Racism: the charge against which there is no defense (With all due respect to Mr. Dalyrmple, “the charge against which there is no defense” applies almost exclusively to white people. — Ed.)
Men may be created equal, but not all murders are equal. Some are quickly forgotten, except by those immediately affected by them, while others—by no means always political assassinations—have a lasting political impact. Among the politically significant kind was the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a young black man, in a London suburb on the evening of April 22, 1993. Five or six white youths set upon Lawrence and a friend, Duwayne Brooks. One of the attackers supposedly shouted, “What, what, nigger?” immediately before Lawrence was stabbed to death. Brooks managed to evade the attackers, who ran away.
Despite considerable circumstantial evidence against severalsuspects, the perpetrators escaped conviction. The police investigationinto the murder was a model of incompetence of the kind that everyBriton now expects of our boys in blue. Over the investigation therealso hung a pall of suspected corruption, for one suspect was the sonof a rich drug trafficker who, on a previous occasion when his sonstood accused of a stabbing, had tried (unsuccessfully) to bribe andthreaten the victim into altering his evidence.
But the Lawrence murder took on a wide social significance becauseof its racial overtones. The botched investigation became a causecélèbre—the presumption being that racism alone could explain thepolice’s failure to bring the perpetrators to justice—and thegovernment launched an official inquiry to “identify the lessons to belearned for the investigation and prosecution of racially motivatedcrimes.” There followed a festival of political and emotionalcorrectness the likes of which have rarely been equaled. It would beimpossible, at less than book length, to plumb the depths ofintellectual confusion and moral cowardice to which the inquiryplunged. In 1999, it released a report of its findings that won almostuniversal praise despite its risible shortcomings.
This year, on the tenth anniversary of the report, the press andprofessional criminologists are celebrating it for, as one put it,bringing about a “paradigm shift” in the sensitivities of Britishpolice about “diversity”—police now think about race all the time, itseems. The report’s real effect, however, was to demoralize further analready demoralized police force, which, immediately after the reportappeared, retreated from stopping or searching people behavingsuspiciously and watched street robberies increase 50 percent.