Free Radical by Maajid Nawaz Page B

back as usual. Patrick, for all his cocky confidence back at primary school, was not a street kid in the way I’d become. He saw me, he saw the look in my eyes, and he began to cower.
    â€œPlease don’t hit me. Maajid, please don’t hit me.”
    I hadn’t even said anything, and the kid was begging me not to do anything.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he continued, starting to cry. “I’m sorry, just don’t . . .” It was the strangest sight—as if he were shriveling up in front of me.
    Patrick wouldn’t dare repeat his comments now. Largely due to the reputation of us B-boys, it was no longer acceptable to be racist in the way it had been even just a few years earlier. The ball had bounced back, the power dynamic had shifted. I saw that, he saw that, and strangely that was enough for me. Despite all the violence I’d been involved in, I had always had a justification for it in my teenage mind; it was all a form of escalating self-defense. I’d never bullied or picked a fight with a defenseless, unarmed person, and I wasn’t about to start now.
    â€œYou’re a chump!” I shouted at him. “Get the fuck out of my sight.”
    Patrick turned and skulked away. I didn’t need to attack him: it was enough to see his reaction when he saw me. I felt good about myself, pleased that I’d not become as bad as the racists. But there was something more there, too: a sense of satisfaction and vindication. I was on the right path. The incident that had begun my spiral of abuse had finally ended. I had won.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The Green Backpack with No Bomb
    If you haven’t felt the fear and helplessness that violent, organized racism makes you feel, it’s difficult to understand. Due to the color of your skin, your entire body is a moving target. And you cannot leave your skin behind, or pretend it doesn’t exist. At any moment, hammer-wielding hooligans could use you for target practice. In such extreme circumstances, self-defense must be a sacred right; the “turn the other cheek” philosophy would have gotten our skulls crushed. The sad reality is that it’s difficult for different ethnic groups to rub along with each other. I’m not saying that my kidult way of dealing with the situation was the answer, but it was an answer. At the time, it felt like the only option open to us.
    Without support from the police or society at large, it felt as though it was the best way to respond—to stand up and take the fight to the racists, in the hope that they’d leave us alone. There’s a sort of brutal logic to that position, but once again it’s one that doesn’t go to the crux of the problem. It’s a kind of “Cold War” thinking, where an uneasy peace is created from the knowledge of what damage the other side could mete out.
    To be fair, the police force did change. It wasn’t an overnight thing—cultural shifts don’t work like that—but the general attitudes of the police have undoubtedly improved from where they were twenty years ago. Of course more can still be done, as the shooting by the police of innocent Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground in 2005 highlighted. This is partly because the police force is no longer exclusively white. Even one of my old family friends from a Pakistani background, Atif, is now a policeman with Essex Police.
    Another form of identity politics was also lurking in the shadows, eventually to emerge as an even more intransigent challenge. Most young Britons of the Muslim faith were of South Asian origin, born and raised in crowded single-ethnicity British ghettos. Though tensions with non-Muslim communities did occur in these areas, part of the problem was a lack of contact with “the other.” As race began to take a backseat, and Afro-Caribbean communities began to enter the mainstream through popular music and culture, into these ghettos came