Lewisham Community Action Meeting.
Honor Oak Community Centre SE4 2DJ.
Black Men Pull Your Socks Up!
Lee
Jasper Speech.
Thursday 1st
October 2015 7pm.
Thank you Sharon it’s so inspiring to see a new generation of leaders
coming through on this issue. People like yourself and Gwenton Sloley are
leading the way for the next generation and showing real leadership of our
community and I want to acknowledge that and ask the audience to do so too.
Just to acknowledge the parents of the recently deceased and the Deslandes Family whom I know having
supported them when their son was brutally murdered you all have my condolences and
respect.
I want to talk to you today as a father of five boys and four girls, as
a Grandfather of five and first and foremost as a black man.
I want to tell you a short personal story. I live in Lambeth and have
done so for some 30 years now. My Wife’s and I last child, is a lovely bright
intelligent boy who we brought up to have empathy and compassion for all
people. I had told him, as I had told all our children, if you see someone in
distress you do not walk on by, you help, if your see someone bullying another
person, help then if you can.
Then one day in the summer of 2010 my
16-year son was on his way home from Rugby practice, he’s small but powerfully
built lad and on his way home he came out of our local tube station and was
confronted with a groups of our boys in a fight with a small boy, whom he knew
form school.
My son intervened on instinct and knowing the boy he tried to placate
the group of boys.
Seeing that one of them had pulled a knife, he grabbed his school friend
by the collar and yanked him out of the way. As he did so, the boy with the
knife lunged forward and my son was stabbed in his torso just above his hip.
All the boys fled, including his school friend and left my Son stabbed bleeding
on the pavement. I got a call at work form my wife who was frantic. I just couldn’t
make out what she was telling me. Finally I she was able to tell me our son had
been stabbed.
The feelings of morbid dread, fear and feelings of powerlessness that
overwhelmed us were indescribable; a gut wrenching fear gripped me as I headed
for Kings College hospital. Once there we saw our beautiful boy, surrounded my doctor’s
nurses, tubes connected to him and clear panic in the medical team.
The doctors and nurses, God bless every one of them, worked to stabilise
his condition. For two hours we waited not knowing how serious he was injured.
That was the worst nightmare of our family life. They told us the blade had almost
nicked an arterial vein above his hip.
A millimetre to either side and he would in all likelihood bled to death
on the spot.
This isn’t about politics for me it’s the reality of life and death.
Today I’m here to say what needs to be said.
I seek only to speak with clarity no modulation, clear and unfettered
without the binding constraints of ego, agenda or ambition.
We have to face the fact, that as it stands today, our young people are
engaged in war of self-hatred, bitter enmity and extreme violence.
Look where we are? Once, not that long ago, we were a community united.
Today our children kill each other with a shocking frequency and a sickening
ferocity.
Today, we all sit here in shock about the increase in teenage murders
across London and in Lewisham in particular.
Lets for us one moment, consider our condition as a community.
Knife crime is up
18%
in London and… over the last year and there are a reported 1000 stabbings a month and 10 young people have died this year
already.
According to the statistics form the Ministry of Justice published in 2012 in London for every 1000 white
people there are 11 murders. For every 1000 black people they are 32.
Black Youth
Unemployment stands at 50% according to official figures published in 2012.
The findings of a Met Police
Multi agency Domestic Violence Murders Review for 2006 stated approximately 25%
of all murders in London.
Furthermore, 30% of children are actually witnesses the
murder of their mother. Many of these murders are happening as a consequence of bitter disputes about separation and child
contact/custody. The long-term impact to children witnessing their mothers being beaten and killed and experiencing is children who are predisposed to or have a propensity to violence.
We the Black Community, have one of the highest rate of Domestic
Violence and DV murders of any single ethnic community in London.
Research
published by the Safe Network shows that Black children and those of mixed
heritage are more likely to be subject to child protection plans and/or end up
in the care system than white children.
Figures produced by the Youth Justice Board this year show that since 2013 there has been an increase of 54% in the number of Black Youth being imprisoned.
We have more black men in prison than University.
Prisons and youth institutions
have themselves become breeding centres of organised violence and racist abuse
by staff, according to Her Majesties Inspector of Prisons.
London
Poverty Profile published by the Trust for London shows 20% of the White population lives in low-income households, compared to
40% of people from BME backgrounds.
We all know Black Homelessness is on the rise as
well as the desperate figures relating to the incidence of mental health in our
community, I cant tell how many of our children our excluded from schools
because with the introductions of Academy and Free Schools, who no longer are
required to publish these figures, we know less about this issue today, than we
did 30 years ago.
The poor state of the economy is aggravating these acute
socioeconomic conditions and that leads me to conclude, looking forward, that
things could get much worse given the very strong link between these issues and
the incidence of violence.
