Racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, ‘that old sovereign right of death’.
(Mbembe, 2003: 17)
A year after the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower in June 2017, as the inquiry unfolded, the survivors, local community and wider society continued to reel from the loss of 72 lives and the institutional indifference that followed and preceded it. Emails from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) council released through Freedom of Information revealed one unnamed worker’s racialised view of the tower’s residents: ‘language problems, lack of education and understanding how anything works’, with parts of the community characterised as ‘territorial ’ in nature and apparently comparable to ‘gangs’ (Booth, 2018b).
By contrast, residents knew enough about ‘how things work’ to have chosen fire-resistant cladding during a 2012 consultation on the tower’s refurbishment. The fire-resistant version of the cladding that was ultimately installed would have cost just £5,000 more, according to The Times (Mostrous, O’Neill and Joiner, 2017). The smoke ventilation system failed eight days before the fire, with a proposal to fix it for £1,800 reportedly unanswered, and no maintenance contract in place (Booth, 2018a). A year after the fire, two-thirds of affected households from Grenfell Tower and Grenfell Walk were without a permanent home (Grenfell Support, 2018).
Grenfell Tower was home to families from countries all over the world, including many from North Africa. It takes its name from nearby Grenfell Walk, itself named after Francis Wallace Grenfell, who fought numerous colonial wars there on behalf of the Crown (Mount, 2017). While many residents were British, or had secure immigration status, some did not. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, an impromptu campaign for an immigration amnesty gathered pace. Health workers and legal representatives found that some people were too afraid to seek support from the emergency services or other officials, fearing that any contact with the state would be used as a pretext to detain and deport them under the auspices of the government’s ‘hostile environment’ (Quinn, 2017).
