by Akala
Britain has two competing traditions – one rooted in ideas of freedom, equality and democracy, and another that sees these words as mere rhetoric to be trotted out at will and violated whenever it serves the Machiavellian purposes of power preservation. This is how the UK can have the largest of the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq and yet still have a government that entirely ignored its population on an issue with such globe-shifting implications.
Severe class inequalities persist, and while it’s probably unrealistic to expect a society with which everyone can be satisfied, by European standards the British class system is still particularly pernicious. It’s not that racism has disappeared from the UK since the 1980s, but without a doubt the resistance of black and Asian communities during the decade of my birth produced very significant reforms that have changed the way my generation experiences and understands ‘race’. The gollywogs and banana skins are no longer a daily feature of black life here and neither is the Special Patrol Group, the notoriously abusive policing unit that gave almost all of the older men in my life a bloody good hiding, more than once. Though police brutality of course continues, few would deny things are far better in this respect than thirty years ago, for now at least.
The physical battles fought by our parents’ generation have meant that ‘nigger hunting’ and ‘Paki bashing’ are far less common than they once were too. My father’s and uncles’ bodies are tattooed with scars from fighting the National Front (NF), Teddy Boys and Skinheads; mine is not. We should not underestimate the newly emboldened bigots, though, and racist violence seems to be on the rise again.
This is partly because, despite much seeming and some very real progress, public discourse about racism is still as childish and supine as it ever was. Where we do discuss race in public, we have been trained to see racism – if we see it at all – as an issue of interpersonal morality. Good people are not racist, only bad people are. This neat binary is a great way of avoiding any real discussion at all. But without the structural violence of unequal treatment before the law and in education, and a history of racial exploitation by states, simple acts of personal prejudice would have significantly less meaning. In short, we are trained to recognise the kinds of racism that tend to be engaged in by poorer people. Thus even the most pro-empire of historians would probably admit that some football hooligan calling a Premier League player a ‘black cunt’ is a bad thing, even while they spend their entire academic careers explaining away, downplaying and essentially cheering for the mass-murdering white-supremacist piracy of the British Empire, which starved millions to death in India, enslaved and tortured millions more in countless locations and often used its power to crush, not enhance, popular democracy and economic development in its non-white colonies, especially when doing so suited larger aims.8 Poor people racism, bad, rich people racism, good.
The kinds of racism still engaged in by the wealthy and the powerful – such as the theft of entire regions’ resources under a thinly veiled update of ‘the white man’s burden’ (basically ‘the savages can’t govern themselves’), or profiteering from a racially unjust legal and prison system – are far more egregious and damaging. Yet these forms of racism are given far less attention than racism as simple name-calling. John Terry calling Anton Ferdinand a ‘black cunt’ in front of millions of viewers may well be deplorable, but the Football Association’s and England management’s subsequent equivocation over whether to take him to the 2012 European Championships, over Anton’s brother Rio, and for England as a nation to be happy and proud to be captained by a man who racially abuses his peers in the workplace, is the more interesting case study for any discussion about how race operates. Had the England team chosen to drop John Terry immediately and pick Rio instead, I’m sure there would have been uproar from much of the country, despite Rio’s obvious abilities.
In the run-up to the 2017 general election, online racists told black MP Diane Abbott that they would ‘hang her if they could find a tree strong enough for the fat black bitch’ – just one message among the slew of racist and sexist abuse she regularly receives. It seems Britain’s most honest racists emphasise the spiritual connection they feel for their American cousins quite well. Yet in reality, the hanging of black people was never a particular phenomenon in domestic Britain; ironically, the vast majority of people hung in British history were white, and they were often poor people hung by the state for not respecting rich people’s property.9 Oh the irony, oh the lack of respect for one’s own ancestors!
All said and done, the idea of racial hierarchy and the attendant philosophy of innate white superiority were not invented by poor people, and while we are not excusing the central role that everyday racism has played in upholding racial hierarchies in the UK and elsewhere, our critique should not rest there.
While ethnic bigotry has been around for millennia and probably affects every known human community to some degree, the invention, or at least codification, of ‘race’ was an eighteenth and nineteenth century pan-Euro-American project, in which British intellectuals played a central role. Britain also had a pioneering role in making white supremacy a temporary political reality via its racialised global empire, yet to publicly discuss racism, much less have the gall to accurately name white supremacy as a strong current in Britain’s history, is to be greeted with odium by some who claim to study that history, but it seems would rather be left to uncritically celebrate it in peace.
But what am I ‘complaining’ about, you might justifiably ask? Have I not, after all, had quite a good life so far, all things told? Yes, indeed, despite these historic forces and the kind of household I was born into, here I stand, a self-employed entrepreneur my entire adult life, an independent artist who has toured the world many times over and someone who barely went to college yet who has lectured at almost every university in the country. I come from one of the statistically least likely groups to attain five GCSE passes – white and ‘mixed-race’ boys on free school meals fail at an even greater rate than ‘fully black’ boys on free school meals do – but I got ten GCSEs, including multiple A* grades. I took my maths GCSE a year early and attended the Royal Institution’s Mathematics masterclasses as a schoolboy.
