Racial violence and the Brexit state

Abstract

Research by the Institute of Race Relations into over one hundred incidents of racial violence reported in the mass media in the month after the EU referendum indicates that the ‘spike’ in such attacks has to be understood in terms of the racist climate created not just during the clearly nativist referendum debate, but also in the divisive policies and programmes of successive governments preceding it. The politicians and police chiefs, who have recently condemned the violence, analyse it in terms of already given media frameworks about ‘hate crime’: bigoted individuals are to blame; this is a law-and-order issue not a socially based problem – thus avoiding any responsibility for the creation of state racism. The research also reveals the central role of the police, at the expense of community groups’ or victims’ voices, when the media decides an attack is newsworthy.