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When riots have colour

Feb 22, ’12 8:00 AM

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

- Langston Hughes

Allowing a poem to do the conceptual groundwork for a sociological article published at an academic journal, amounts to relegating yourself in the dustbin of scholarly prestige and inviting endless scoffing from your interlocutors; yet this is precisely the risk I’m wholeheartedly taking in the remainder of this paper. What follows should be read as a civic and not an academic response to this summer’s social unrest, following BSA’s laudable initiative to devote an open forum for sociological perspectives on the recent English riots.

Borrowing Langston Hughes’ evocative imagery of a dream being deferred; that dream being the ambition to escape the institutionalised abbreviation of citizenship that Black Britons routinely face in their interaction with the police, I advance the intentionally loaded proposition that the wave of civil unrest that gripped English cities in August, was racial and political and not the arbitrary and unfortunate by-product of consumerism’s allure on disenfranchised youth, living under the spectre of neo-liberal economy’s tyrannical excesses. To do so, the article is divided into four parts, each addressing the following questions; (a) why race? (b) just race?, (c) why politics?, (d) just politics? , presided by a brief overview of the recent Guardian/LSE study, aptly entitled; Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s summer of disorder.

According to the first round of reports on the findings of that study, published on last Monday’s edition of The Guardian, the riots allegedly captured a ‘widespread anger and frustration at the way in which police engage with communities’ and columnist Gary Younge (2011b) was quick to single out ‘indifferent elites’, ‘economic hardship’ and police brutality’ as reasons to riot based on the study’s findings.  What is startling about these comments is a noticeable discomfort and a conceptual mismatch between envisaging the riots as an emotive revenge, driven by opportunism and consumerist greed on the part of the summer looters; accusations that featured rather widely and sonorously in the immediate aftermath of the events, and a newly discovered acknowledgement of ‘deep seated and even visceral antipathy of the rioters towards the police’. Additional mention was surprisingly reserved in the report for issues of race and politics which was rather conspicuous in its absence in the initial outbreak of commentary following the riots. ‘Race was never far from the surface of the first person accounts of rioters. The most acute sense of a longstanding mistrust was among black interviewees’ writes Raekha Prasad (2011), reiterating black interviewees’ descriptions of incidents that involved being ‘handcuffed, beaten, kicked, spat on and called ‘nigger’ and ‘black bastard’, or episodes of stop and search operations where one police officer asked a colleague ‘Mate why don’t you ask him where Saddam [Hussein] is. He might be able to help out.’ On the statistical side of things, Younge (2011b) cites a 75% of the respondents who considered the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan as ‘an important or very important cause of the riots’, with additional figures of stop and search operations, revealing that 73% of the respondents reported that they have been stopped and searched in the last 12 months, while an additional chart in the study shows a 28% of London’s black population to have been stopped and searched by the police.

If race came as a surprise to the Guardian/LSE study on the riots, it is also intriguing to notice its accompaniment by a cameo appearance of politics too, in the critical delineation of the study by the newspaper’s commentators. Gary Younge (2011a), in keeping with an earlier article of his in The Guardian, finds the rioters to be ‘far more politically conscious than even many of the left’ and finds politics to be the first of the ‘two particular themes [that] have helped correct some initially flawed impressions’, the second being the ‘contempt between rioters and police with tales of petty harassment, abuse and humiliation’ appearing commonplace and, I would add, racially driven.

Why Race?

In my emotional and intellectual memory of the riots, race starred as ‘the elephant in the room’, impossible to ignore yet largely unaddressed. Let us retrace the steps of this gigantic omission in the initial reporting of and media, political and expert discourses on the outbreak of the riots, by means of rendering race as a visible cause for the incidents that shocked and awed many, commentators and pundits featuring large among them.

On Thursday, 4th of August, Mark Duggan, a black kid from Tottenham was killed as a result of a terrifying shoot-out with the police.  A few days later, Sunday, 7th of August, Stafford Scott, a consultant on racial equality and community engagement and co-founder of the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign in 1985, was interviewed on Sky News where he saw the spark of rioting as both a response to the Duggan killing and a lingering coda of a similar incident, involving the death of Cynthia Jarett during a police raid in 1985 also at the Broadwater farm estate in Tottenham. In his Guardian article published the next day, Scott (2011) made a comment that is impossible to ignore; ‘if the rioting was a surprise, you weren’t looking’. It is this degree of inattention and pathological degree of amnesia that I should wish to highlight in my reading of the riots as triggered by the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan; insisting that no other ‘cause’ adequately explains them.