The World
Health Organisation is very clear on this
issue, as is the Equality Trust whose work the Spirit Level sets our very clearly the relationship between long term deprivation and violence.
So, I say to all of you all gathered here tonight,
that the situation we are facing is likely to get much worse and the critical
question that hangs pregnant in the air over every single one of us…. is what
are we… not the Council, not the
police, not the schools, what are we going
to do about it?
Add to these facts the reality of cuts to public services and Local
authority budgets means that their ability to help in financial terms is
reducing year on year, so we know that times are going to be tough.
I want to speak to the Black men in the room and those watching elsewhere.
Because all too often we are absent from the home and too often we are the
perpetrators of Domestic Violence when we are in the home.
We populate the mental health, prison
system and dole queues in disproportionate numbers and sadly we are the most
likely to be shot or stabbed in London.
We are in danger of ourselves, we are
our biggest mortal threat, and all of us are at risk of someone close to us,
losing his or her lives unnecessarily because of the unaddressed needs of
another young person.
The challenges that we face are immense, but not insurmountable. The
most basic and fundamental question we must ask ourselves is, what is the value
of young Black lives?
The answer is as simple as it is
sobering. The value of young Black lives is precisely commensurate with the
value we as a community place upon them.
As we stand today,
young Black life is cheap.
Too often we
contrast the values of our children’s lives with the perceived value place by
wider society of the lives of young white people. This is an error.
The ugly, abhorrent
truth is that as a community, we value our own children’s lives least of all.
More Black
teenagers have lost their lives in the UK since 2000 than the combined total of
British soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are not the only casualties as we often
totally ignore the number of Black youth fortunate to survive. The walking wounded, scared, maimed and
disfigured bodies that constitute the invisible causalities of a war of
self-hatred. Then increasing rates of black male suicide are terrifying.
These are the
inconvenient truths we must now face head on.
The pains of these losses are borne largely, but not exclusively by Black women and children alone. The reality of the abandonment of too many of our children are broken hearted angry boys, without fathers.
The broader consequences of this implicit, public and yet unacknowledged
failure that so corrosively attacks both the heart and soul of poor communities
can be read on the headstones of the dead youth.
The causalities of the deadly virus of violence and in particular youth
violence are all around for us to see.
And like any other deadly and infectious
disease, violence and the fear of violence, leaves whole communities in deep
pain, traumatised and paralysed by a toxic combination of pain, fear and
feelings of powerlessness.
Our moral failure
is only matched by our political failure.
We all know economic injustice, poverty and depravation exacerbates, aggravates
and amplifies violence. The World Health
Organisation is very clear on this point, as are a plethora of
international studies that bear witness to the tragic consequences of long-term
poverty and high unemployment. Public health approaches to tackling violence are
Against this backdrop of ever increasing public sector cuts the problem, dipping our hand into our own pockets is an important part of moving forward and restoring our self respect. I believe given these problems, the awful prognosis is that things will get worse, as the public sector’s ability to meet
these challenges diminishes. In that context we must step up not step down.
Not only are we an economically impoverished community, we also suffer a
poverty of ambition, a poverty of empathy, a poverty of social solidarity and a
poverty of ethical leadership.
Community organisations seeking public or statutory funding are forced
to compete rather than co-operate, contributing to a climate of distrust and
alienation.
Too many Black men in our communities feel both disempowered and
disrespected, generating feelings of low self-esteem, shame and anger.
Even our everyday language has become increasingly violent and dominates
our discourse infecting our psyche and thought patterns producing
self-regulating crabs in a barrel.
In the midst of this deep dysfunctionality, lies a minority, but a
significant minority, of broken families, broken children and broken
communities who are starved off familial leadership in the home and ethical
leadership in the wider community.
These casualties of economic injustice produce damaged psychologies,
where emotional intelligence is minimal, where commitment to learning and
education can be weak and the language and physicality of immediate, intimate
violence and abuse becomes infectious.
Over time these dysfunctional and damaged families and local communities
create a self-reinforcing environment where the virus of violence becomes not
only highly infectious, but also malignant.
The simple truth is only compassion; love and empathy can overcome the
challenges we face.
Doing so has the unique potential and the hopeful possibility of
enthusing feelings of pride, familial love and community responsibility. Therein
lies our goal and best weapon against this plague of violence.
Absent Black men need to home both literally and to their communities.
They must come home and join Black women and children struggling to cope with the
desperate trauma and grievous loss and become evident in the fight against this
deadly infection.
Gwenton Sloley issued a simple and yet profound challenge. He called for
community leaders to ‘ pull up our socks’.
We can do that but we must empower our communities through action
knowledge and compassionate love.
We must return to the family, defend our communities become and principled
ethical leaders. We need a paradigm shift toward a 'do for self' social economy.
We are the key to effectively dealing with this issue.
As the African American poetess famously said, when asked where are the
black leaders and responded.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Thank you
