Introduction
Two days ago a video was posted on social media showing a fight between white girls and a black girl in Ashford in Surrey. Most of the fight consists of a blonde girl and the black girl fighting, while a younger white girl in purple tries to kick the black girl in the head and a rather chubby younger white girl in uniform launches periodic kicks. All of this is accompanied by demands from an offscreen mother for the white girls to keep hitting the black girl. Throughout various students and car drivers fail to act. At the end a group of adults, including what is believed to be the head teacher of the school the girls come from, intervene and the fight ends.
School fights are nothing new in Britain, sadly, and it isn’t that unusual for them to be filmed and posted on social media. This one however has caused a storm. The Labour MP Bell Ribiero-Addy has tweeted that the “school must be held to account” over the fight. Labour MP Janet Daby has cited the fight in Parliament, calling for “justice to be served”. The APPG on Race and Education, which is chaired by Labour MP Diane Abbott, has said there are “some very serious safeguarding questions for the school to answer”. Nadine White, the race correspondent of The Independent, felt it necessary to write on Twitter that “There was no "violent altercation". A gang of white people viciously attacked a Black schoolgirl while people stood by doing nothing.”
What happened after the fight?
What complicates things is that the white people are, judging by their Irish accents, an ethnic minority of their own, namely Travellers. Ironically, Bell Ribiero-Addy MP is a prominent supporter of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. The Ashford Borough Council website confirms that there is Gypsy and Traveller accommodation in the town. Social media footage shows that black people appear to have turned up outside some of that accommodation, where they were lead in chants about “taking back our turf” and “we’ll pull up outside your door”, which are clearly threatening. Later on in the same video a discussion can be heard between the chant leader and some white people in which the chant leader says he’s not against “the white community”.
The chant leader wears a distinctive uniform consisting of old British Army fatigues and a black stab vest. In other social media footage he can easily be identified as the activist who usually goes under the name of Raspect Rebellion and the logo on the stab vest is revealed to read “FF Force”, which stands for Forever Family Force. In that footage, filmed and posted by Nadine White, he says “"Tangible solutions. Steppers only: chattings done". In modern urban slang, “stepping up” can mean to start a fight while “chattings done” suggest the time for talking is over. This is an incitement to violence by a man wearing a paramilitary uniform.
In another video, also filmed and posted by Nadine White, Raspect can be seen saying that if “we as the men” fail to “mobilise collectively” then it somehow forces (black) youths to carry knives because they’d rather face a criminal court than the grave.
Who are Forever Family?
Raspect and Forever Family came to public prominence in 2020, when they joined the annual emancipation march in Brixton wearing all-black paramilitary uniforms. This is illegal under the Public Order Act 1936, which bans the use of political uniform. The annual march is run by a coalition of groups, including Stop the Maangamizi, a crank group who are also the secretariat for the APPG on Afrikan Reparations, which is chaired by Labour MP Bell Ribiero-Addy.
A profile at the time revealed that Raspect had a very active social media life, which included anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, claiming Bill Gates created coronavirus, and alleging that slavery was “the original holocaust” while Jews own the banking system via the “Rothschild bloodline”. That profile also reveals that a backer of the group is the musician Mega, who is part of So Solid Crew. By tracing PayPal links posted to solicit donations, it’s revealed that they link back to a company called Forever Family Ltd, whose director is Khari McKenzie, aka Raspect Rebellion.
As Raspect he is an aspiring rapper and used to run a group called GANG which was set up to “reclaim the space”. As the leader of GANG he was invited to discuss race relations with Victoria Derbyshire.
Forever Family gave footage of their march to black nationalist YouTube channel GotKush. One of their members also produced a music video for his song “House or the Field”, a reference to the division of labour between black slaves in America. In 2021 they were filmed joining forces with publicly-funded prison abolition group The 4Front Project to protest outside Tottenham police station. A rap song plays periodically, with a lyric calling Winnie Mandela a “real Black Panther” (referencing the Marvel film rather than the US political group). Winnie was infamous in South Africa for running the Mandela United Football Club, which operated as a death squad, most infamously torturing and murdering a 14 year old black child on her orders. She got off with a fine.
If you’d like to listen to the rap song, it’s available on YouTube as “Real Black Panther (Forever Wakanda)” by Raspect Fyabinghi (aka Raspect Rebellion) x Mun Roe.
In another video from the Tottenham police station protest they claimed they would launch “police the police global”, which would track stop and search by police officers. Instead they said they would become “SIA trained” (Security Industry Authority - this is what private security guards are required to have) and would “police our own communities”, which would include stopping “police harassment” and “conflict resolution amongst our own”. Later at 13:24 Raspect raps that “you kill the mandem, we start a riot”. At the Brixton march they had a similar message, calling for a “reparations rebellion” and claiming that they would eradicate gang violence with “facilities in every ends” and “a wave of young black entrepreneurs”.