Before pleading for recognition of a link between the riots and issues of race and racism, it seems vital to give more insight into the immediate aftermath of the Duggan killing and its lamentable if not unpardonable treatment by the police.

Defying normal police procedures, the police failed to send out a family liaison officer to inform Duggan’s relatives about his death on Thursday, 4th of August (they found that out from the media) and the family did not receive an apology about this until Monday, 8th of August. Stafford Scott (2011) recalls that the family was disgusted by the complete disregard to their feelings by the police and along with other members of the community, went to the police station to speak to a senior officer demonstrating peacefully until that would happen. Scott adds that the police kept ‘prevaricating’; “The most senior person they gave us was a chief inspector. We said that person wasn’t senior enough – we wanted a senior ranking officer of superintendent or above. Eventually they sent for a superintendent, but by then it was too late. We’d told them: don’t prevaricate, we wanted to hear what was happening so we could explain to the community what was taking place. [..] had they dealt with us earlier in the day, we would have removed ourselves from this area, we would have gone back to Broadwater Farm”, and had that happened, the streets of London would probably not have erupted in violence.

In the light of such testimony, it seems timely and relevant to argue that the police shooting of Duggan is by no means new nor does it amount to an isolated incident or a historical first, if one is willing to follow both the history of rioting in Britain and the uneasy relationship between Black British citizens and the(ir) police; the names of Joy Gardner and Roger Sylvester, killed in police custody in the recent years come immediately to mind not to mention reggae star Smiley Culture’s death in police custody under the most mysterious of circumstances earlier this year.

To make matters (appear) worse, it could be provocatively argued that a historical account of Black British experience can indeed be narrated along the lines of racism and violent clashes with the police and many literary and non-literary landmarks of Black British Culture could be mobilised to testify that; be it Trevor and Michael Phillips’ historical Windrush: The Irresistible Making of Multi-Racial Britain, Paul Gilroy’s sociological classic There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Winston James and Clive Harris’ polemical Inside Babylon: The Caribean Diaspora in Britain, Philip Cohen and H.S. Bains’ poignant Multi-Racist Britain, Courtia Newland and Kadija Sessay’s playful IC3 anthology of New Black Writing in Britain borrowing its name from the police identity code for ‘black’ (IC3), Alex Wheatle’s transfusion of rioting into writing in Brixton Rock,  Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ferocious dub poetry, Trinidadian calypso’s biting and piquant social commentary of London scenes, or the very lived experiences and oral testimonies of the Windrush pickney themselves.

To witness the riots of 2011 in the light of earlier disturbances is to allow oneself to guide the ‘how’s’ and the ‘why’s’ through a moment’s recollection of some key moments in black British history where the police has clashed violently with the public with the common thread of such animosities being the social, cultural and political signifier of race.

In 1959, Kelso Colchrane’s unsolved murder in the streets of Notting Hill sparked tensions in London; setting the scene for what James Whitfield (2004) would refer to as the ‘unhappy dialogue’ between the Metropolitan Police and Black Londoners in post-war Britain. In 1976, Notting Hill carnival , a key cultural institution of (Black) Britain, ended in riot and violent clashes with the police, followed by the 1977 National Front March, described as ‘deliberately provocative’ by the NF itself and in that spirit renewed its rendez-vous with racism in 1979 leading to the Southall riots. In 1981 the notorious Brixton riots broke out aggravated by “Operation Swamp” and persistent stop and search operations in the area, while later that year in the tragic New Cross Fire in Deptford 13 young, black people died in a house fire set ablaze by racists. 1985 saw the Broadwater Farm riots triggered by Cynthia Jarett’s death in a police raid, spreading contagiously to Brixton, Toxteth and Peckham, while in 1999 the murder of Stephen Lawrence re-introduced the term ‘institutional racism’ and sparked the most profound re-appraisal of race relations and the justice system, since Brixton 1981, leading to the MacPherson report on racist attitudes within the Metropolitan Police force.

What these incidents have in common is the lived experience (not any abstracted narrative) of race as and by means of exclusion and that in a rather alarming sequence of events, the effect of which is impossible to ignore, even if we allude to those events as cacophonous exceptions in an otherwise smooth-running multicultural society which condemns such incidents and provides for their extinction from public life ever after.

Just race?

