Black Lives Matter: Birmingham, Policing & Speaking on Racism

Louis Clark at Birmingham’s largest BLM protest. June 2020

Louis has been a city resident all his life, and sat down with THP to discuss Birmingham, BLM and UK culture

‘‘Fear of the police was a very prevalent thing, and it creates this general feeling of uncomfortableness.

Even as an adult now like if I'm driving and I see the police, I'm always check in my rear view mirrors. I'm looking around the corner and making sure my phone is on the mantel is showing maps, so there’s no reason to pull me over. I'm always checking the rear views and stuff just in case they're following me.

From a young age, like, if you were knocking around, I played football and stuff. And the police car would drive past, you would just bolt. Like even from a young age, being a young guy that didn't even always know why, it's just what you did.

But then as you sort of get older, and you sort of see patterns of behaviour from people and their insights into policing starts to make sense. Once you see that, you become a little bit more fearful.

It’s like if there was a report that a schoolkid robbed someone, you know the police will pull over one of the non-white kids. It's happened to me. It's a general distrust. It's not that there’s always a specific instance that you have, I think it's a culture

You end up developing a spidey sense like when the police around. You tingle a little bit. It sounds mad stupid, but you just become ultra-aware

Even up to this point, I got followed home a few months ago, and I know like they followed me. The road I live on it's not a cull-de-sac, but it kind of cuts off one main road so you would never go down that road, unless you lived there. They followed me down the road for a while, turned down my road, stopped when I parked, and then as I got out the car they like drove past slowly and just carried on.

They didn't stick around. It's things like that I kind of live through the feeds into the general distrust, because you just always have the feeling of being watched and that you're more suspicious even when you're doing nothing wrong.’’

The discussion around the existence of racism in the UK has been highly polarising. We’ve seen pundits and politicians outright deny the existence of institutional prejudice and systemic racism; or we’ve seen the entire conversation become derailed by a fixation with a Churchill statue for instance. Why do you think the discussion is treated as such a controversial topic?

Racism in the UK? Of course it exists. 

British people, just like Americans, are really prideful people. And I think we're so...kind of like what you said, when there's not so many recent instances of public brutalization like the Mark Duggan and Stephen Lawrence cases, it’s easy for people to believe that it’s not a common thing. 

I think there's A very real desire to believe, amongst people here, that racism isn't really a thing in this country. And again, like I get that. No one wants to live in a country and be part of a country that still exists as a racist society. And I think people want to believe that because people don't say the N word anymore, and people don't like participate in National Front marches, or don't do all these things so publicly that there isn't a problem. 

And I think it's easier to accept that one person or one group of people being racist is just a group of people being racist, rather than a symptom of a diseased system.

I think to me, those are the two main contributing factors. I don't think many people are consciously racist, don't think a lot of people do it out of chosen ignorance. I do think a lot people do have ignorance. It's more naivety; still, I kind of had to accept recently that it's not really an excuse anymore. I don't think a lot of people do it to be malignant. I don't think a lot of people even consider themselves racist

And that doesn't excuse it, but I don't think that it comes from a heart of it. And that's kind of been like, when I've been discussing with people and when I've been like trying talk to people about it, like trying to get to the core of the issue. The core of the issue isn't black versus white. 

Like, I'm not out, we're not out here trying to tell you all you're racist, like, it's not about white guilt. To me, I don't think that it was about white guilt to anyone. I don't need a bunch of people saying sorry. It's not about your individual prejudices, let's just make a change overall for the better’’

Birmingham
June 2020