Between 1980 and 2024, the UK has seen race riots once every six years.
After each set of upheavals, the country has engaged in soul-searching. Reports have been written, commissions established, and newspaper opinion pieces have agonised over what the riots tell us about who we, as a country, are.
And then nothing changes.
What the riots do in fact tell us is that as a country we are amazingly skilled at avoiding talking about race. It may not seem it – especially after three years of Black Lives Matters, fourteen years of the Equality Act 2010 , and over thirty years of race equality schemes.
But race talk comes in many different forms. There’s talk about how we should act, talk about people’s cultural needs, even talk about what we should be allowed to talk about. What there’s been much less talk about is who we are as a society and how deeply embedded racial biases shape our identities, our institutions, and our interactions with one another. We avoid the hard topics that change hearts and minds—the conversations that challenge our core beliefs, confront our complicity, and demand emotional reckoning.
This avoidance is not an accident; it’s a defence mechanism designed to protect the status quo.
Race talk is often reduced to an intellectual exercise, a debate over facts and figures, or a performance of political correctness. We focus on myth-busting, trying to correct misconceptions with data and logic, assuming that if people just understood the ‘facts’, they would change. But this approach rarely works because racism is not just a matter of misinformation; it's deeply rooted in emotions, fears, and – yes – the need to belong.
Changing hearts and minds requires more than just providing information.
brap have been having these conversations for 25 years now. One thing we have learnt is that we cannot run away from this debate.
But we fear that is precisely what will happen. When the dust has settled (and it will settle) what will we settle for ?
In the last few days, we have seen racists setting fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers. Shops owned by foreign nationals set ablaze. Innocent people threatened with knives and bricks.
This needs to be a wake-up call. The same old approaches to the issues of cohesion and racism have not worked and it’s time we moved beyond them.
If we are to ever really change we need to create spaces where people can confront their own discomfort, reflect on their lived experiences, and engage emotionally with the realities of racial injustice. These spaces can be in schools and workplaces, but must be in the wider community, too.
The reality of anti-racism means more than statements. It means that we must grapple with the emotional and ideological core of racialised thinking.
If we don't, nothing will change. And a few years down the line – when cities are ablaze, protestors are on the street, and people are scared – we will ask ourselves the same old question: what does this tell us about ourselves, about our society?
And we will know the answer.
The figure for the frequency of race riots is an average, based on the number of years in which riots occurred. Some years, such as 1981, witnessed a number of riots over different months. The image is from the 1981 Brixton Riots. Source: kim-aldis.co.uk/the-1981-brixton-riots/
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