To determine the proper response to the murder of Henry Nowak we must first dismiss those courses of action that would be in error. The establishment line, the one voiced by the government, the media and the political left, is that Nowak’s death is about knife crime. New policies or fresh legislation are required as well as interventions to divert young men from ‘toxic masculinity’. This we will call the Adolescence strategy, for like the Netflix-series-cum-moral-panic this perspective can confront a social controversy only by denuding it of those elements that make it controversial, in this case by forgoing discussion of the role of anti-racist policing in the decision of responding officers to handcuff a dying teenager on the strength of a false accusation of racism.
To the anti-racist, the potential for a crime to stir up ill-feeling towards a minority demographic is a more immediate concern than establishing the truth
Progressives deem any reference to race a shameful exploitation of a tragedy by far-right ideologues bent on sowing division. That these same people behaved differently over the murder of George Floyd and the lawful killing of Chris Kaba does not make them hypocrites. Progressives sincerely believe that whites cannot be victims of racism and so in framing incidents of cross-racial or inter-ethnic violence, public officials and journalists tend to racialise events where whites are villains and de-racialise those where they are victims. Their more intemperate critics regard this double standard as proof that progressives are consciously malign but progressives believe they are being actively anti-racist, a stance they associate with virtue and good conscience.
