Understanding Racist Violence

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss the findings of research into the perpetrators of racist violence in the Greater Manchester conurbation.1 Our main focus is on the offenders’ own accounts of themselves and their offences as obtained through interviews, and our interpretation of what they said. These accounts are situated in the context of the local cultures of violence, grievance and racism that characterise the neighbourhoods where offenders tend to live. We will suggest that much racist violence can be understood as a product of the shame, resentment and hostility experienced by young white men who are disadvantaged and marginalised economically and culturally, and thus deprived of the material basis for enacting a traditional conception of working-class masculinity. Such emotions readily lead to violence only in the case of young men (and occasionally young women) for whom resorting to violence is a common approach to settling arguments and conflicts. Tendencies to this behaviour are widely shared among white residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods on the fringes of metropolitan Manchester. First, however, we want to set the research findings in two contexts: that of racist violence as a public issue in England and Wales and in Greater Manchester, and that of the Manchester conurbation’s economic and cultural development.