Envisaging the 2011 English riots solely through what W.E. Du Bois (1920 and 1961) articulated as the ‘racial veil’ may appear problematic, yet looking through that veil has its respective merits, if a broader definition of race is put in motion. Race is very rarely just race and it is here imagined as a modality through which the riots can be understood, reminiscent perhaps of Stuart Hall’s (2006) well-known definition of race as a ‘floating signifier’. Race is not skin colour but a social division that is better understood alongside other insignia of social distinction such as class. In other words, I interpret race as class given that both share an exclusionary life in British political life. To detach race from other social divisions is to render its understanding almost impossible, as social divisions more often than not come in a bundle, as if zipped together, making our understanding of them possible only if we use the right software to unzip and unpack these notions and examine their antagonistic interdependence as belonging to the exclusionary spectrum of political and civic life.  Jonathan Rutherford’s (ed.) (1998) excellent book on Identity is a laudable work in this direction of understanding social divisions together in our effort to understand the social life of difference in a political community with race being no exception and rarely being just race. Race itself, in the context of the riots, functions less a veil and more as a mirror if not a probing X-ray , attesting bitterly to the lack of tolerance, acceptance and positive identification; values that otherwise constitute the nuclear weaponry of multiculturalism and cosmopolitan citizenship, defying neo-racist proclivities reminiscent of Powellism, ‘grinning picanninies’ and ‘Rivers of Blood’.

Why Politics?

In the time that has elapsed since The Guardian/LSE study on the riots, the mainstream punditocracy attributed the riots to some superficial criminality, mindless looting, disenchanted youth otherwise dominated by torpor and apathy, scenes of urban pathology, ideological orchestration with the use of new social media and technologies (Twitter, Blackberry), and predominantly to the tyranny of the market celebrated by a neoliberal agenda and consumer society as the loving flower of the romance between market despotism and state ideology/power.

Such explanations of the riots as apolitical manifestations of the homo consumans and neo-liberalis however seem rather vague and only marginally attentive to what these riots may mean. To say that citizenship has been eroded making way for consumer society and that the market economy is to blame for the waste of human potential, is to state the obvious. Online journals like Prof. Ben Agger’s Fast Capitalism prove themselves to be righteous scholarly custodians of this intellectual position.

A recurrent complaint was that this summer’s civic unrest had ‘no cause’, an argument that re-appears in times of crisis, austerity and trouble with the riots of 1976, 1981 and 1985 being no exception. What can be learned from it though is our sclerotic outlook of politics; what counts as and what is political?  Could rioting itself not fare as a form of disruptive protest?

Paul Gilroy (1987) reserves some room for this, with reference to the radicalism of Black Power, while the Situationists (1965) also noted the militarization of elements within the Black Power movement exploding in the Watts riots of 1965 in Los Angeles with the question of ‘How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them?’ as their motto.

While not celebrating violence or advocating a position that defends looting as a political practice, it would be unwise to discard such views irrespective of our views on using violence to express civil disobedience, political defiance or to respond to police harassment and the repressive use of the legal system as has been the case in Britain and the US respectively.

Like race, a political cause is not singular, not one but many; multi-dimensional, complex, interdependent and multi-directional. A cause can be as blurry as to even make towering historical figures of Western political philosophy appear vague in their efforts to pin it down; for Hobbes it was ‘Leviathan’, for Adam Smith it was an ‘invisible hand’, for John Locke it was ‘the identity of interests’ and for Marx it was ‘class struggle’. It becomes rather clear that, perhaps with the exception of Marx, neither of those necessary evils is recognisable and ‘tactile’ so that we can work on them and re-model them politically in some direct manner. If that zigzag into political philosophy shows anything it is that a political cause is very hard to capture and is by no means a moral absolute that is set in stone, but a dialogic and interpretive experience even for those participating in the deliberation of any political cause. In the case of the recent riots that political cause may not be the attempt to win or seize state power, as this was not the case in either 1848 or 1968, but an emotive response of the ‘unclassed precariat’ facing a floating, fleeting and ‘liquid’ world as Bauman (2007 and 2011) would have it.

Just politics?

Having politicised the seemingly apolitical we now need to depoliticise the political, by arguing that what may count as a political stance may be a symbolic, personal and ritualised affair; thus not exclusively mediated by or situated in the ballot-box but rather based on the routine, everyday management and negotiation of our daily lives.  The trivial, the mundane, the banal can give rise to sentiments and affiliations that can be politically expressive with mugging and looting seen as acts of resistance through rituals to quote a sociological classic. In the words of Simon Winlow and Steve Hall (2006) ‘the rapid emergence of diverse forms of the political in a world in which the reproductive momentum of old class cultures appeared to falter, allowed new interstitial opportunities for the creative construction of identity and meaning. As the rather awkward mixture of consumerism, radical politics and the libertarian insinuations of the transatlantic ‘counterculture’ began to encroach upon traditional forms of enclassed identity; spaces appeared to be opening up in which young people could explore new forms of individuality and small-scale collectivism by adopting and reworking the rich symbolism of consumer styles’.

