A question of black or white

Abstract

"I was only tangentially caught up in the events that consumed London on July 7th 2005. On my way to work at a summer school at South Bank University that morning, the Bakerloo Line train I was travelling on pulled into Elephant and Castle station, the last stop of the line. The usual silence which marks the end of the journey was replaced by an uncharacteristically benign Tannoy announcement from the driver, apologising for any disruption passengers may have experienced on their journey, due to a massive electrical surge which had affected all trains through Baker Street station. I thought little of it; in fact, like most passengers, I expect, I was hardly listening to the crackly, muffled voice as I departed. Only later that day, after finding a host of messages on my mobile phone, and a brief conversation to establish what happened before the signal gave out, did I realise that the power surge we had paid so little attention to was, in fact, the Aldgate bomb blast. Certainly not a close enough call to be categorised as a brush with death, but enough to make me reflect upon the events that day—I can’t help, for example, returning frequently in my mind to the Piccadilly Line train that, shortly after 8am, had strangely pulled into the District Line station at Ravenscourt Park near my home. I got on this train, fearing delays, and then got off again when the District Line train pulled into the platform as expected. I often ask myself, what happened to that train, packed with commuters? Did the delay, the unscheduled wait, throw those people (and potentially in another timeline when I didn’t change trains, of course, myself) into the events at Kings Cross? Or did it keep those commuters back, held by some unknown twist of fate, chance, or however you might interpret it, in a space that saved them from the trauma that would follow? I don’t know. I probably never will. But these events have also provoked a more intellectual, even a more political, reflection. In the new academic year following the events of July, I was asked to give a guest lecture on Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album to a group of Media and Cultural Studies students. The bombings of July 7th asked all who live in Britain to reappraise their sense of what being British in fact means, and drew into stark relief the exclusions clearly complicit in it."(pg 1)