Back to the Future

The first film I remember seeing was ‘Back to the Future’. I wanted to be Marty McFly. To go back in time and see my parents when they were younger, to shred to ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and a room full of gawping teenagers, to hitch a ride on the back of a pickup truck and a makeshift skateboard.

That same year, as I watched Marty McFly go back to the future, two brothers, Kassamali and Amirali Moledina, were burnt to death in the post office they ran on Lozells Road during the Handsworth Riots in Birmingham. “They’re smashing their way in,” the men screamed in the last of four 999 calls they placed. “They’re going to kill us.”

Nearly 40 years on and riots are again sweeping across England. Violence incited by the suited in high office and the booted on the ground. A ring-wing press giving a far-right few the words to express their anger. And who’s to blame? Bloody immigrants.

It’s like we’ve gone back in time.

I was just old enough to watch ‘Back to the Future’, but too young to understand what was happening in Handsworth. I was four, my daughter’s age now. So, my mum would have worried about me, the same way I worry about her.

I’d grow to understand a bit of what happened in Handsworth. Slowly, I’d learn what the swastikas meant, spraypainted over our windows. When to cross the road when I’d see someone with a shaved head, Doc Martens, or a bomber jacket. And when to run when they had all three.

When I was 8, someone who fit that description shouted “paki” at me in the street. I ran home so fast I might have hit 88 mph and generated the 1.21 gigawatts to travel back through time.

Where would I go? As a brown person in the UK, you can’t go that far back. 40 years ago, you’re being chased down the canal by a skinhead. 40 years earlier, you’re fighting a war for an empire that stole from you. 40 years before that, you’re doing the Victorian freak show circuit with the Elephant Man.

Great Scott.

I’m making light of this, though the whole thing is clearly triggering, because we can’t succumb to the darkness. We can’t choose to accept that this is England. We can’t go back in time. We must “look for the helpers”, as Fred Rogers said. “You’ll always find people who are helping.”

So yes, absolutely retweet video clips. But also pause on the videos of the helpers, rebuilding the walls and bridges between communities, repainting a picture of the future: a future of hope. And hoverboards.