A youth campaigner who was chased by racist thugs as a teen says ‘nothing has changed’ following the assault on a black schoolgirl in Surrey.
Sayce Holmes Lewis, 40, founder of youth mentoring organisation Mentivity, says that black children are not safe from racism in the UK and in schools where they should be protected.
After watching the shocking video of a 15-year-old girl being viciously beaten in what police are investigating as a racially motivated attack, Sayce says he was left ‘horrified’ by what he saw.
Four people have been arrested on suspicion of attempted racially aggravated grievous bodily harm, including a 39-year-old woman, two girls aged 11 and another aged 16.
A 43-year-old man was also arrested.
All four suspects have now been bailed to return to the police station in March while police continue to search for a sixth suspect - a 15-year-old girl.
But the campaigner and father-of-one says that schools are not creating safe spaces for children and that teachers are not equipped to deal with racism.
Sayce said: “Schools are supposed to be a safe haven for young people to learn to make mistakes and to be guided through discovery with teachers. But that's just not happening.
“You have teachers that are not racially literate. They don't have racial literacy and don’t understand what it is to face that oppression, to speak about this and be outside their comfort zone and that’s where we’re going wrong.”
The father-of-one from South East London says that watching the video of the violent attack triggered memories of Stephen Lawrence who was killed by racists, as well as his own experiences with racism growing up.
He said: “It was a horrific, heinous attack. It just kind of brought up memories of my childhood, and being chased out of Bermondsey. Memories of Stephen Lawrence being chased by a group of white boys and murdered.
“It was when I was about 15, I was playing for a football club in Bermondsey called Red Lion and I used to routinely go to train and on a Wednesday and sometimes I used to ride or get the bus.
“And there's one time I didn't ride [the bus]. I was walking from training and a group of white boys saw me and just shouted expletives, racist expletives, and words and stuff like that.
“They started chasing me down and I was literally running, fearing for my life and thinking about what happened when I was younger with Stephen Lawrence. I was thinking, ‘wow, is this my Stephen Lawrence moment?'”
Sayce says he was rescued when a bus driver kindly stopped and “saved his life.”
He said: “Luckily enough, there was a bus driver driving past. A black bus driver who saw what was going on, and he was in between bus stops. The next bus stop was far away from where we were.
“He stopped the bus and I jumped on and he drove off and I wasn't caught. And he potentially saved my life or saved me from a beating.”
Overall, Sayce says his experience is “part and parcel” of being black in Britain and that nothing has changed as racism is “as British as tea.”
The CEO said: “I don't think that things are getting worse because I think that this racism is as British as tea.
“This is part and parcel was embedded in institutions.
“This was something that was normal for black people and especially the older generation.
“That's just reflective of the black British negative experience. That's what being black in Britain is about, dealing with people racist thugs.
“But also dealing with police who want to over punish you and you're under-protected and being marginalised in education.
“[Black children] are not safe from exclusions. They're not safe from racist outlooks from teachers who might share that Eurocentric imperialist outlook.
“Teachers telling me, I'm never going to amount to anything, ‘you're going to be a drug dealer’, and when people place those labels on young people day in day out, they end up fulfilling that negative prophecy.
“Now because of social media and media in general. It's much easier for people to talk about and express it.
“So it seems as though it's getting worse, but it's more commonplace, literally, because people are speaking about it more often.”
Sayce says that his mentoring organisation Mentivity aims to protect black children from a racist system and help them ‘navigate” it.
He said: “That's why we're just keen to support young people and try to help them to navigate as best as possible.
“We've got to have honest conversations with young people around racism around the impact of it.
“And we've got to safeguard young people by having those difficult conversations and getting them to understand what's happened prior to their existence.
“Unfortunately, if you're not part of the majority, and you're seen as the minority in inverted commas, it can be very difficult because then who do you bounce ideas off of who you speak to about racist incidents if teachers don't actually see it, and can't empathise and don't understand what racism actually is?
“We need to decolonize the curriculum. We need more black senior leadership, team members so that they can have a say in terms of how schools are run with the more black males in education.
“I think black women have been holding the fort for so long. We need more black men within education, we need more of a balance in education.”