Footage of them practicing their marching before the Brixton march shows that they trained at the Brixton Street Gym, which was opened by Ibrahim Dogus, of the British Kebab Awards, and local Labour MP Helen Hayes. In that video they practice fighting but claim that it’s only for “self-defence”. They also reveal that the group formed after the Trafalgar Square BLM demo, where they claim they clashed with the EDL, which led them to create Forever Family. They say none of them get paid, they’re pro-family, they salute women, and they’re building the “Nubian World Order”.
There are two videos showing Mega Man and Raspect at the Trafalgar Square demo, although no fight is seen. In the first one it can be seen that Raspect was wearing the black stab vest already. In the second one Mega Man appears upset, asking at 00:36, ““where’s all the road n*ggers? Where’s all the up north n*ggers?”. Later on at 01:24 Mega Man says, “I didn’t call up a lot of my top dons. I could have called a hundred and one f*cking South London n*ggers to turn up here blood. But I know that I can’t control a hundred and one of my South London n*ggers. So I came up here with a few of my real dons and we’re standing firm, yeah. Where’s the rest of you lot bloods?”.
Another video features the actress Imarn Ayton, who famously denounced the Black Lives Matter UK group, claiming they tried to hijack the BLM protests for their own far-left agenda. Aside from protests, they also tried community activism, giving out bags of school supplies to black children. That said, on the soundtrack they reference Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mumia Abu Jubal, who murdered a police officer. After this Forever Family seems to have lost energy. Their Twitter account hasn’t been updated since July 2021 and their website still refers to the initiatives they want to do “in 2021”. Linked accounts like Police the Police Global also appear defunct.
Who is Raspect?
Raspect is the leader of Forever Family but he has a long track record as an activist. In one video he appears as “The Lions Den” with a poster for “G-Grinderz” behind him, while at 8:13 he endorses a book called “the Hustler’s Holy Book”. Searching for these reveals his YouTube channel where he rants about “Zionists”. You can still find the Hustler’s Holy Book by Hustlafari on Amazon, which includes chapters on “money laundering” and how “crime pays”. An Instagram post by GANG claimed the book was written while in prison. The Lions Den is a streaming platform where people had to pay on his Patreon to get access to videos.
Most of the various Instagram accounts he’s used over the years have been deleted but the GANG one is still up. It includes images featuring slogans like “cops are da ops”, “mash em up destroy dem”, and “as long as cops are ur ops, your a fren of mine”.
He even made his way into academia, appearing in 2015 at a conference organised by Kehinde Andrews, where he says, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable…when the youth takes to streets and riot, it’s something that needs to be done” and that “justice is what stops the next officer from shooting down a black youth. So ‘justice’ would be the officers being punished. But that doesn’t happen. So what stops an officer from shooting down the next black youth? It should be the response of the black community, a political response. But they care not for our peaceful protests. So what stops an officer from shooting a black youth? The fear of the whole place burning down. That’s just the honest truth”.
His Lions Den livestreams are notable for both their extraordinary length and titles, such as “YOU BLACK'S DON'T DESERVE REPARATIONS!!!”, “RALPH ON HOW TO GET RID OF MUSLIMS IN THE WEST”, “WOMEN ARE INFERIOR TO MEN!”, “UNCLE OMAR CALLS BLACK NON MUSLIMS BABOON!”, and the eight hour epic “IS PEDOPHILIA SUBJECTIVE OR OBJECTIVE!?!?”. In the description is a link to the Hustlafari PayPal account, suggesting that he is likely the author behind the Hustler’s Holy Book. He was also a regular debater at Speaker’s Corner until the police kicked him out.
Comment
Journalist Nadine White has now stated that there was a second victim at the school, who was white, although they didn’t require a hospital trip. We don’t know who her attacker was. Nor do we know what the original fight was about, or whether racism was involved. What is clear is that a school fight rapidly became a racial flashpoint, driven on by intemperate journalists, Parliamentarians, and activists. The tendency of identity politics to reduce any fight or injustice to pure racial conflict only makes racial violence more likely. So far the crowds chanting threats and the activists in body armour have remained relatively peaceful but that isn’t a certainty in future.
The story of Forever Family meanwhile shows how a febrile mix of music, politics, get rich scheming, black identity, and crank ideas mix around the black community. They can’t simply be dismissed as fringe lunatics: So Solid Crew have appeared on Top of the Pops; Raspect has been interviewed on TV and appeared in academia; and Forever Family had pride of place at the Brixton march organised by a group closely linked to several MPs via their APPG work. Despite being a deliberately threatening group who dress in paramilitary gear and discuss their martial arts training in multiple videos, the authorities appear to have taken no serious action against them. The police should be questioned as to why they’ve failed to do so.