W hen I was 15, I went to Southend High Street after school one day with two of my best friends. A group of white men drinking beer walked past us, a trio of brown girls in school uniform. One of them pointed and shouted in a ripe estuarine accent: “Oi, Steve, would you fuck one of them Pakis?” As it happened, only one of us was of Pakistani extraction: me.
This pedantic point of fact helped my friends and me process this disturbing incident as tragicomedy. This is how racism is widely understood – as a character defect that causes predatory boors like Steve’s mate to shout slurs in the street – but it is a woefully shallow analysis. Being called nasty names is unpleasant, but it is only one manifestation of deeply embedded patterns of thought and behaviour that touch every aspect of society.
Experiencing direct, interpersonal racism has a physiological effect on the body that can sicken and age a person beyond their years, especially when it is repeated over a lifetime. Yet there are other less easily discernible kinds of racism. Systemic , Layal Liverpool’s lucid and impressive first book, lays out the evidence that racist modes of thinking are incorporated into the structures of our society from healthcare to housing, with wide-ranging effects.
It is a convincing argument for considering racism a kind of root-and-branch disease, rather than merely a recreational activity for individual lager louts. Systemic shows that racism and inequality hurt people in a host.