A reflection on prejudice, collective blame and selective outrage.
Image: iStock
Back when we were teenagers riding our penny-farthings to our whites-only school in the old Transvaal, my friend told me her new boyfriend didn’t like black people. However, she reckoned in his case it was understandable: his dad was stabbed by a black man. Even then, I knew this made zero sense.
Right, I wondered aloud, if his dad had been stabbed by a white man, would he hate all white people? Would he hate himself?
To this day, almost 40 years later (and 40 years earlier, too), this logic is revisited whenever a heinous act is committed by somebody who can be racially profiled.
When one crime becomes a pretext
Last week in Belfast – and earlier this month in Southampton – a white mob took to the streets following separate knife attacks on two white men.
The crimes they were protesting were both horrific, and the accused were dark-skinned – one a British Sikh man, the other a Sudanese refugee – but the reaction was vile, too.
One bad apple meant all apples must go. The baying Belfast mob had ready-made lists of addresses where foreign people lived: they just needed an excuse.
Collective blame and mob violence
They targeted people of colour – any colour really – rioting, burning down houses and setting cars ablaze, as sobbing children in their pyjamas were hustled into police vans and taken to safety.
And yet, of the 12 men jailed so far for public disorder in Southampton, only one had no criminal record. The others share over 150 previous convictions for upwards of 250 offences, from a hit-and-run to robbery to grievous bodily harm.
One had 51, another 25, and a third had 19, including for domestic violence after he knocked his partner unconscious, broke her front teeth, and bleached her hair while she was down.
The double standard
Where were the rioters then, I wonder? They don’t take to the streets when it’s white men committing crimes, when women are brutalised by white men. One bad apple, you see.
When I was a witness in a Dublin rape case in 2024, it was reported during the trial that the accused was a taxi driver.
I watched online as people raged about foreign taxi drivers, biting my tongue because the case was sub judice, but I knew he was white and Irish.
When he was found guilty, when his identity was revealed…radio silence. And the baying mob moved onto a story that better fitted their narrative.
