This fascinating book documents the everyday abuse, assault, and intimidation that is suffered by black and Asian people in Great Britain every day, using information gathered in an East London London case study. The author explains and analyses the process through which violence is targeted at these minorities, and the role that the ideas and language of racial exclusion take in this process. The failure of the police to respond to this problem is then looked at in depth.

This book is based on detailed analysis of official documents, a victimization survey, interviews, and direct observation, seen in the overall context of the history of race relations in Britain. The author describes many of the thousands of racist attacks that have occurred in recent years and the events in the last two decades that have shaped English racism, and the political response to it.

In this paperback edition Ben Bowling's Preface examines the racist murder of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, whose killing in cold blood on an ordinary English street in April 1993 did not hit the headlines until February 1999, causing reverberations across the whole body of British politics and beyond.