by Akala
Natives
Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire
Akala
www.tworoadsbooks.com
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Two Roads
An imprint of John Murray Press
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Kingslee Daley 2018
The right of Akala to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 473 66124 0
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.tworoadsbooks.com
www.hodder.co.uk
To Uncle Offs
Contents
1 – Born in the 1980s
Interlude: A Guide to Denial
2 – The Day I Realised My Mum was White
3 – Special Needs?
4 – Linford’s Lunchbox
5 – Empire and Slavery in the British Memory
6 – Scotland and Jamaica
7 – Police, Peers and Teenage Years
8 – Why Do White People Love Mandela? Why Do Conservatives Hate Castro?
9 – The Ku Klux Klan Stopped Crime by Killing Black People
10 – Britain and America
11 – The Decline of Whiteness, the Decline of Race? (Or the End of Capitalism?)
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Author
1 – Born in the 1980s
I was born in the 1980s and I grew up in the clichéd, single-parent working-class family. We often depended on state benefits, we lived in a council house, I ate free school meals. I am the child of a British-Caribbean father and a Scottish/English mother, my teenage parents were never married and they separated before I was born. My dad spent a portion of his childhood in and out of the care system and my mum was pretty much disowned by her father for getting with a ‘nig nog’. The first time I saw someone being stabbed I was twelve, maybe thirteen, the same year I was searched by the police for the first time. I first smoked weed when I was nine and many of my ‘uncles’ – meaning biological uncles as well as family friends – went to prison. My upbringing was, on the face of it, typical of those of my peers who ended up meeting an early death or have spent much of their adult lives in and out of prison.
I was born in Crawley, West Sussex, but moved to Camden in north-west London before I had formed any concrete memories and I spent my childhood and teenage years living there. Camden is home to 130 languages and about as wide a divide between rich and poor as anywhere in the country. I went to school with the children of lords and ladies, millionaires, refugees, children clearly suffering from malnourishment and young boys selling drugs for their fathers. If there is anywhere in Britain that could serve as a petri dish for examining race, class and culture, Camden would be that place.
I was born in the 1980s in the ‘mother country’ of the British Commonwealth, the seat of the first truly global empire, the birthplace of ‘the’ industrial revolution and the epicentre of global finance. What does this mean? What are the social and historical forces that even allowed my parents to meet? My father is the British-born child of two African-Jamaican migrant workers who came to the mother country as part of the Windrush generation. My mother was an army child, born in Germany, spending her infant years in Hong Kong and moving to the small town in which I was born in her early teens. In my parents’ meeting are untold histories of imperial conquest, macroeconomic change, slave revolts, decolonisation and workers’ struggles. I was born poor, by Western standards at least. I was born poor and racialised as black – despite my ‘white’ mother – in perhaps the most tumultuous decade of Britain’s domestic racial history.
I was born in the 1980s, before mixed-race children had become an acceptable fashion accessory. A nurse in the hospital promised to give my white mother ‘nigger blood’ when she needed a transfusion after giving birth; yeah, the 1980s was a decade bereft of political correctness.
The 1980s was also the decade of Thatcherite–Reaganite ascendency. The ‘golden age of capitalism’ had ended in 1973, and the 80s saw the start of the rollback of the post-war welfare state, increased sell-off of public assets and the embrace of an individualistic ‘self-made’ logic by the very generation that had become wealthy with the support of free universities and cheap council houses, and had literally been kept alive by the newly constructed National Health Service. The decade saw the most powerful military machine ever assembled spun into existential crisis by the enormous threat posed by the potential of a socialist revolution on the tiny little Caribbean island of Grenada, and the self-appointed captains of global democracy could be found backing genocidal regimes from Nicaragua to South Africa – though that could’ve been any decade, really. It was the decade Thomas Sankara was killed, the Berlin Wall fell, Michael Jackson started to turn white and the MOVE movement was bombed from the sky. The 1980s were fairly eventful, to say the least.
For black Britain, the decade began with the New Cross fire/massacre of 1981, a suspected racist arson attack at 439 New Cross Road, where Yvonne Ruddock was celebrating her sixteenth birthday party.1 Thirteen of the partygoers burned to death, including the birthday girl, and one of the survivors also later committed suicide. Many of the families of the dead have maintained to this day that a) it was an arson attack and b) the police bungled the investigation and treated the families of the dead like suspects instead of victims. The community’s suspicion that it was an arson attack was perfectly reasonable, given that it came in the wake of a string of such racist arson attacks in that area of south-east London.2 The prime minister did not even bother to offer condolences to what were apparently British children and their families. Of course, Thatcher could not, in her heart of hearts, express sympathy for black British children while supporting an apartheid government rooted in the idea that black people were subhuman, so at least she was consistent. There certainly was not going to be a minute’s silence and most of Britain is completely unaware it even happened, despite the New Cross fire being one of the largest single losses of life in post-war Britain.
