#4: Hadrian’s Wall, AD1987

Description:  As a child of 7, I visited Hadrian’s Wall in the company of immediate family and family friends.  The family travelling with us had a son of my age who was developmentally-arrested due to severe hypoxic brain damage in early infancy.  While visiting the on-site museum, he started behaving boisterously out of excitement, causing his mother to reflexively scold him in her native language (Cantonese).  This caused the on-duty custodian to take offence and evict our entire group, at first refusing to give any reason, but later stating that the museum was closed, despite the opening hours on the door clearly stating the contrary, before hurling abuse at us and slamming the door shut in our faces.

Feelings: At that young age, I had not yet developed an understanding of racism, and so was rather confused at the entire event.  When my father explained to me the likely cause of the custodian’s sudden hostility, I remember being confused by the notion that someone could hate me for the simple fact of skin colour and language, and saddened that this was a reality.

Evaluation:  Racism of any sort is a humiliating and disempowering event.  The impact of this incident was all the worse for me when my father, to whom I looked at the time for safety and security, declared that there was no recourse and that the injustice we had faced would have to go unredressed.

Analysis:  Institutional racism may be defined as, ‘a collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origins.  It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviours which amount to discrimination through the unwitting prejudice, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantages minority ethnic people,’ (Macpherson, 1999).  

My direct experience of this was evident in the fact that my father – a legal professional in training at the time – declared there was no redress for what we had experienced, as the mechanisms for enhancing the redress of racially-motivated offences that would be implemented after the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1993 did not yet exist and it was difficult to prove that we had not been evicted on grounds other than racial discrimination.

Even less encouraging is the revelation that institutional racism is rife in UK law enforcement.  Officers involved in the Stephen Lawrence case, through indifference, responded tardily to the report despite detailed information from multiple sources arriving very quickly after the report was made.  This allowed the perpetrators to destroy incriminating evidence.  Furthermore, the link indicates a prevailing perception of law enforcement officers(LEOs) as being not only indifferent to racially-motivated crime, but actively discriminatory against minority groups themselves, extending even to their minority ethnic colleagues.

Conclusion:  In all, being subjected to racially-motivated hostility at a personal level was a degrading and disempowering experience, made all the worse by the lack of mechanisms of redress.  Since the Stephen Lawrence murder, significant changes have been made in this regard, yet the underlying social climate leaves much to be desired, with 106  known or suspected racially-motivated murders taking place in the UK since the Stephen Lawrence case, and black people having 28 times the national average risk of police stop-and-search under Section 60 laws.

Works Cited

Macpherson, L. W., 1999. The Macpherson Reports, London: HMSO Command Paper No. 4262.