My admittedly risky proposition here is that if the riots were political they might also be suspected for consolidating a ‘new’ form of politics, one that does not deny our social and political participation as citizen-consumers but rather affirms it in our symbolic and branded political sphere. Politics is not just politics but graduates to an extension of our participation in the turbo-capitalist polity. In that context, rioting, even if interpreted exclusively through acts of foraging for i-pads and branded footwear, appears political by means of a consumerist expression of political values.

In the light of the above and to filter the article’s title through the veil of Langston Hughes’ poem; when the riots have colour they do not simply amount to the inarticulate bravado of swaggering street toughs but rather testify to a tuneless second class citizenship and a deferral of a civic dream seething on the edge of an explosion.

- Lambros Fatsis

Notes

(i)Lambros Fatsis is a final year DPhil student at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex. His doctoral thesis concentrates on discussions of public sociology, the role of the University and intellectuals, while other research interests include black music, urban culture and the history and sociology of the Jamaican soundsystem. He also performs as a reggae selector/radio presenter under the name Boulevard Soundsystem and is a contributor of Billboard magazine on reggae music.

(ii)The initial reporting of the riots came under the heading ‘UK riots’ which was then changed to ‘English riots’ as England and not the rest of the UK was affected by them: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ariel/14488492

References

Agger, B., 2005 Introduction. [online] Fast Capitalism. Available at: http://www.fastcapitalism.com/ [Accessed 11 December 2011]

Bauman, Z., 2007 Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. London: Polity

Bauman, Z., On the Unclass of Precarians, Social Europe Journal, [online] Available at: http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/06/on-the-unclass-of-precarians/ [Accessed 11 December 2011]

Cohen, P. And Bains, H.S. eds., 1990 Multi-Racist Britain. London: Macmillan

Du Bois, W.E.B., 1920 Darkwater : Voices from within the Veil. London: Constable

Du Bois, W.E.B. ,1961 The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Fawcett Publications

Gilroy, P., 2002 There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Routledge

Hughes, L., 1951. A Dream Deferred. In: W. James and C. Harris, eds. 1993. Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain. London: Verso

James, W. And Harris, C. eds., 1993 Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain. London: Verso

Newland, C. and Sesay, K., eds., 2001 IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain. London: Penguin

Phillips, T. and Phillips, M., 2009 The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain. London: Harper Collins

Prasad, R., 2011. Rebels with a cause? Rioters claim ‘payback’ against the police. The Guardian, 5 Sep. p. 2-3.

Rutherford, J., ed., 1998 Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart

Scott, S., 2011. If the rioting was a surprise, people weren’t looking. The Guardian [online] 8 August Available at : http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/08/tottenham-riots-not-unexpected [Accessed 11 December 2011]

Sky News, 2011. Police ‘Disregarded’ Dead Man’s Family (August 2011), Sky News . Available at: http://news.sky.com/home/video/16045305 [Accessed 11 December 2011]

Situationist International, 1965 The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy. December 1965 Available at: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.Watts.htm [Accessed 11 December 2011]

Stuart Hall, 2006. Race: The Floating Signifier: Featuring Stuart Hall. [video online) Available at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMo2uiRAf30 [Accessed 11 December 2011].

The Guardian/LSE, 2011. Reading the riots: Investigating England’s summer of Disorder. London: The Guardian Available at: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/series/reading-the-riots [Accessed 11 December 2011]

Younge, G., 2011a.. The riots were political. They were looting, not shoplifting. The Guardian [online] 14 August Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/14/young-british-rioters-political-actions [Accessed 11 December 2011]

Younge, G., 2011b.. Indifferent elites, economic hardship and police brutality- all reasons to riot. The Guardian, 5 Sep. p. 25.

Wheatle, A., 2004 Brixton Rock. London: Black Amber Books

Whitfield J., 2004 Unhappy Dialogue: The Metropolitan Police and Black Londoners in post-war Britain. Cullompton: Willan Publishing

Winlow, S. And Hall, S., 2006. Book Review: Resistance Through Rituals (2nd edn) Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds). Crime, Media, Culture, [online] Available at: http://cmc.sagepub.com/content/3/3/394 [Accessed 11 December 2011].

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Violence, Inequality and UK Riots

Nov 22, ’11 8:00 AM

In this podcast Mark Carrigan interviews Larry Ray, a professor at Kent University who has done pioneering work on the sociology of violence, about the summer’s riots in the UK, the media coverage and the subsequent political fall out.

