IMPERIAL SUSPECT: Policing Colonies within "Post"-Imperial England

In his final report on the 1981 Brixton disorders, Lord Leslie Scarman devoted considerable space identifying Black parental failures and "foreign cultures" as explanations for youth participation in the riots. For Lord Scarman, it was Black mothers who had failed, even if their perceived failures were understandable. These critiques of Black parenting in the Scarman report participate in a neat erasure of years of work by Black activists, most of whom were parents, who warned specifically that an event like Brixton might occur. Other scholars have considered the importance of the Brixton riot in the context of restrictive immigration reforms in the late 1970s and 1980s and life under Thatcher. Here, Jackson suggests that the Brixton incident must be considered as part of a longer historical arc. She argues that the police use of section four of the 1824 Vagrancy Act, an act that allowed police officers to arrest a suspect based on their believed intent to commit a crime, demonstrated a redrawing of the boundaries of the nation and legitimate versus illegitimate citizenry. Because the ordinance was disproportionally used against Black people, it aided in their marginalization in society and they were recast as an internal colony within the nation. Black communities became colonies within the nation; and Black British youth riots anti-colonial revolts.