In my first week in England six teenagers, mainly Blacks, were killed by other teens.
In one case, June 23, it was a White boy, 16-year- old Ben Hitchcock, who, with six other boys had tried to storm a party.

The gang of Black youths who chased them down were armed with metal poles, broken bottles, knives and planks of wood.

The boy was forced onto spiked metal railings, dragged onto the road and stamped on his head and fatally stabbed.

He was a member of a gang called the Penge Block.

A 17-year-old girl in North London was shot in a fight in a bar and a 20-year-old man was shot dead in a street.

It’s difficult to differentiate such teenage violence according to race or colour in the English newpapers, since it seems to me that they follow a code of colourless identification of aggressors and victims, unless you have a picture of the victim.

Anna Pukas, writing in the Daily Express of June 29, observed that “violent crime has moved from the murk of the pub to the brightness of the streets ... from adult males wielding fists to gangs of adolescent boys wielding knives.

“It has also moved from the council estates and the poor working class -- the unemployed, the shiftless or the damned unlucky -- to more middle-class areas populated by the aspirational.

“The victims of such crimes”, she writes, “are just as likely to be innocent passers-by as gang members.” Once upon a time sociologists and leftist idologues would blame crime on poverty and deprivation.

Teenage violence, today, however, covers all classes and locations, she points out: “St. John’s Wood, home to rock stars and TV celebrities”, as opposed to lower class areas like “Streatham in suburban South London, trendy Clapham in South London -- all are diverse areas.”

(In Clapham, which is differentiated by the Subway as North, Central and South, I saw people of African and Asian origin living nearby “yuppies”, some sporting expensive cars).

Pukas does not mention any colour of the aggressors or the victims in her article, only showing them in photos as being White and Black.

Darcus Howe from Trinidad, a Black activist writing in the magazine, the New Statesman, talks only of the Blacks (July 2).

Describing two scenes of Black women rowing over a man, in Brixton, the home of many West Indians, he keenly observed the behaviour of the lower class West Indian woman, which is so well known to us.

“Two young women, with bairns (babies) in their prams, stood toe-to-toe exchanging the vilest abuse ... crude expletives, the likes of which I remember hearing as a boy in working-class communities in the West Indies.

“Cheers and shouts of approbation (from a crowd of Black Caribbean women surrounding them) greeted every insult.

“It turned out that both had given birth to babies fathered by the same man”, he writes, “and had done so almost simultaneously.

“They offered their public evidence of what he bought for their respective offspring, at what price, at what shops and with what brand names, too.”

A year later, two other women repeated the same scene, but this time one of them rammed a knife in the other.

Howe commented that within a year “Any conflict between young Blacks in South London, no matter how insignificant, can now lead to loss of life. This murderous meanness of spirit is winging its way throughout the Black communities of this unpleasant land.”

He blames this increase in violence on the feeling that that they are being denied opportunties because of their skin colour as they have to be contented with menial jobs like their parents before them, while witnessing the material wealth flaunted by the White middle-class.

He uses Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric theory of the Algerian and other African experiences in their frustration with rule by the White colonialists to explain this internecine Black violence in Britain.

This leads me to wonder, why after having Black governments in Trinidad and Africa since the 1950s, that there is more killing between gangs and ethnic groups than there was before independence.

Two authors, Dick Pountain and David Robins explain their theory elaborated in their book Cool Rules, thus: “‘Cool’ is an adaptation to life in affluent societies where consumption rules over production ...”

Product vendors constantly monitor youth creativity to discover new products, that appeal to their “cool” persona.

Since they know they can’t win, they diss society’s mores as ... “applying to everyone except themselves.” The authors claim, like Howe, that it is the conspicuous flaunting of the “pricey” material goods -- cars, iPods, clothes -- needed for a “cool” life that causes the resentment among the relatively deprived teenagers that sparks off the competitive gang formation and behaviour that leads to violence.

They admit that “the most significant aesthetic input came from the US Black culture, from the earliest jazz age right up to Hip-hop.”

But I cannot see how a critique of the Weberian Protestant work ethic of Capitalism as degenerating into “narcissism, hedonism and ironic detachment” can lead to the alienation of Blacks, and to a culture of violence, moreso than Whites, unless there is something culturally different being transmitted from generation to generation, like the incidents Darcus Howe describes.

Untrammelled capitalism in White Europe has led to the rise of social and political movements, like socialism and communism not to gang formation and murders.

But as our Trinidad experience has shown, with the demise of Socialism and Communism and the failure of Black nationalism of the PNM to replace the ideology of a promised land, the political leaders no longer have anything to offer the poor youth other than materialism in the form of money and consumerism.

Each society has to be examined separately but the rise of Black culture with its degenerate anti-love, anti-romantic music and uncultured language in the USA is being adopted by Black youth everywhere.
.