Larry Ray on UK Riots

Larry makes reference to a BBC interview with Darcus Howe in the podcast which you can watch below:

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UK Riots: Sociological Perspectives and Civic Responses

Oct 2, ’11 8:00 AM


Saturday 15th October, 2011, Birmingham Midland Institute
£10 waged, £5 unwaged

The recent civil disturbances across a number of English cities have provoked much commentary and debate. However, there has been little sustained analysis of the events, their causes and likely consequences. This symposium is one in a series of unrelated endeavours to bring public understandings and sociological perspectives to bear upon the events of last month. To this end we have invited a diverse range of speakers to open up the discussion, and combine academics and members of the community on the stage and in the audience.  We combine speakers who will present sociological perspectives on the civil disturbances with a discussion of civic responses.

The event is organized by the British Sociological Association’s Theory Study Group in collaboration with the Department of Sociology, University of Leicester and the Social Theory Centre, University of Warwick.

Programme:

10.30-11.00 – Registration

11.00-12.30 – Panel 1: Institutional Contexts

  • Karim Murji, Continuities and Contradictions: Race and Policing, Then and Now
  • Ajmal Hussain, ‘Presenting’ the Riots in Birmingham: New Times for ‘Community’, Policing and Leadership?
  • Alana Lentin,

12.30-2.00 – Lunch

2.00-3.30 – Panel 2: Civic Responses

  • Malcolm James, The UK Riots and the Criminalisation of Young People in Public Space
  • Nina Power,
  • John Solomos,

3.30-4.00 – Break

4.00-5.30 – Roundtable: Learning from the past, looking to the future: What now?

  • Rob Berkeley
  • Sam Farooq
  • Maxie Hayles
  • Heidi Mirza

£10 waged; £5 unwaged/students/concessionary to be paid by cash or cheque on the day. There are also a number of free places for those unable to pay.

Please note, places are limited and you will need to register to attend. To register for a place, please email: birmingham15october2011 AT gmail.com

Confirmed speakers
Rob Berkeley, The Runnymede Trust

Sam Farooq, University of Gloucester

Maxie Hayles, Maxie Hayles International Consultancy

Ajmal Hussain, London School of Economics
Ajmal Hussain is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics. His research is an ethnography exploring new Muslim identity formation in inner-city Birmingham, where he grew up and now lives. Ajmal also works as a Research Associate within the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Languages & Diversity (InterLanD) at Aston University.

Malcolm James, London School of Economics
Malcolm James is a social researcher and PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. His PhD research is based around three East London youth clubs. The themes for the research are racism, youth culture and how young people live publicly. Over the last decade Malcolm has published work on young people, ‘race’ and racism, migration and xenophobia and structural inequality. Malcolm is also Editor of the online journal Critical Contemporary Culture.

Alana Lentin, University of Sussex

Heidi Mirza, Institute of Education

Karim Murji, The Open University
Dr Karim Murji is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, where he has written distance learning materials for courses in Sociology, Social Policy, Politics, Geography and social research methods. His research interests are culture, ethnicity and racism and these are applied to fields such as race and policing, race equality and social policy, and diaspora and identity. Recent publications on these themes appear in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies (2009), the Journal of Social Policy (2010) and Policy Studies (2011). With John Solomos, he is the co-editor of Racialization: Studies in theory and practice (Oxford University Press, 2005). He is a former member of the Metropolitan Police Authority and is currently a member for the General Teaching Council and a local Safeguarding Children Board. He is also on the Equality and Diversity Forum and has recently served in many advisory roles including the BME Trust and Confidence Group, the Transformative Justice Forum, the UK Drug Policy Commission Equalities review and the Home Office Drugs Equality Strategy group.

Nina Power, University of Roehampton

John Solomos, City University London

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Behind the UK Riots

Sep 14, ’11 8:00 AM

Sociologists living and working in the areas affected by rioting in August 2011 examine the causes and consequences of the unrest in this series of Guardian articles.

In case you missed them first time round, here’s some of SI’s coverage of the riots:

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UK Riots: Sociological Perspectives and Civic Responses

Sep 13, ’11 11:15 PM


Saturday 15th October, 2011, Birmingham Midland Institute
£10 waged, £5 unwaged

The recent civil disturbances across a number of English cities have provoked much commentary and debate. However, there has been little sustained analysis of the events, their causes and likely consequences. This symposium is one in a series of unrelated endeavours to bring public understandings and sociological perspectives to bear upon the events of last month. To this end we have invited a diverse range of speakers to open up the discussion, and combine academics and members of the community on the stage and in the audience.  We combine speakers who will present sociological perspectives on the civil disturbances with a discussion of civic responses.

The event is organized by the British Sociological Association’s Theory Study Group in collaboration with the Department of Sociology, University of Leicester and the Social Theory Centre, University of Warwick.

