It is the story of every multicultural working-class community in London. The experiences of young people in Newham are not unique. That’s not to say that young people do not care about others, but capacity for caring can get lost in deep feelings of real futility.
The thing about not having hope or looking forward in a purposeful way tells us about the state of society, and it can also take away capacity to care for ourselves and others. That might be distressing to think about, but we need to. Many young people might not express their emotions using these words, but many feel like their lives do not matter and have no value.
JW: There is a deep collective feeling of weariness, confusion, hopelessness and disillusionment among some young Black and multicultural communities in the inner city. JP: Your exploration of the nihilism experienced by some young working-class communities is compelling. I come from a time when ‘failures’, if we can call them that, were understood in relation to the state. And that is because the neoliberalism is not just something that is happening out there, it is happening to us, and many young people have internalised it so that now it has become common sense to think that their lack of ‘success’ as an individual is their failure. Even the ones that were supposedly ‘doing the right things’ like getting a job or going to university, were still asking this same question. One of the questions that kept on cropping up in my research was ‘why is it that no matter how much you do and how hard you try, we never get anywhere?’. The young people in my working-class community want to make sense of their lives. You know, many young Black people have little sense of how they came to be here and do not know how my generation resisted state racism. It’s easy to see how some young people can end up with ahistorical views when there has been a deliberate attempt to not include Black histories in the school curriculum. What I mean is that many of the struggles that my generation faced with racism in housing and policing persist today, they just look different at times. I wanted to try and get across the continuity of struggle across the generations in Newham. My aim was to connect the dots for example between gentrification, austerity, youth violence, and describe how these processes have pressed down on Black youth.Īt times, it was difficult for me to write Terraformed because I was overcome with a sense of grief and rage at what is happening to our community in Forest Gate, something I think a lot of young working-class people can relate to. To be frank, I wanted to make sense of it for myself. Joy White: Topographically and sociologically, east London has changed a lot over the past forty years, and I wanted to support young Black working-class people to make sense of the challenges they face owing to these changes. Jessica Perera: Can you tell me the basics about ‘Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City’? But, as Joy White argues here, a deep nihilism has set in for young working-class Black communities in London’s inner city, and its effects are yet to be acknowledged. The ‘failing’ are exhorted to find routes out of their culture to success. IRR’s Jessica Perera interviews academic Joy White about her 2020 ethnographic book Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City, which reads as a telling riposte to the recent Commission for Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) report.Ĭommentators have argued that the approach behind the CRED report brings to mind a league-table, where points are awarded (or not) depending on whether you are deemed as coming from a good or bad ethnic minority, reflecting the winner and loser ideology of neoliberalism.