The same year also saw the passing of the British Nationality Act, the last of a series of Acts that were passed from 1962 onwards and whose racialised motivations were barely disguised. British Caribbeans had come to learn that they were indeed second-class citizens – as many had long suspected – but they were not of a mood to be quiet and keep their heads down about it. New Cross led to the largest demonstration by black people in British history; 20,000 marched on parliament on a working weekday and foretold of the harsh realities of the decade to come: ‘Blood a go run, if justice na come’ was the chant. It was to prove prophetic.
The rest of the decade of my birth was punctuated by uprisings and disturbances in almost all of the Caribbean and ‘Asian’ areas of the country, as well as the miners’ strikes o
f 1984–85 and the constant presence of the anti-apartheid struggle. These ‘disturbances’ included the infamous Brixton riots of 1981, set off by the sus laws – a resurrection of the 1824 Vagrancy Act, these laws allowed people to be arrested on the mere suspicion that they intended to commit a crime – and their manifestation in Swamp81, a racialised mass stop-and-search police campaign.
Brixton burned again in 1985, set aflame by the police shooting and paralysing Cherry Groce. Just a week later, the death of Cynthia Jarret after a police raid on her home sparked the Broadwater Farm riots, where a police officer was killed. I know members of both families personally, and grew up with the son of Smiley Culture, the reggae artist who died during a police raid on his home in 2011. I mention these connections only to point out that these people are not abstractions or mere news items, but members of a community, our community. Dalian Atkinson, the former Premier League footballer, was tasered to death by the police in 2016; it’s hard to imagine a former pop star or a retired footballer from any other community in Britain dying after contact with the police.
These 1980s reactions to state violence, racism, poverty and class conflict were by no means limited to London; there was the St Paul’s riot in Bristol in 1980, Moss Side and Toxteth in the north-west of England in 1981, Handsworth in the Midlands in 1981 and 1985 and Chapletown in Leeds in 1981 and 1987. How many millions of pounds of damage these outpourings of rage caused I don’t know, but now that they are sufficiently distant from the present, very few academics would dispute that they had very real socio-political causes. Indeed, entire books have been written on them, and government policy and police behaviour and training were reformed in direct response to these events, though what lessons the British state has truly learned from the 1980s remains to be seen.
It’s easy for people just slightly younger than myself, and born into a relative degree of multiculturalism, to forget just how recently basic public decency towards black folks was won in this country, but I was born in the 80s so I remember only too well. I was five years old when the infamous picture was taken of footballer John Barnes, kicking away the banana that had been thrown at him from the stands. I grew up routinely watching some of England’s greatest ever football players suffer this type of humiliation in their workplace, in front of tens of thousands of people, who for the most part seemed to find it entirely acceptable, funny even. I knew Cyril Regis personally (rest in power, sir), I know about the bullets in the post and the death threats received by black players from their ‘own’ supporters and apparent countrymen because they wanted to play for England. No one asked in public discourse where that association with black people and monkeys came from, because if they did we might have to speak of historical origins, of savage myths and of literal human zoos.
I was not born with an opinion of the world but it clearly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me. I did not know what race and class supposedly were but the world taught me very quickly, and the irrational manifestations of its prejudices forced me to search for answers. I did not particularly want to spend a portion of a lifetime studying these issues, it was not among my ambitions as a child, but I was compelled upon this path very early, as I stared at Barnsey kicking away that banana skin or when I sat in the dark and the freezing cold simply because my mum did not make enough money. I knew that these experiences were significant but I was not yet sure how to tease meaning from them.
I was born in the 1980s, when MPs in parliament could be found arguing that we – non-white Commonwealth citizens – should be sent back to where we came from. Now that where we came from had legally ceased to be part of Britain, our very existence here was seen as the problem. So, after our grandmothers had helped build the National Health Service and our grandfathers had staffed the public transport system, British MPs could openly talk about repatriation – we were no longer needed, excess labour, surplus to requirements, of no further use to capital. The entire management of ‘race’ – the media propaganda, the overstaffed mental institutions, the severe unemployment, the massively disproportionate incarceration rates and school expulsions – has to be understood in the context of why we were invited here in the first place. It was not so that we, en masse, could access the best of what British society had to offer, because that was not even on offer to the majority of the white population at the time. We were invited here to do the menial work that needed doing in the years immediately following the Second World War, and even in that very limited capacity, all post-war governments – including Attlee’s spirit of 45 lot – were deeply concerned about the long-term effects of letting brown-skinned British citizens into the country.
