Systemic change

The Ministry of Justice (2020) acknowledge there remains an overrepresentation of ethnic minorities within the criminal justice system and disparities in aspects of their treatment. The Lammy Review (2017) reflected an indictment on the criminal justice system as experienced by black people. It is clear that the case to address these disparities remains compelling. Lorde (1984) expresses the view that the ‘master's tools will never dismantle the master's house’. It is, therefore, incumbent on any scholar who decides to challenge the orthodoxy to do so from a position that does not negate black epistemological concerns. Marable (2001) argues that, historically, it is black scholars who have theorized from the black experience who have often proposed practical steps for the empowerment of black people. In other words, there is a practical step between their scholarship and the struggle for racial parity, between social analysis and social transformation. The purpose of black scholarship, as Marable suggests, is more than restoration of identity and self-esteem; it is to use history and culture as tools through which black people interpret their collective experience for the purpose of transforming their actual conditions and the totality of the society all around them. Hall (1993) similarly sees black culture as a contradictory space that can never be simplified or explained in terms of binary opposites or statistical breakdowns. He goes further by suggesting that ‘it is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are’ (1993: 111).