Perhaps unhelpfully, we use the term “race riot” to describe two very different phenomena, each with its own dismal history. In the 1980s, it was the term attached to the uprisings that erupted among Black communities in Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds, London and elsewhere. Outbreaks of lawlessness and violence that were in large part a response to racial targeting by the police: harassment that aggravated existing disadvantages and intensified deep disillusionment, especially among the younger generation who had been born in Britain.
However, a very different set of events with a far longer history has also been defined as race riots. The deadly disturbances of 1919 in Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, London, Salford, Newport, Barry, Hull and South Shields, like the riots that came again to Liverpool in 1948, and those that broke out in 1958 in Nottingham and London’s Notting Hill.
In each of the latter cases, the rioters were mobs of white men. The grievance that brought them on to the streets was the presence in their cities of non-white people. We must now add the summer of 2024 to the list of riots that were in essence organised violence against minority communities. My generation, brought up amid the endemic racism of the 1980s, had in recent years started to believe that our memories of being assaulted on the streets or besieged in our homes belonged firmly to a 20th-century Britain that we had long ago left behind. Now members of another generation of Britons from minority communities have traumatic memories that they too will have to process later in life.
An understanding of the long and ugly history of the second type of British “race riot” might have helped some of the journalists and commentators who last week attempted to explain the causes of the wave of violence and looting we have just witnessed. The initial category error, made by much of the media, was to describe riots as protests. That misstep led to later difficulties. It convinced editors of the need to adopt the increasingly unviable stance of “bothsidesism” and to go in search of deeper social causes behind the violence. Race riots of the sort Britain experienced in 1919, 1948 and 1958 have always had........