Warning: A long read. Apologies but life's complicated. Don't read if you haven't got time. Wait until you do and get some fresh green tea, sip gently and read slowly.
The problem of Black school exclusions is as old as the hills, and its history goes as far back as the 1960's. The headline below is a blast from the past.
It's a timely reminder during Black History Month of the resilience of English institutional racism as an issue that constitutes a real and present danger, a fundamental threat to the safety and success of future generations.
Black school exclusions in England today are at their highest level ever recorded.
The fact is systemic racisms in the UK are also getting worse, not better. The Government calculates the number of prison places needed in the future from the school exclusion rates today.
Prison cells reserved for black people. Your brand new, black child's cell is designed, built, and awaits their intended and planned arrival.
I have said before and will say again unemployed black youth are worth more to the state - in jail - than claiming universal credit on the road.
Think about it. When we go to jail, everybody gets paid.
The police officer, probation officer, social worker, prison staff, architects, and prison builders all feed off black youth's direct demonisation and commodification. Our children are seen as nothing more than the raw material needed to keep the prison industrial profit complex moving.
It's costs well over £100k a year to keep a young person in jail, and it costs £49,000 to send them to Eton. Do the maths…
They've unleashed a covert plan focused on the intentional mass criminalisation of Black communities on an unprecedented scale.
Today the number of Black youth in youth offender institutions in England has increased by 100% since 2010.
The bad news the Gov has recently announced they're spending £2.5 billion in building 10,000 new jail cells.
Research by Release and the David Lammy MP report in racism in the criminal justice system, have shown that Black people suffer an apartheid type of policing and racial injustice at every stage of the criminal justice system .
Using drug laws, black youths and adults are being charged for like offences, for which white people with more extensive criminal records get a caution.
Once in court, systemic racism is ratcheted up again.
We are less likely to receive bail, more likely to be convicted, and if so will receive a considerably longer sentence, and we are far less likely to get parole than our white counterparts.
We have to stop pussyfooting around.
I have long advocated we need to adopt radical political action in response.
Is it any wonder some young people have no respect for their elders - when we have left them at the mercy of entrenched and festering systemic racism that sits at the heart of the criminal justice system?
Too many Black people in years past rejected radical action and civil rights confrontation with the state opting for the genteel, well paid, glacial gradualism that's always presented as progress but constitutes nothing more than total and insipid failure.
Too many Zippidie-do-dah blacks were and remain content with chump change and small gains.
They're opening gambit to ingratiate themselves with white liberals or Tories went something like this;
"We think Lee, though well-meaning is unreasonable, he's too radical; it's all about him. We can do the job, and we understand what's needed.
Oh, look what he's saying now, Massa - black schools? Why he's nothing more than an racist extremist."
I was the Barbarian at the gate, and many a black liberal used me and others to good effect in climbing that greasy pole to big-money careers.
All they had to say is we don't agree with Lee or the countless number of other genuine community activists who we're also demanding radical action, and that was enough to get you a job.
In 1999 2.4% of African Caribbeans were police officers. In 2021 it's 2.9%
How much money has been spent on Heads of Diversity, HR and D&I specialist diversity consultants? Billions.
Far too many black professionals back then and still today provide 'diversity and inclusion' cover for institutions that incentivise systemic racism, as is the case with school exclusions, policing and the criminal justice system.
Less diverse schools - make more money.
The whiter the school - the longer the queues to get in. The blacker the classroom, the longer the queues to get out.
That is the nature of racial capitalism - to make blackness pay for its obstinate and offensive existence.
And this starts in schools. They fail us - then they jail us. Yet just like baby lambs, too many of us are prepared, for a few pennies more, to suck on their vinegar tits solution, smile for the camera and call it nectar.
Black youth unemployment is higher today than it was in 1981. Some 40 years later, and nothings changed?
It's 2021; we should have our schools, large scale business, social care and medical centres, own our politicians - they're all funded by somebody.
If we are to escape a descent into the hell that we've seen in American cities in the '80s onwards and even Chicago today, if we are to avoid that dreadful future for our children - we must break and not remake the system.
Garvey told you, Nkhruma told you, Winnie Mandela told you - African solidarity, self-help and knowledge of history and self - none can keep us down or set us free- but ourselves.
Whilst they've built the predatory machine known as the school to prison pipeline, we've sat back and observed its construction.
It's like someone building a gallows for you outside your home, and they hire you as a Gallows consultant.
I despair that radical voices like mine, and I was by no means alone, failed in our duty to convince the masses to move in a consistent, effective and radical manner.
It's a failure, I feel personally after 40 years in the trenches.
All that was predicted, Fortess Europe, more racist immigration controls, rampant intuitional racism in policing and criminal justice, and profound social and economic exclusion, as a result of more racism and more discrimination - all has sadly come to pass.
Systemic racism has to be systemically dismantled. Its ability to resist reform is evident from the bursting cells filled with young black faces - commodified and made a 'profit centre' just like our ancestors.
It's necessary to do the research - but what's the point when research doesn't result in the easing of pain, discomfort and challenge to the powers that be?
We have paralysis of analysis and a paucity of praxis.
It's time for that old-time radicalism now, and it requires political education and organisation.
The sooner we start building the truly unified movement we all agree we need, the sooner we can get their knees off all our children's necks.
Let's make racism black history.
