Viewpoint: Why racism in US is worse than in Europe

In France, nationality usurped race, and while that can have its own problems, it was still very different from the racism back home.

When I was in London, I lived in Bethnal Green during the 2011 riots, which started after London police officers killed Mark Duggan, a black man.

As teenage vandals looted and set my neighbourhood ablaze, I remember casually walking down the street during the chaos and having a London police officer politely ask me to return to my flat. There was no tense exchange, I was not arrested, and I never feared for my life.

During the week of the riots, Londoners openly discussed how black people might receive different treatment from law enforcement, but conversations focused on analysing policing techniques, discussing ways to keep teenagers off of the streets during the summer when they do not have school, and catching looters via CCTV.

In the American discourse, a supposedly inherent danger or criminality of black bodies would have been used to justify the police’s killing of Duggan and present the riots as an inevitable by-product of a “culture of crime”. The killing of Michael Brown and the riots in Ferguson followed this all-too-familiar American script.