David Cameron, then-Prime Minister, cut short his holiday in Tuscany to oversee the response to the riots—or, at least, to be seen responding—and on August 15 gave a speech at a youth center in his local constituency of Witney, Oxfordshire (where unemployment rates are among the lowest in the country at 1.5 percent).

“These riots were not about race,” he said, nor were they about “government cuts” or “poverty.” They were about “behaviour…a twisted moral code.” They happened because people no longer knew right from wrong, because Britain was “broken.”¹¹⁹

His comments echoed those of his Education Secretary Michael Gove, who attributed the rioting to “a culture of greed and instant gratification, rootless hedonism and amoral violence.”¹²⁰

Cameron admitted, however, that “behaviour does not happen in a vacuum: it is affected by the rules government sets and how they are enforced.” So these “twisted” riots, though they weren’t about government cuts, were about “behaviour” which may have been affected by government rules. The government was and was not responsible.

There were countless other speeches by politicians, all keen to share their theories as to why it had happened (Michael Gove thought it could have been prevented if teachers were allowed to use “greater force” against their students and if young people joined their local cadets).¹²¹

Meanwhile almost two thousand people were being handed prison sentences, the majority for petty crimes—one twenty-three-year-old was given six months for stealing £3.50 worth of water.¹²² According to statistics from the Ministry of Justice, 52 percent of those charged were black, Asian or “other”; 35 percent of adults involved were claiming out-of-work benefits at the time (the national average is 12 percent); and 42 percent of the young people involved were in receipt of free school meals (the national average is 16 percent).¹²³ But the riots were not about race or poverty, said the Prime Minister.

My own memories of that week are loose. I remember going to work, meeting friends, checking Twitter. I’d just moved out of Clapham Junction, where the rioting was briefly at its worst. I texted friends to ask how they were. A department store had been raided and a fancy dress shop set on fire. They said they were at home, checking Twitter too.

It had only been through someone’s connection to a church-owned house with cheap rent that we’d ended up living in Clapham Junction, halfway between the railway station and Battersea. It felt like an in-between place in other ways too. Over the last couple of decades, Clapham had transformed itself into a popular residential area for bankers and young professionals, now known jokily as “Pram Springs” and full of cocktail bars and shops specializing in boutique baby wear.

Battersea, though, was still one of the most deprived parts of London. In 2013, the foodbank at St Mark’s Church served 1,551 local people, two in five of whom were children. And if that proportion seems high, the Institute of Fiscal Studies predicts that by 2022 it will be the norm in Britain with child poverty reaching up to 37 percent.¹²⁴

Maybe, as David Cameron said, this is a “broken” country, but the riots aren’t what broke it. They exposed the fissures that were already there, which might once have been possible to see past. Beneath London’s smoothly functioning surface, poverty had been on the rise, along with almost every indicator of racial disparity.

I struggle to relate Obama to the events of that summer. The heroism he summoned, the projected unity, the sharing in a single, clinched moment, feels dissonant. In Tucson, his words could lift the weight of tragedy. They could inspire. But they couldn’t answer to the rage of protracted injustice. This much would become clear in Ferguson in 2014 when Obama was helpless to stem the tide of anger that followed the police shooting of Michael Brown. Sometimes no speech, however beautiful, can compensate for suffering.

In 2011, I was surprised. I hadn’t expected the rage because I hadn’t seen the injustice. Or I had shut my eyes to it—as I had to my own racial difference—half-looking away from the world in the hope that its troubles might disappear. In that case, I wouldn’t have to bear responsibility for them. But the brokenness was everywhere around and inside of me.