The government and the education system failed to explain to white Britain that, as the academic Adam Elliot-Cooper puts it, we had not come to Britain, but ‘rather that Britain had come to us’. They did not explain that the wealth of Britain, which made the welfare state and other class ameliorations possible, was derived in no small part from the coffee and tobacco, cotton and diamonds, gold and sweat and blood and death of the colonies. No one explained that our grandparents were not immigrants, that they were literally British citizens –many of them Second World War veterans – with British passports to match, moving from one of Britain’s outposts to the metropole. Nobody told white Britain that, over there in the colonies, Caribbeans and Asians were being told that Britain was their mother country, that it was the home of peace and justice and prosperity and that they would be welcomed with open arms by their loving motherland. Similarly, no one told my grandparents and others over there in the colonies that most white Britons were actually poor, or that the UK had a history of brutal labour exploitation and class conflict at home. You see, out there in the colonies, whiteness implies aristocracy, whiteness is aspirational, and as the only white people my grandparents knew of in Jamaica were the ruling classes, this association was entirely rational. My uncle could not contain his shock when ‘me come a England and me cyan believe say white man a sweep street’; the illusion was ruined the moment his four-year-old self got off the boat in the 1950s and saw poor white people. How preposterous – what is this place?
Within a week, my uncle also discovered that he was a black bastard – some adult let him know while he was in the sweet shop. You see, while the people in the colonies were being told Britain was their mother, much of white Britain had convinced itself that these undeserving niggers – Asians were niggers too, back then – had just got off their banana boats to come and freeload, to take ‘their’ jobs and steal ‘their’ women. Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire – ‘fuck the bloody foreigners’. Never mind that waves of migration have been a constant in British history and that great many millions of ‘white’ Britons are themselves descendants of Jewish, Eastern European and Irish migrants of the nineteenth century,3 nor that even in the post-war ‘mass migration’ years, Ireland and Europe were the largest source of immigrants.4 And, of course, let’s say nothing about the millions of British emigrants, settlers and colonists abroad – conveniently labelled ‘expats’.
The reaction to our grandparents, and even more to their British-born children, was one of general and irrational revulsion, such that the mere mention of their treatment is sure to elicit rage and embarrassment today, now that the pioneering Windrush generation has officially become part of Britain’s national story. These people who came to labour in post-war Britain were greeted by de facto segregation, verbal abuse, violent attacks and even murder, motivated by nothing more than their brown and black skin. Immigration acts put a stop to the British citizenship claims of the non-white Commonwealth, and hundreds of millions of British citizens were stripped of their citizenship and the freedom of movement that a British passport gave them, simply because they were not wh
ite. In a barely disguised move in the 1968 and 1971 immigration acts ‘grandfather clauses’ were placed into the legislation, which allowed the white citizens of the Commonwealth to continue to keep their freedom of movement without having to use explicitly racial language.5
Despite all this, my grandfather Brinsley worked hard, saved his pennies and moved out to the suburbs. Everything British capitalism says a good worker should do for the system to reward them – which, to be fair, it obviously did in his case. His neighbours all signed a petition to have the nigger removed from the street but my granddad, for reasons I could never quite understand, chose to stay put. As a homeowner surrounded by council tenants he could not be moved. My grandmother, Millicent, also saved her pennies and bought a home, but she stayed in London. This was all back when a worker in London could have any hope at all of buying their home; soaring house prices have permanently put an end to that.
The 1980s drew to a close with the Hillsborough disaster, in which ninety-six people were crushed to death during an FA Cup semi-final game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the national press and police blamed the Liverpool fans for the disaster, relying on crude class stereotypes of them as drunk hooligans. The Sun went as far as claiming that some fans were pickpocketing the dead and that others had urinated on the police; to this day people in Liverpool boycott the paper as a result. After twenty-seven years of tireless family campaigning, an inquest finally reached a verdict of unlawful killing that laid the blame for the deaths at the doors of the police.
So where are we now? Has nothing at all changed since the decade I was born? While it’s obviously true that aristocratic privilege and whiteness are among the basic assumptions of British ruling-class ideology, it’s also obvious that Britain’s inner cities – London in particular – are now some of the most successfully multi-ethnic experiments in the ‘Western’ world, despite what the right-wing press would like to pretend. Multi-ethnic Britain is a result of what scholar Paul Gilroy calls our ‘convivial’ culture, the normal everyday decency of ordinary people that for the most part keeps the peace in the face of enormous challenges.6 Racism and anti-racism, complete contempt for the poor and Christian charity, home to the world’s top universities and a strong disdain for learning, the pioneer of ‘Anglo-globalisation’ whose citizens constantly bemoan other peoples right to move freely without a hint of irony – Britain has long been a land of startling paradoxes. For example, why did Britain have an abolitionist movement on a far greater scale than any of the other major European slaveholding powers, even while Britain had become the premier slave trader? Why, two centuries later, was there such revulsion towards and organisation against apartheid by ‘radical’ groups here, even as ‘our’ government, British corporations and banks supported it? (Though the British struggle against apartheid in Britain was not without its own racial tensions, ironically.7)
