We don't wanna hear you say "nigga" no more!

“The key points to bear in mind here are as follows. First, institutional racism does not require overtly racist individuals: it conceives racism as arising through social processes - a difficult idea for the English imagination since (as a former Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, once gloriously observed) the latter has no concept of ‘the social’ which cannot be reduced to ‘individuals and their families’. Second, institutional racism has clearly taken the argument that culture regulates conduct. These behavioural norms are carried within the occupational culture of an organization, and transmitted by informal and implicit ways through its routine, everyday practices as an indestructible part of the institutional habitus. Racism of this kind becomes routine, habitual, taken for granted. It is far more effective in socializing the practice of officers than formal training or regulations. (The arduous reporting of racial incidents or domestic violence, by contrast, is defined, in the occupational culture, as 'rubbish’ policing.) And it blocks a professional reflexivity from ever coming into operation. Far from being seen as exceptional, this 'unwitting’ type of racism becomes part of the very working definition of 'normal police work’. It is perfectly possible for young officers - whose promotion up the ranks and acceptance as 'regular cops’ depends on imbibing as an unreflected practice this folk-wisdom of 'how to be a good copper’ - to love reggae, eat Vindaloo curry every Saturday night, have a few black friends, and still think that 'good policing’ requires them to act on the assumption that a young black man carrying a holdall at a bus-stop after dark almost certainly just committed a robbery and should be 'sussed’ - stopped and searched. This is certainly not the only kind of racism which operates in our institutions, but it is one, distinct variety and, precisely because of its institutional embeddedness, one of the most difficult to identify and dismantle.”

“[The English] are racist not because they hate the Blacks but because they don’t know who they are without the Blacks. They have to know who they are not in order to know who they are.”