The areas of London from which MLE emerged appear, over the last decade or so, to have contracted as neighborhood affiliations intensify and the emergence of gangs represents a new hyper-territorialism at the heart of one of the world's great global cities. John Pitts' work on "reluctant gangsters" argues that it is increasingly difficult for young people to opt out of these street-level affiliations. One ray of good news is that these tiny neighborhood identifications are post-racial; the "end" matters in the capital's patchwork culture more than ethnicity.
But this convergence among young Londoners on MLE could represent a double-restriction of urban space and the mind. And such restrictions are taking place against a backdrop of crisis for disadvantaged youth: The official unemployment rate for British youth is 20 percent, functional illiteracy among teens is at 17 percent, and the country has one of the lowest social mobility rates in Europe, according to an OECD 2010 study.
Many accounts of this crisis do not encompass its many dimensions, constrained as they are by political correctness and liberal orthodoxies around race and racism. A contemporary source of such constraints was the flawed but influential 1999 Macpherson Report on institutional racism, the simplifications and illogicalities of which were matched only by the dogmatic fervor with which the New Labour government implemented its recommendations throughout the 2000s. But Gus John, the Guyanan-born writer and activist who has worked in Afro-Caribbean community empowerment and British education for decades, recently said what white, liberally minded sociolinguists do not say aloud: that much of the dysfunction and pain experienced by the underclass is, to a significant extent, generated from within its own patterns of culture.
John's voice amounts to a cry of despair that demands recognition of the problem's true scale, which does not sit well with the conventional wisdom routinely employed, that minorities are passive victims of institutional racism and top-down social injustices. Earlier in the year, before the riots, John called for a "peoples' inquiry" into murders in the African community, enabled by guns and knives. The role of language and its brutalization was front and center: "No ‘black talk', street language or slang should contain nonchalant sayings like ‘he was duppied', meaning that he was shot or stabbed to death; or he ‘got a wig', meaning that he was shot in the head. All of that represents a measure of brutality and barbarism that dehumanizes not just the perpetrators but the entire community and society."
Great Britain has a challenge in mainstreaming a globalized, multiethnic underclass, coherent enough to produce a genuine multiculture, but largely immobilized in increasingly territorial and socially dysfunctional neighborhoods. Ending an entrenched, nihilistic youth culture is not easy - and more difficult if those tackling the problem cannot move beyond the narrative that suggests the suffering and social pathologies of the underclass are entirely somebody else's doing. This would require an end to the condescending pretense that MLE is anything more than a rudimentary, limiting form of street speech. Left unchecked, MLE can only perpetuate the entrapment of its speakers in increasingly primitive "ends."