Timetable

10-11 Registration
11-12.30 Panel 1:  Institutions  – Police, Politicians, Family, Media
12.30-2pm Lunch
2-3.30 Panel 2: Civic Responses – Young People, Community Organizing, Social Movements
3.30-4 Break
4-5.30 Roundtable: Learning from the past, looking to the future: What now?

Speakers

Dr Karim Murji
Senior Lecturer in Sociology
The Open University

Ajmal Hussain
London School of Economics

Dr Nina Power
Senior Lecturer
University of Roehampton

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Providing meaning: give a little bit of the Sociological Imagination….

Sep 13, ’11 8:00 AM

I was once asked by Mark Carrigan, editor of The Sociological Imagination, what I have learnt from studying Sociology, this was my brief response:

“In a nutshell, Sociology has given me specific tools that have become invaluable to me personally and professionally. I think it is a discipline which teaches the techniques and politics behind thinking critically and reflexively in a complex and multi-faceted world. It allows a space in which to develop ideas, theories and discursive understanding of people, practices, processes and institutions in a way in which conflict, bias, exploitation, discrimination (and other forms of prejudice, injustice, discrimination, subordination and control) can be critically analysed and questioned.”

I still agree with these comments I made months ago.

The Sociological Imagination, as Charles Wright Mills terms it, has never been so relevant in making sense of the world as we know it. So, briefly, what did Mills say about the Sociological Imagination? The following quote could be one place to begin:

“Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.” (Mills 1959: 3)

There are some parallels in what Mills states above and the reactive action taken in the protests, riots and/or movements witnessed in Greece, North Africa and (arguably) the UK recently. Although causes for the unrest and mobilisation occurred for very different reasons, collectively the result is that ordinary people (that is, those outside the gates of power) have opted in diverse ways to get their voices heard. The parameters and constraints of society have been progressively chipped away through collective mobilisation and people are no longer strictly “bounded by the private orbits in which they live”. A ‘politics of recognition’ as Charles Taylor (1992) terms it, whereby groups in this instance, organise themselves by forming self-empowering collectives which through action receives recognition is relevant. Although Taylor originally uses the concept of recognition in reference to nationalist groups and multiculturalism, it can apply here – rightfully or wrongfully depending on perspective, (especially in the case of the 2011 Summer riots in the UK), globally people are continuing to demand recognition against all odds and costs. The process of demanding recognition, inclusion, political emancipation and equality is nothing new, but has been strengthened in its power through the use of new technology and social media.

With the dominance of Web 2.0 and the rise of Facebook, Twitter, BlackBerry Messenger, interactive blogs etc. protesters have been able to spread word of their action far and wide in real time to mobilise support to excellent effect. A prime example of this was reported in the London riots this summer. In general, protests happening across the globe appear closer and immediate through timeless time (Castells 1996), time space distanciation (Giddens 1991) and compression (Harvey 1989) caused by using new technologies.
Sociology has been long been concerned with the use of technologies and the impact it has had on collective action and mobilisation (for instance, Castells 2001, 2009, Seidman 1998), but this area of investigation has come into its own in recent years. Through the use of new technologies, personal troubles can instantly become public and global issues within the faceless flows of communication. In making sense of our surroundings, adopting a Sociological Imagination can therefore be useful:

“Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues- and in terms of the problems of history-making. Know that the human meaning of public issues must be revealed by relating them to personal troubles – and to the problems of the individual life. Know that the problems of social science, when adequately formulated, must include both troubles and issues, both biography and history, and the range of their intricate relations. Within that range the life of the individual and the making of societies occur; and within that range the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time.” (Mills 1959: 226)

In brief, the Sociological Imagination in personal reflection provides a critical and reflexive approach to personal and public issues. Adopting a Sociological Imagination can allow ample space to mindfully evaluate and critically explore important processes and practices happening around us: it can create meaning and continuously revise meaning.

Just how exactly this meaning translates into real world solutions in pushing for change is still yet concretely to be seen, but there is movement in the right direction. David Cameron’s call for a Sociological analysis of the 2011 Summer riots has prompted Sociologists across the UK to put forward explanations into the riots thus bringing sociology and the Sociological Imagination into the public glare.

Some sociologists have been criticised for their assumed position in explaining the 2011 Summer riots. In a series of articles by Sociologists published in the Guardian, some readers have responded with negativity, claiming such articles empathises or indeed, excuses the behaviour of some of the rioters. Nonetheless, it must be remembered that the Prime Minister called for a Sociological analysis of the riots which by definition should include some theoretical, causal and empirical considerations as to why the riots occurred. This in itself is not and should not be seen as a vehicle for excusing what was witnessed in Manchester, Birmingham, Salford, Brixton, Clapham, Hackney, Lewisham, Wood Green and Walworth this summer.

