I’ve spent much of the last 30 years feeling sad about the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Not all the time, 24/7 and all that, but the enduring pain his family must feel at losing their first born in a vicious racist attack is hard to imagine. Murdered because of the colour of his skin. Stephen would be 48 years old today, but all that’s left are memories of a smart and clever 18 year old about to embark on a career as an architect. I learned something else today. Stephen’s grave isn’t in Eltham, where he lived. It’s in Jamaica. And why? Because, as his father says, “we didn’t want people to vandalise his grave.”
I am unable to understand the mentality of someone who would vandalise a grave, unless it contained someone like Jimmy Savile, and even then what comfort would that bring anyone? It might release some temporary anger, or maybe make someone feel better, but for better or for worse, when you’re dead, you’re dead. To desecrate the grave of someone whose only ‘crime’ was being black is beyond irrational.
I do believe we are in a better place when it comes to racism than we were 30 years ago, but then I am a white man and have never suffered from it. Yet we live in an increasingly perverse culture these days to the extent that someone who is aware of, and indeed opposed to racism, is regarded as ‘woke’, but not in a good way, by way of an insult. The very word itself has been hijacked by the right when actually being woke is A Good Thing. Indeed, if you are aware of injustice in general and are angered by it, you are not only woke, but a snowflake. All of this, lumped together, will be that old chestnut political correctness gone mad, as meaningless a phrase today as it ever was. Lazy, ignorant stereotypes rule, okay?
One thing I do remember vividly in the months and years after Stephen’s murder was the arrogant and aggressive behaviour of the men – if you can call them men – who allegedly killed him. Even though this is not exactly a wildly popular blog in terms of views and subscriptions, I do not intend to do anything that might somehow glorify those evil, cowardly toads, so don’t expect to see any photos, links or pictures of them. I just hope their lives have been utterly miserable since that terrible day and, as I always say at times like this, I only wish there was a hell to them to go to. But then, as I don’t believe there is a heaven for anyone to go to, I just hope their lives have been a kind of hell on Earth, utterly ruined.
Some people have said on social media that it’s time to move on, that this isn’t 30 years ago and we can’t live in the past forever. But I suspect the same people would say exactly that about Hillsborough and any number of tragedies. As George Santayana is quoted as saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That’s exactly why we remember Stephen and why we should never, ever forget him.
