SocialiSt Review | OCTOBER 2010 |13

I was born in Britain in the early 1960s to parents originating from the Carib-bean. I recall many stories being told to me by my parents, one of them being that some white people believed black people had tails and would peep

through their curtains to see if they could catch a glimpse of their tails!

From the age of about seven I recall being the first and only black girl attending infant school together with one black boy. While I never really received racism directed at me personally by the other children in the school, I experienced their views of black people, which could only have originated from their parents and their peers. This included television and radio using name callings such as “gollywog”, “blackie”, “nignog”, and telling us to “go back to our own country”. For my part and many others, we knew no other country.

For our men it was much tougher: racism was experienced regularly in the workplace and they encountered police brutality. If you were black and on the street, you were likely to be labelled a troublemaker. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the sus law was intro-duced during which time our fathers, uncles and brothers were being stopped, searched and brutalised by the police simply because they were black.

Some lived to tell the tale but many died at the hands of the police in brutal and

suspicious circumstances, with not one single officer accountable for these deaths. Anger and riots raged across the communities. Working class white men were also on the receiving end of police brutality and death, leaving the strong impression that this was a class issue, not just a black issue. Yet black and ethnic minorities bore the brunt.

There have been well over 2,500 deaths in custody since 1969 in police stations, state prisons and mental health institutions. Black and ethnic minorities have been and are increasingly overrepresented. Why? What has really changed over the last 50 years?

What we certainly do have are past cases and a history of more people dying with no accountability, proving that deaths in custody are a serious matter with little or no acknowl-edgement and/or change from the British government. Even after families have vigor-ously and tirelessly campaigned for justice by

Marcia Rigg“Another family’s grief, another death in custody”

lobbying, marching and highlighting in the media the horrendous and blatant murders of their loved ones, the state simply continues to cover up and protect the same people who should be protecting us.

Institutionalised racism hits out hard. These custodial institutions can literally get away with murder. Does the British state have a conscience at all? Does it really care about how the community feels? We still have investigations being carried out by the police against themselves, even after arduous campaigning to get the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) scrapped.

The system continues to boast long drawn out investigations to wear families down with officers using the “I can’t recall” tactic. All fami-lies are means tested with little or no funding for the inquest and with private criminal prose-cutions being almost impossible for families to self-fund. However, the police, prison service and mental health institutions automatically receive free legal representation from the pub-lic purse, yet the system only offers a “no case to answer” verdict. Is this not a waste of our resources? The Independent Police Complaints Commission replaced the PCA in April 2004, yet has failed to restore public confidence in its investigations into deaths in custody. Investi-gations are fashionably biased in favour of the police and the government appear to ignore the evidence of this. In 2010 why are there not

Institutionalised racism hits out hard. Custodial institutions literally get away with murder.

Marcia Rigg (centre) leads a protest to Brixton police station, where Sean Rigg died

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