Am I unique? Do I have some special sauce that has made me different from so many of my peers? Surely my very existence proves Britain is meritocratic, and that if you just work hard you’ll ‘make it’? If there is a UK equivalent of the ‘American Dream’, aren’t I one small example of its manifestation? Not only me, but my siblings too; my older sister is Ms. Dynamite, whom I’m sure you’ve heard of, one of my younger sisters is an award winning stuntwoman called Belle Williams who has worked on some of the biggest films ever made, my sixteen-year-old brother also just also got ten GCSEs and currently wants to be a neuroscientist. Isn’t my successful, rags to halfway riches ‘mixed race’ family further living proof of the very social mobility that I am claiming is mostly fictional?
If only things were so simple. If only exceptions did not prove the rule.
The purpose of this book is to examine how these seemingly impersonal forces – race and class – have impacted and continue to shape our lives, and how easily I could now be telling you a very different but much more common story of cyclical violence, prison and part-time, insecure and low-paying work.
You see, alongside the familiar tropes and trappings of inner-city life, I also had many unusual things stacked in my favour: I went to a special pan-African Saturday school that made up for what my state schooling lacked; my stepdad was the stage manager of the Hackney Empire, thus I saw more theatre growing up than any rich child is likely to; I had politicised and militantly pro-education parents who were always willing to fight my corner against teachers, whenever and wherever necessary. Some of my happiest childhood memories were formed in the public library that was almost on the corner of our street, a facility that played no small part in inculcating in me an almost irrational love of books. I already own more books than I c
ould ever read, yet I often still go to bookshops just to look at, browse and smell the pages of a freshly printed one – sadly nerdy, I know. Had I not had access to free public libraries courtesy of the taxpayer, and a mum willing and able to take me, this book you hold probably would never have been written. Yet, despite all of this, I still carried a knife out of fear and flirted with petty crime after I had left school.
Black consciousness did not save me from carrying a knife, and nor could it protect me in the streets, but it certainly shaped my sense of self-worth and imbued me with a community-oriented moral compass. It would be easy for me to ignore these factors and claim myself to be a ‘self-made’ man, but in reality there is no such thing.
Countless teachers and community activists gave me the tools for navigating life’s roadmap; football coaches taught me to play and kept me out of trouble. I am not saying that my own hard work, discipline and sacrifice have played no role in my life’s outcomes; that would be absurd. But I am saying that even these characteristics were nourished with help, support and encouragement from others, and that without this support – much of it from volunteers – it’s inconceivable that I would be where I am today. When I say I could have been a statistic – another working-class black man dead or in prison – people who did not grow up how we grew up probably think it an exaggeration. But people that grew up like us know just how real this statement is, just how easily the scales could have been tipped.
Yes, I grew up without my father in the home, but we kept in contact and I went to stay with him and his new family many a school holiday. My stepdad was also a very positive influence in my life before he and my mother had a difficult split and, reflecting the unusual mix of cultures that is normal in Camden, I even had an ‘uncle’ from Cyprus called Andrew, who looked out for me all through my teenage years. But of all the men in my life, it is my godfather, ‘Uncle Offs’, the man to whom this book is dedicated, who made the biggest impact on my upbringing. While he was technically just a family friend, he has played a greater role in my life than many parents do in the lives of their own children. He was so close to my parents, and loved me and my siblings so much, that when my mum got cancer he agreed to let us live with him if she died, despite the fact that he had three children of his own and lived on a council estate in Hackney. I often wonder where men like my Uncle Offs fit in to the stereotype of the supposedly ubiquitously absent black father.
There were other benefits too that, while not exclusive to my family, are an inescapable part of our narrative. I got the measles aged five and I got treatment, for free. My mum got cancer when I was ten; she got treatment, also for free, and both courtesy of the NHS. I went on subsidised school trips to Rome and Barcelona that greatly expanded my horizons. In another time and space, someone born into my socio-economic bracket would have had to drop out of school and work to help feed the family; indeed, one of my best friends, the legendary Brazilian hip hop artist MC Marechal, had to do just that, as do countless children all across the world today through no fault of their own, just because of the lottery of birth. I am partly a product of Britain’s injustices, of its history of class and race oppression, but also of its counter-narrative of struggle and the compromises made by those in power born of those struggles. I am a product of the empire, and also of the welfare state.
