Jack Johnston

“Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no
black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and
shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century - who do you
think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? - you can
imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as
‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever
been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war,
the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of
murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite
hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European
history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite
the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost
entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a
rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused
black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but
simply because they are ‘black’, and sometimes because they listened to too
much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black
crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of
humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical,
economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because
of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome. The fact that yellow-on-yellow
crime, mixed race-on-mixed race crime or white-on-white violence just sound
like joke terms but black on black violence has ‘credibility’ speaks very loudly
about the perceived relationship between blackness and depravity in this culture.”
― Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

“Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be so romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind