1919, the Year History forgot: ‘riot’ and interraciality in a decolonial school curriculum
Having grown up and lived in the UK all my life, it is impossible to ignore how the First World War is an intrinsic part of how Britain see itself. But whilst the State has marked lots of its centenaries, rarely has it marked those in the interwar years. However, the year 2019 marked 100 years since the 1919 Race Riots, an early example of white supremacist heteropatriarchal violence in Britain in no less than nine seaports, including Liverpool with the Murder of Charles Wotton and further killings in South Wales. Via my experiences of the private education system and last year’s (2020) Black Lives Matter resurgence, this paper uses autoethnography via storytelling to analyse how today’s “Black Lives Matter” chants may apply to the lives of Black Britons over 100 years ago.
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(Page 20-21)
Whilst 2020 saw a wave of insurgency in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests happening across America, 1919 saw waves of rioting primarily in response to widespread unemployment. The Government commissioned a deportation scheme to send two thousand Black veterans and merchant sailors and their families to the Caribbean (Hunter, 2018), to somewhat ‘thin out’ the competition. However, even employed white men revolted and there were mass strikes (Sherry, 2012). Amongst them, were the police themselves. In that same year, Liverpool’s entire police force were on strike (Forbidden Britain) in addition to half of British police in general (Bourne, 2019: 228). With “I can’t breathe” as a rallying chant in 2020, 1919 also saw many struggling to breathe under violent economic tensions and the Spanish Flu Pandemic (1918 –1920). In a time of politics and pandemics further combined with job competition, 1919 is a year that ought to be part of not only how we think about the First World War, but further taught on the national curriculum.
In Britain, how we think about 1918 is in Armistice as the finale of that saga, arguably an early example of a “contradiction closing” event (Bell, 1985). The fighting stopped, but 1919 brought other problems. With Derek Chauvin convicted in 2021, his trial was a reminder of how big media cases help the system maintain the image of justice where “contradiction-closing cases ... allow business as usual to go on even smoothly than before, because now we can point to the exception case say, ‘See our system is really fair and just. See what we just did for the minorities and the poor’” (Delgado, 1998). And in Britain, we fall back on Macpherson (1999) as the “contradiction closing case” (Gillborn, 2008: 118-145), where until recently we had a London Met Police Chief that stated it was not helpful to label the police as institutionally racist (Osbourne, 2020). Policing is one example, and in my experiences of discussions about racism since June 2020, I am disappointed many of my colleagues still individualise racism as “bad apples”, not the trees that bore strange fruit.
Interwoven with the protests, I was privy to discussions criticising rioting. Namely, these were British people judging America, but it got me thinking how little we know about Britain’s history of rioting. Earlier, I discussed how the Government censored Britain’s histories of rioting in the first half of the twentieth century (Forbidden Britain). Perhaps, this is why there is so much amnesia. In those criticisms, I found people challenging ‘protest’ as well, so I wrote two articlesthinking about histories of insurrection (Ventour, 2020; 2020b). I found myself epistemologicallyexploring the term violence. In my circles, I saw many capable of relating football hooliganism to violence but not poverty, deportations, or disproportionality (DDN, 2020). The evident disproportionality in poverty (Stroud, 2020) ushered me to consider the racism of the economy, revisiting this historically, which also had relevance in Black experiences of the interwar years…