My age group, born in the early 1980s, find ourselves in a kind of black limbo; we are the last set of black Brits old enough to remember the old-school racism, though we only witnessed it as children as our parents comprehensively defeated it, in the major cities at least. While the generation born in 1981 is far poorer than those born in 1971 for the general population,10 the narrative is more complicated for black people. Some of my generation, like me, have had opportunities afforded us that might have been far less likely had we been born just a decade earlier, and black British music in particular has a public international profile it has never had before. Millions of people from all communities right across the country care more about what Stormzy and Jme think about the world than their politicians, and the central role played by the Grime4Corbyn campaign in shifting the centre ground in British politics will no doubt inspire a slew of PhDs at some point in the future, if it hasn’t already.
The changes brought by reform manifest in odd ways.
When I rented my first nice flat, I had a disagreement with the black man working at the estate agent after he told me, ‘You should feel lucky, because coloured folks like us never usually get these kinds of opportunities.’ Obviously it’s an extreme example of self-hatred to think it is a privilege for black people to be able to give away thousands of pounds of their hard-earned money, but as more young black people in London and elsewhere become materially successful, it will complicate class–race dynamics and continue to challenge people’s expectations.
I remember back in 2011 I was getting ready to interview a legendary black poet and activist for a programme I presented on Channel 4 called Life of Rhyme and, as myself and the crew finished setting up, he asked ‘Where is the producer?’ I pointed to the black woman with me. He then asked, ‘Where is the director?’ I pointed to the black man with me. The interviewee paused, then said ‘Wow, in my day you would have never have gotten that’ – an all-black film crew, that is. Of course, one only has to walk into the BBC, C4, or any major corporation to see that this is not a generalized trend; their staffs do not even close to accurately reflect the ethnic composition of the city in which they are situated. But nonetheless, if a poet whose entire career has been spent fighting racism can find himself looking for the ‘white person in charge’, it gives us a sense of the degree to which reality has conditioned our expectations, even in London. (To be fair to him, there were actually white people in charge of the production, as senior directors and producers, they just happened to not be with us that day.)
What both the poet and the confused estate agent were commenting on is the fact that there is a visible nascent black middle class on a scale that there just wasn’t with our parents’ generation. The trend is reflected in some of the occupations of my friend group – a classical composer, a university professor, a W10 bar owner, a trauma surgeon and a couple of lawyers, all second or third-generation black Brits. Though we should not wrap ourselves in joy just as yet, as the changing nature of my friends’ occupations could also be seen to reflect the general closing of ‘British’ industry, and these exceptional cases sit alongside the ever-deepening reality of a black underclass that is in the process of permanently joining the much older white underclass. This process has been chronicled in the press obsession with gangs, and with making gangs synonymous with young black boys, despite the obvious fact that violent working-class youth gangs have been part of British history for well over a century, and despite the fact that they are still prevalent in areas of the country where there are hardly any black people, such as Glasgow, Durham, Cleveland, Belfast and most other decaying, post-industrial centres of deprivation.
Of course, a few successful black people also do very little to alter the race–class dynamics of the UK and can even help to cement it. These successes can and will be used – even sometimes by the ‘middle class’ respectable black people themselves – to beat other poor people that ‘didn’t make it’ over the head. They can be used to pretend that the system is just and there are enough seats at the table – ‘if you just work hard and pull your socks up you can be like me’ – rather than simply being honest about the way things actually work. Most people, it seems to me at least, hate poor people more than they hate poverty.
This is classic, the old pull yourself up by the bootstraps trope. It ignores that people are not inherently good or bad, and that even ‘bad’ decisions are made in a context. For example, my aforementioned gangster uncles universally encouraged me to stay in school, paid me pocket money for reciting the theory of evolution to them as a child and even threatened to give me a bloody good hiding if I tried to be like them – i.e. a criminal. My good fr
iend, a retired Premier League footballer from the notorious Stonebridge estate, was officially banned from the ‘front line’ by all the drug dealers in ‘the ends’ when he was growing up. They saw his potential, his chance for a life different to their own, and these ‘bad’ people – I am not denying that they were indeed hardened criminals – protected him and me.
Meanwhile, some of my white, middle-class teachers made my school life extremely difficult and penalised me for the very thing they were supposed to be nurturing; my intelligence. Law enforcement acted upon my body based on media-induced hysteria regardless of my school grades, my absolute geekiness and the fact that I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. We judge the street corner hustler or working-class criminal – from East Glasgow to East London – but we see a job as an investment banker, even in firms that launder the profits of drug cartels, fund terrorism, aid the global flow of arms, fuel war, oil spills, land grabs and generally fuck up the planet, as a perfectly legitimate, even aspirational occupation. I am not even necessarily passing judgment on those who are employed in that system, as I’m complicit in it to a degree because of my consumption, I am just pointing out that our evaluation of what constitutes ‘crime’ is not guided by morality, it is guided by the law; in other words, the rules set down by the powerful, not a universal barometer of justice – if such a thing even exists. We need not remind ourselves that slavery, apartheid, Jim Crow, a man’s right to rape his wife and the chemical castration of gay people were all ‘legal’ at one stage of very recent history, as was most of what was done by Nazi Germany.
