Though official attitudes towards the American black and the New Britons has changed drastically during the past 20 years, the general social climate has not improved at the same pace. Acceptance by the Anglo-Saxons of a man with a black skin as his equal can only be termed as a vague generalisation. The recurring race riots in Britain's larger metropolitan areas such as London, Birmingham and Wolverhampton have now become a constant feature of a "British way of life". The tensions between black and white have always remained high.

Indeed, there are extreme cases of violence in America, between people of two colours of skin. All this reveals that multi-racialism has still not moved beyond the debating clubs... Black-on-black crime is far more than average than violence done by blacks on white or vice versa. For example, murder is the main cause of death among black men under 40, and the life expectancy of males in Harlem, New York, is lower than in Bangladesh.

Take the trial of three black youths accused of the rape and attempted murder of a white jogger in New York's Central Park in April, 1989.

There are weaknesses in the prosecution's case. There is an almost complete lack of scientific evidence linking the three youths to the crime. To most blacks the trial is a matter of shame and humiliation. But to an increasingly vocal black minority, the jogger case is a racist show trial Black America's most popular tabloid, The Amsterdam News, called the whole sordid affair a form of "legal lynching". William Tatum, the daily's editor said: "Whether guilt or innocence is proved in this case is no longer important. What is important is that blacks have once more been criminalised by a judiciary that works against us". Tatum made it clear that the "truth of the matter is that there is a conspiracy of interest that someone black must go to jail for this crime against the (white) jogger, and any black will do.""There is a racist bias in the media," said black filmmaker Spike Lee. In May (1989), a month (later) a black mother was raped and thrown off a roof in a Brooklyn neighbourhood. Needless to say, she did not receive anything like the media attention bestowed upon the young (white jogger). This is the type of media discrimination that "hurts us blacks most". And as the large and local networks are controlled mainly by the whites, there is little chance of a fair coverage.

A member of Los Angeles' white suburbia described his black fellow citizen as an alien. Moving down to the sprawling city's black dominated South Central District, it would be difficult to write off this statement as absurd. Heavily armed white policemen in patrol cars control the outlets of this ghetto of doom. A most brutal terminology would be that South Central is a disorganised concentration camp minus the gas chambers. "There is a total lack of hope among us," says Clyde Johnson, president of the Black Employee Association. "You have to have hope to have frustration and after years of gang warfare on the streets, unemployment as high as 80 per cent and no education, many of us just do not feel they are part of any country any longer, and so they don't even think of attacking the white authorities in any way. There is no incentive to identify ourselves with the rest of America. It is apathetic." Johnson adds that the black ghettos have now joined the Third World in terms of poverty and social destitution. Local church organisations distribute food for 50,000 "down and outs" every month. "And more than often", despairs Johnson, "grandmothers look after the kids because their mothers have either abandoned them, or are out on the streets, selling themselves for five dollars a time."

The Los Angeles police department does not share Johnson's view of apathy and despair. The police estimates that there are 70,000 gang members who control the South Central district armed with AK-47 rifles, Israeli Uzi submachine guns and sawed-off shot guns. "Not only is their arsenal impressive, but they know how to use it." (Police) expects another massive outbreak of violence like the one in 1965, when, after a week long gun battle between the police and armed blacks, the body counts showed up more than 50 dead and 1,500 wounded naturally all blacks. "The time is ripe for rebellion," says (Police) "We have to contain these people in their ghettos."

It would be wrong to blame white societies in Britain and the USA entirely for the breakdown in social communication. Governments in both countries have invested much energy in trying to curb discrimination, which is deep-rooted in Anglo-Saxon communities.The British have always tended to be insular. Their dislike for foreigners dates back into the Middle Ages, and it was not directed against any specific type of outsider, but at foreigners as a whole. Colonial expansion and the philosophical idea of empire nurtured race superiority. Intermingled with Britain's duty to civilise pagan societies in Africa and Asia were social-Darwinism and Evangelicism. The latter two ideologies paved the way for racial intolerance. The United States, basically Anglo-Saxon in its culture acted similarly when expanding westwards. Subjugation and humiliation were common aspects where white settlers and their soldiers dealt with native Indians and Hispanic colonists . It took a civil war to free the black man from bondage. The victorious North removed the chains from the black man's ankles, but it imprisoned him in the factory floors of Chicago, Detroit and elsewhere. The black left his hovel in Alabama to live in a bleak tenement in Michigan. The move by black men to re-group and seek a new identity in the continent of their origin has proved a dismal failure.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Programme did much to free the black from the bondage of discrimination and deprivation. Johnson's legislation opened doors to black men and women in the white man's domain. The acceleration towards integration lapsed after the Johnson era, and by the time Ronald Reagan took over the dividing line between the two communities became more visible once again.

Despite all setbacks, the blacks in the USA are on their feet once more. "For too long we have tolerated many of our boys making the passage from boyhood to manhood by defining manhood as toughness, antagonism and hate," said William Oliver, a black professor of criminal justice at the University of Delaware. "Ultimately we have got to save ourselves." Save ourselves as blacks or Americans? That Oliver could not answer. And this is also a question that black Britons will soon have to think about.

(Source: The India Week, 10-16 August, 1990)