Whatever the core reasons for the riots – a response to Mark Duggan’s death in Tottenham by ‘reclaiming power’, an answer to widespread inequality, material deprivation, lack of opportunities, widespread anomie (Durkheim 1897), greed, opportunism etc. – one thing that is clear is the impact it has had on businesses, public sentiment and perception, racial politics – and – as a result, the Government.

In particular, the role that the riots have played on racial politics is still being felt one month on from the 2011 Summer riots. Historian, David Starkey’s claim on BBC’s Newsnight that “whites have become black”, thus blaming the influence of black people and black culture in causing the riots was unfortunately, a predictable response from sections of society. The use of riots as a racialised political football side-steps the diverse collective involved in the protests and implies that black ‘communities’ are homogeneous, uniform and inherently prone to violence, crime and all the negative things associated with such activities. Starkey’s arguments serve to offer a newsworthy soundbite which conflates the multifaceted reasons for the riots into a neat racialist argument furthering the interests of right-wing extremists groups.

In spite of the causes and reasons behind the UK riots and the public unrest globally – in a structural sense, hegemonic forces have no choice but to listen, digest, reflect and respond. Asking for a bit of a Sociological Imagination in the process, could indeed be something is beneficial in the long-run and should be encouraged to develop, not quashed.

References
Castells, Manuel (2001) The Internet Galaxy, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Castells, Manuel (2009) Communication Power, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Durkheim, Emile (1897) Suicide, The Free Press, New York
Giddens, Anthony (1991) The Consequences of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge
Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford
Mills, Wright, Charles (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press: New York
Seidman, Steven (1998) Contested Knowledge, Second Edition, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford
Taylor, Charles (1992) ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Taylor. Charles & Gutmann, Amy (eds.) Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”, Princeton University Press, New Jersey

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UK Riots 2011 – A ‘social revolution’ yet to take place?

Aug 15, ’11 8:00 AM

In the chapter titled “Third World,” the historian Eric Hobsbawm writes in his autobiography Interesting Times that, “Columbia was, and continues to be, proof that gradual reform in the framework of liberal democracy is not the only, or even the most plausible, alternative to social and political revolutions, including the ones that fail or are aborted. I discovered a country in which the failure to make a social revolution had made violence the constant, universal, omnipresent core of public life.” This is the sad truth of an empire a little more than sixty years ago reduced to ruins in a matter of thirty years or so and being forced into a process of third worldization with its government and people pitted against each other. It needs a life as long as that of Hobsbawm to notice rapid changes that are strikingly historical and yet unpleasant in terms of the role they play in day-to-day life.

In a way there is a sinister resemblance between the Norway attacks in July and the UK riots just now. Both have the look of being predetermined and waiting to happen. Somebody had to throw the match for the leaking fuel tank to catch fire and explode. It could be as simple as that. In all such cases of violence of a larger kind which have the apparent look of “suddenness” there is no doubt the tacit support of a significant section of the masses, no matter how hard the corporate-driven media might try to make it look like this is the work of a few fringe “criminal” elements. That’s definitely not the case. Both the Norway attacks and UK disturbances are expressions of individual and collective bitterness and hatred towards a non-responsive and indifferent government that does not hesitate in using violence against them to keep a semblance of order.

In the case of UK the difference is that the riots had a forewarning. When the vehement student tuition fee protest was ignored towards the end of the last year the government created the conditions for these riots. I was surprised then that the government dared to ignore a protest of that magnitude, something that would’ve scared those at the helm of affairs in a poorer nation as well. When it did ignore the warning, it clearly demonstrated to the person on the street that it would not relent to popular pressure and was determined to go against the will of ordinary Britons. When a normal person is violent it is usually because all avenues to dialogue are closed and he or she wants you to hear them out. In cases where it is carefully thought out the violence turns into revolutionary action. In any other case the very fact that all customary restraints are broken down is a sign that there is nothing to stop people on streets from turning into mobs out of anger and frustration. The looting is a symptom of a larger malaise that stems from the fact that most people consciously or unconsciously feel unjustly treated.

