I was born in 1989, the year that Obama started at Harvard Law School and Keanu starred in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Elsewhere, the Berlin Wall was reduced to rubble and Nicolae Ceauşescu executed as protests flared in Tiananmen Square and Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union, holding its first elections since 1917, was edging toward collapse. But while the established order trembled, power in the United States was being passed smoothly from one Republican president to another. Chaos abroad only served to confirm U.S. hegemony. And for the next twelve years at least, the West would pretend that no other future had been possible and nothing uncertain. History was dead. In its wake—laughing into the sunset—was white, liberal democracy.

Looking back, the United States’ swaggering ’90s pose can be seen—or pre-empted—in the previous decade’s movies. 1989 was an especially blockbuster year. Movies like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Batman, Ghostbusters II, and Lethal Weapon 2 contributed to box-office takings of over $1 billion in the US alone. American superhero-strongmen were everywhere, lassoing and shooting their way across the screen. Reckless or roguish, each controlled their fate. In Dead Poets Society, another movie from 1989, Robin Williams’s character John Keating sums up the mood: “Hear it? Carpe. Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”

On their excellent adventure, Bill and Ted have two mottos that echoed through my childhood: “be excellent to each other” and “party on.” In the ’90s, it felt like everyone in the West had agreed on their final, mutual excellence and now just wanted to party on. In keeping with this, the house I grew up in was washed of any reminders of my Indonesianness, my otherness. It was easier for my mum to forget, and hope I would too. Difference, if I noticed it or if it appeared, took the attractive form of those mixed-race couples on billboards for United Colors of Benetton. Or it was the cute interracial kids hugging at the end of the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World.” It was never hard or hateful or ugly.

Which must be why when, in 1999, the Macpherson Report—commissioned by New Labour to assess the shortcomings of the Stephen Lawrence investigation—was finally published, though there were the usual blandishments (Tony Blair said it would lead to a “fundamental shift in the way British society deals with racism”⁷⁸), it was mostly ignored or criticized.

Michael Gove, later to hold a variety of senior public posts—including Secretary of State for Education, Justice, and the Environment—was a journalist then, and used his column in The Times to rage against “race radicals” and what he called “a new McCarthyism.”⁷⁹ A few weeks after Stephen’s death, in March 1993, the Daily Mail had covered a march demanding justice for Stephen, which they described as “unrest…fomented for political motives.” The protesters were nothing more than “race militants.”⁸⁰

Just as the Daily Mail criticized anti-racist groups for turning “the brutal killing of a schoolboy into a political cause,”⁸¹ so Gove claimed the Macpherson Report was fundamentally “illiberal.” The proper way to support minority communities, he wrote, was through the invisible hand of economic opportunity and personal freedom. He subscribed to a neoliberal creed that worshipped personal choice and the free market above all else. It meant that the death of an individual, however outrageous the systemic failures that led to it and prevented justice from being served, could only be seen in terms of bad individual choices.

Gove also expressed concern at the recommendations put forward by the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, launched by Lord Parekh and the Runnymede Trust in 1997 (which published its recommendations in 2000). The Commission proposed diversity quotas for public appointments, tactics to reduce discrimination in schools, and ethnic minority recruitment targets for private franchises. “They are orders for a forced march down one path,” wrote Gove, “paved with good intentions, towards a massive and illiberal extension of state power.”⁸²

In The Times, Gove laid out his dream for Martin Luther King’s “colour-blind society”—before suggesting that those who supported the report of Lord Parekh’s Commision were comparable to “apartheid’s apologists.”⁸³ It was this same overwhelming confidence—in the free market, in liberal democracy—that had propelled Tony Blair to power. Hope was closing your eyes to color. And history, if you didn’t look behind or beneath you, could be seen anew, unmarred by the wreckage of discrimination. It was a path down which, in spite of occasional diversions, we all marched hand-in-hand toward a better, more excellent future.