Moloch must be fed
Anti-racism and child sacrifice
One evening in May 2017 a security guard in Manchester was alerted to something that didn’t look right: a man of Middle Eastern appearance with a rucksack was seen by a member of the public approaching a pop concert filled with teenage girls. The man looked ‘dodgy’, in the words of the 18-year-old guard, who later recalled his moment of agonising: ‘I felt unsure about what to do. It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male. I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race.’
Concerned that he would be accused of racism, the young man went with his doubts and let the British-born Libyan Salman Abedi walk on. The rucksack was packed with homemade explosives, mixed with nuts and bolts to maximise the suffering they would inflict on human flesh, and fifteen minutes later Abedi pressed the detonator, killing 22 people, ten of them under 20 and the youngest aged just eight.
The poor security guard, barely more than a child himself, will have to live with his decision for the rest of his life, but the anxieties he felt were real and understandable. Many others would have made the same decision, and indeed it would take an unusual person to act otherwise. While millions of years of evolution has installed in us a sixth sense about danger, a hard-to-rationalise bad feeling about certain people, social pressure can often force us to overcome our instincts.
Perhaps he remembered all the times he had warned about racial profiling, how this was the characteristic of a deeply immoral person, and how it had detrimental psychological effects on those being stereotyped. He was no doubt aware that profiling a Person of Colour could lead to accusations of racism, causing public shame and career damage to him and put his employers at risk of legal action. His life might well have been ruined for breaking the gravest sins, when the chances are – as with anyone who looks ‘dodgy’ – that it’s probably nothing. Even with the most effective profiling, the probability of innocence is high; evolution has made us over-sensitive to danger, but it’s usually worth paying attention to our gut instinct.
The security guard had internalised the most powerful taboo of our age, the anti-racism prohibition, and this was by no means the only occasion when the taboo led to tragedy.
In 2023, mental health services in Nottingham became aware of a young man with an extensive history of alarming violence. Valdo Calocane had attacked his flatmate on one occasion, and assaulted strangers on others. He was clearly very dangerous, and while mental health professionals had been ‘leaning towards’ sectioning him, he was released after they ‘considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention’. Calocane went on to butcher three people in broad daylight, including two 19-year-old students from the same university.
In the case of the Nottingham massacre the university, the police and mental health services had all failed in some way to incapacitate a man who was a danger to those around him, the minimal requirement of any institution with a protective role. In many societies with far more basic state provision, including our own from just a few decades ago, an individual who behaved in such a manner would have been incapacitated by the authorities. The university would have expelled him, police would have detained him, and mental health authorities had him securely removed from the public. Any public servant who failed to act would have feared the consequences to their career, as well as the wider danger of public shame – but what happens when there are worse disgraces than failing to protect the public, like breaking the anti-racism taboo?
Around the same time that Calocane’s history of violence was reaching its inevitable conclusion, a similar tragedy was unfolding in Lancashire. At the Acorns School in Ormskirk, headteacher Joanne Hodson said she felt a ‘visceral sense of dread’ about new pupil Axel Rudakubana. The teenager had been caught bringing a knife into class in his previous school, and when Hodson asked him why, had replied coldly: ‘to use it’.
Hodson thought him to be ‘very high risk’, with a manner ‘devoid of any remorse’. He had not only repeatedly brought knives into school, but had threatened other pupils and expressed a sinister interest in violence, as well as racial animosity towards Europeans. When she raised the risk posed by the dread-inducing young male, mental health workers accused her of ‘racially stereotyping’ him as ‘a black boy with a knife’. Hodson was ‘shut up’ by professionals for the crime of ‘ profiling’, in many sectors a career-ending accusation. Her instincts were correct, and Rudakubana went on to murder three young girls in Southport.