This is a serious reminder to the David Cameron government on two counts. First, they – this includes the other European governments as well – better wake up and provide welfare measures to a large number of people especially working class whites who feel grieved by the fact that they’re being completely neglected in their own country along with the ill-founded perception that the government sucks up to immigrants, in addition to moving the jobs abroad at their expense. The truth is that the foreign policy pursued by western governments is a treacherous one where corporations draw the blood of cheap third world labor and make massive profits. The multinational companies are colonial in character and not bound by rules that operate in western liberal democracies. The terrible abuse of workers who get paid enough by local standards to barely survive will simply not be accepted in a developed nation. The “immigrant” is another word for cheap labor and the devastation caused by outsourcing to bodies of the third world poor is not a guarded secret as such.

I can see where men like Anders Brevik responsible for the death of seventy innocent lives come from. They’re victims in a way no different from rioters on the streets of London and other cities. They feel their way of life has been threatened and the government is prejudiced against them. They’re not completely wrong in feeling that way. An enlightened government needs to understand, assuage and respond to their grievances through positive and inclusive means that will give them a chance to education and a decent life. Economic reservations have to be made in terms of jobs and other benefits to local citizens who come from deprived backgrounds. That’s a practical solution. The world is not a global village and the locals are as local as ever before. Therefore there is nothing wrong in prioritizing their interests and giving consideration to their feelings.

The second count is that there is no point in pursuing a policy of vengeance. The arrests and harsh punishments meted out to rioters only convince the people that the intentions of the government are malafide. As such every section of British society ranging from students to workers has serious doubts about the credibility of the Tory government. The punishments will add to their disastrous resume as the party in power. The violence could temporarily be suppressed. But, if the government has the slightest imagination it should know that they will not be seeing the last of either the riots or the rioters.

Back in the 1920s when the young John Steinbeck was ready to embark on his life as a writer, he received a piece of advice from his teacher who asked him to go to Europe since he had no money. She told him that “in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful.” Globalization, in the last couple of decades has ended up making the whole world ashamed of being poor, and with the weakening of conventional social bonds across the planet the poor are condemned to isolation in addition to the burden of poverty. The result is endemic violence which is “the constant, universal, omnipresent core of public life.” While this is painfully accepted as a fact of life in most parts of the third world we’re getting to see more and more of it in the nations of the first world as well.

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#UKRiots and Sociological Imagination

Aug 10, ’11 8:00 AM

Tottenham Riots

So with London in flames for the third night in a row and, for the first time, disturbances spreading outside of the capital, the British population are asking the natural question – what the fuck is going on? The most frequent, as well as understandable, response to this question has been moral condemnation.

Yet calling these riots ‘lawless looting’ or ‘pure criminality’ isn’t explanation, it’s description. In the last 48 hours of being obsessively glued to coverage of events (on social media and traditional media) one of the things that’s stood out most to me is antipathy to the former response in favor of the latter. Many people seem to assume that attempts to explain the riots are tantamount to moral justification, as if recognizing causal factors beyond the proclivities of particular individuals involved – or a purported culture they share – erases responsibility for their actions.

In extreme cases this manifests itself in outright racism and classism but, in more moderate forms, it merely stands as a refusal to seriously engage with the severity of events. Rather than trying to understand how and why these riots are happening, it’s implied that they’re an inevitable consequence of the characteristics of those involved: given sufficient opportunity criminals will pursue criminal acts. Yet it would be a mistake to jump to the opposite extreme and argue that ‘austerity has caused these riots’, as if that’s all that needs to be said to explain the pretty much unprecedented scenes we’re all watching.

At root, this can almost be construed as a methodological dispute about the central sociological question of structure and agency: should an event like this be explained in terms of the action of people involved or in terms of wider social forces shaping that action? The obvious excluded middle is that it’s both: public policy at both a metropolitan and national level, as well as the wider political and economic environment within which that policy is enacted, has shaped the life circumstances which different groups within cities encounter on a day-to-day basis. A plethora of cultural changes, some driven by these policies and others relatively independent, have shaped how different groups experience, interpret and respond to these circumstances (not least of all the spread of social media and smarts phones, which have been central to the organization, coverage and clean up of the riots).

This might seem an overly abstract way of looking at such extreme events but these questions aren’t going to go away. Over the coming days, weeks and months we’re going to hear many suggested explanations of these events: breakdown of authority, youth unemployment, gang culture, failing educational systems, declining family structures, failures of multiculturalism, local government cuts, police cuts, declining educational opportunities, entrenched poverty etc. The right will invoke micro factors (some entirely accurate, others with a kernel of truth, many which are offensive nonsense) while the left will invoke macro factors (austerity, unemployment and disenfranchisement) and be condemned by the great and the good of the right-wing press for ‘point-scoring’ and ‘political opportunism’. Meanwhile, conspicuous by its absence, will be what C Wright Mills called the Sociological Imagination, the capacity to knit together the macro and the micro – the personal and the historical – through the recognition that:

“The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”

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