40th anniversary of the Brixton uprising is in April.

It does not take a genius to work out that these momentous events are connected. But guess which one of these three will be widely covered in the mainstream media?

Yes, you’re right. One hundred per cent. But our year of reckoning doesn’t stop there.

Last year saw the grim reaper of COVID cut a discriminatory swathe through our communities, even as the authorities were concentrating the fight against it elsewhere as they publicly insisted that the virus is colour
blind. The evidence to the contrary greeted us every evening via another empty space in our workplace, and another empty seat on public transport and at the dinner table – in our communities.

We couldn’t help but notice how the great and the good of our communities – doctors and nurses, teachers and militant activists and the pop singers that we grew up to love and dance to, were dying abruptly one after the other.

Back in March when ‘celebrity’ deaths from COVID was still a relatively rare occurrence for the wider community, Black Britons were seeing a pattern, and many of us were running scared, let’s face it. And we ain’t stopped running yet.

And when we run scared, we don’t know who to trust. The soothsayers in our neighbourhood reached for scriptures and prophecies and conspiracy theories and warned us to “beware the ides of March”.

And enough of us listened to gather what we have often concluded when we have stared at death down one barrel or another ‘THEY’ are trying to kill us.

‘THEY’ are trying to kill us was one of the many theories that emerged as the news filtered through the Black community 40 years ago this month as we heard it through the ‘ghetto’ grapevine that 13 Black children had died in what most of us believed was a racist arson attack on a teenage house party.

Evidence

The fact that the authorities reacted with what we perceived and interpreted as ambivalence was further ‘evidence’ and the chant went up right through the community: “13 DEAD AND NOTHING SAID.”

About 100 of us gathered outside the fateful house on the 30th anniversary of the fire. We gathered to support the families and to remember. I recall Professor Gus John, who was there, gave a powerful speech. Also present was Toyin Agbetu.

However, despite the local police commander assuring us that all the investigations had been carried out and the only conclusion was that the fire was a tragic accident, I can assure you there were those who hadn’t forgotten the relentless racism we were subjected to on the streets every day (not just in the New Cross area) at the time and were still not convinced, but kept their own counsel in respect of the assembled families of the dead and injured.

Once the seed of doubt has been planted by a conspiracy theory it is difficult for any government let alone science and rationale to shift it.

Hence the reason this 40th anniversary of the fire and the subsequent days of action and insurrection may underlie this year of reckoning for us.

If the statistics are anything to go by, Black Britons may be the biggest killers of Black people this year. We may very well be the ‘THEY’ that are going to kill us. The latest stats show that we are much more reluctant to take the coronavirus vaccine than our white counterparts.

The irony is not lost that we have already concluded this is a racist virus that is coming for us first and foremost.

However, when an antidote arrives like a blessing from above we are reminded of what the soothsayers said about being wary of “the ides of March” and like Julius Caesar’s soothsayer says when Caesar scoffs that “the ides of March” have come and he hasn’t been stabbed to death yet, the ides of March may have come and gone in 2020 but we’ve got another one this year… and next year – or so our soothsayers/ conspiracy theorists would have us believe. The fact of the matter is there are still enough of us who believe that ‘THEY’ are still trying to kill us.

Whether through a tiny white pill to control our natural birth or through the violence that saw the world gasp for breath as they witnessed what they
describe as the public lynching of a Black man at the hands of a police officer in the United States.

For the conspiracy theorists, this all amounts to evidence that ‘THEY’ are trying to kill us and isn’t it by way of a lethal injection that they kill off so many Black men on death row?

But they don’t want to show us this, say the conspiracy theorists, that’s why they are more likely to concentrate on Black men throwing bricks at police officers in this 40th anniversary commemorative year that to show how ‘THEY’ are trying to kill our children.

I wish I could say this is an extreme point of view in the Black community but it is more common than is safe.

To paraphrase LKJ, this is the age of science and technology and some of us are still guided by conspiracy.

Blood

Honestly, me nuh know how ‘WE’ and ‘THEY’ are going to work this out. Whoever ‘THEY’ are who are trying to kill us, all I know is that someone will have to pay, mark my words, for all the innocent blood that will be lost to COVID every day if ‘THEY’ don’t take the vaccine that protects us all.