Just as New Labour wanted, I grew up not really thinking about race or thinking it was something to see past. But its effects were visible everywhere around me.

At school, the kids who got free meals were black and brown, as were the men being stopped and searched on the high street. Later, when there were insults on the playground and I became insecure about my own foreign-looking features, my response was to see past it all, to wait until things got better.

When New Labour came to power, the pressure was such that they were forced to commission a report into Stephen Lawrence’s murder and the failure of the police investigation. After two years and countless interviews, the Macpherson Report was presented to Parliament and stated in no uncertain terms that “institutional racism” had undermined the investigation: it pointed to the family’s treatment at the hospital, the initial reaction to Duwayne Brooks, and—which was related—the failure of so many officers “to recognise Stephen’s murder as a purely ‘racially motivated’ crime.” As Duwayne told the Guardian in 1999, “At the scene the police treated me like a liar, like a suspect instead of a victim, because I was black and they couldn’t believe that white boys would attack us for nothing.”⁹

The report also noted that “not a single officer questioned before us in 1998 had received any training of significance in racism awareness and race relations throughout the course of his or her career.” This might have explained another factor hampering the murder investigation: “the significant under-reporting of ‘racial incidents’ occasioned largely by a lack of confidence in the police and their perceived unwillingness to take such incidents seriously.”¹⁰

Tony Blair was undaunted. Accustomed to announcing “new eras” and periods of “national renewal,” he said there would be “a new era of race relations.” This was only a small setback on the road to multicultural prosperity. In the meantime, Stephen’s killers went about their lives and I made sure not to look anyone in the eyes.