Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - The Sunday Times Bestseller

by Akala

  Even if we return this idiocy to ‘white’ Britain, what would have happened if the Tolpuddle marchers, the suffragettes, Tom Paine, the Chartists, those that campaigned to end child labour and slavery had all shut up for fear of being called ‘anti-British’? Put simply, many of the freedoms that people take for granted simply might not exist. What’s more, this ‘anti-British’ label shows that the person using it conflates the interests of the British ruling class and their cronies in the House of Lords and the arms, oil and banking cabals with the interests of Britain’s people as a whole. That said, I am not a nationalist, so to be accused of lacking sufficient patriotism does not fill me with indignation.

  ‘But what about [INSERT ANY INJUSTICE HERE]?’

  Yes, I am aware there is still a caste system and persecution of Sikhs in India, that the ‘Islamic world’ had several slave-holding waves of empire centuries before the rise of the modern West and that Islamic fascism, Hindu fascism in India and the persecution of Muslims in Burma all exist. I am aware that Kurds, Ainu, West Papuans, Palestinians, Indigenous Americans and Australians and a whole host of other people have far worse sufferings to speak of than black people in Britain. I am aware that no human community is perfect and that injustices exist everywhere. You have not made an insightful observation by distraction. Additionally, the idea that the spread of Euro-American imperialism has played no role in helping cement or prolong some of the above injustices is, well, rather quaint; but even if that were the case, we could deflect from any number of injustices with the ‘what about?’ clause. There are great studies on all of the above subjects, and this book does not negate any of them.

  ‘You’re obsessed with identity politics.’

  This one is all the rage lately and ‘identity politics’ is spoken about as if it were something entirely new. Of course in reality Britain has a long history of crafting polities not around merit or even solely class distinctions but also around white identity.

  Also, please explain to me how all politics is not in part ‘identity’ politics. Are ‘working class’ (especially in a post-industrial welfare state) ‘Irish’, ‘Christian’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘Japanese’ not all identities? Please explain how humans organised into any group identity can have an identity-less politics. Again, if you just don’t want to hear from and engage with people from my identity or the experiences we’ve had as a result of that identity, no worries, put the book down, don’t follow me on Twitter or watch me on YouTube. I am not stalking you, fam.

  ‘You are trying to blame me for what my ancestors did.’

  This one usually arises when discussing the particularly sensitive area of Britain’s role in the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans. ‘I never owned slaves’ or so the strawman logic goes. Well of course, everybody knows that no one alive in Britain today owned an African person, but that does very little to change how significant a role slavery played in Britain’s history.2 Also, as the writer Gary Younge once explained, people in Britain naturally take pride in positive national events they had no direct role in – ‘we won the world cup’, ‘we won the war’ – yet many seem less willing to confront the more negative aspects of our history. People seem rather happy to align themselves with the Dunkirk spirit but rather less interested in even acknowledging the ‘Amritsar spirit’.

  ‘Stop making excuses.’

  If you were to ask why northern England is so much poorer than the south or why southern Italy is so much poorer than the north, why east London is poorer than west or why Glasgow and Belfast have been so much more violent than other UK cities, you will likely get an explanation grounded in history, politics and economics and not be told that those explanations are just ‘making excuses’ for the innate failings of the northern English, southern Italians or citizens of Belfast and Glasgow. The ‘stop making excuses’ clause is there to suggest that black people are not permitted to make use of the very same tools available to the rest of humanity to understand the shape of their communities today because their black skin and inferior culture are a sufficient explanation for any issues they might be having.

  As people say this to me personally so often let’s just recap on my family history and current position as briefly outlined in the last chapter to assess what I am supposed to be ‘making excuses’ for. Both of my mother’s parents were alcoholics, my father grew up in and out of care, I grew up in a single-parent home on free school meals. As I’m sure you are aware most children eligible for free school meals do not achieve five GCSEs: all three of my mother’s other children and I got ten GCSEs and lead very successful lives so I am unsure what exactly I am supposed to be ‘making excuses for’, as my life has panned out wonderfully well from a personal perspective. However. one of the main reasons me and my siblings were able to navigate life growing up was because we were made to understand very early that poorer children and poorer black children in particular would have to work twice as hard to get half as far. Apparently me passing on the useful knowledge of how racism and poverty are deliberately reproduced is ‘making excuses’ for poorer children to fail. Nonsense. I’m genuinely surprised that people do not get embarrassed looking at where I have come from and what I have done with my life when they try to hit me with the ‘stop making excuses’ clause, but that is the tone deaf nature of such persons.

  ‘You just blame the west for all of the world’s problems’

  This one is the geo-political equivalent of ‘stop making excuses’ and is usually aimed at anyone that dares to suggest that the disproportionate influence of Western power may still be having an impact on global human relations. If you ask the person saying this which African or Asian scholars’ work do they think could usefully be described as ‘blaming the west for everything’ they will not be able to tell you of course, because such a body of scholarship simply does not exist. Post-colonial African, Asian and Caribbean scholarship takes as a basic assumption the obvious fact that non-white people are people and thus quite capable of oppressing one another without mighty whiteys’ assistance. In fact this body of scholarship generally points out that the great challenges faced by the masses of Africa and large parts of Asia are caused precisely by the fact that they have two sets of oppressors’ greed to satiate, their own domestic elites and the international corporations and foreign states their domestic oppressors often serve and collaborate with. But if you point out the simple and obvious fact that long after the official colonial period Western governments have been perfectly happy to install and support the most gruesome of dictatorial regimes and also overthrow democratically elected presidents as and when it suits them, this will be labelled ‘blaming the west for everything’. You need not worry though as adjectives and slogans are not counter arguments of course.

  ‘I don’t see colour.’

  This one does make me laugh and is grounded in the idea that colour itself is a negative, rather than the associations that have been forced upon it. It’s so absurd to suggest that you don’t see a person’s colour that I can think of no better testament to the difficulties people have discussing race than this silly but often quoted one-liner.

  ‘It’s not about race.’

  Nothing is ever about race; you should know this by now.

  In reality, the idea of race has been one of the most important ideas in the modern world, it has underpinned centuries of enslavement, justified genocide and been used to decide the demarcation line between who lives and who dies, who gets to access rights of citizenship, property, migration and the vote. To not want to debate, discuss and deal with an idea that has been so impactful reveals a palpable lack of interest in humanity, or at least certain portions of it.

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  There are many variants on these non-arguments, you can’t defeat them with common sense and you cannot – nor should you waste your time trying to – persuade everybody.

  2 – The Day I Realised My Mum was White

  I returned home from primary school upset. My mum tried to figure ou
t why but I was reluctant to tell her. After some coaxing, it emerged that a boy in the playground had called me a particularly nasty name. As I was finally about to spill the beans a strange thing occurred. I said ‘Mum, the white boy . . .’ and trailed off before I could complete the sentence. I looked to my mum as a profound realisation hit me. With a hint of terror and accusation, I said, ‘But you’re white, aren’t you Mummy?’ Before this moment my mum was just my mum, a flawless superhero like any loving parent is in a five-year-old’s eyes, but I sensed that something about that image was changing in the moment, something we could never take back. I wanted to un-ask the question, I wished I had just pretended my day had been fine; I was mad at myself. My mother’s expression was halfway between shock and resignation – she’d known this day would come but the directness of the question still took her aback.

  She thought for a moment and then, using one of her brilliant, if perhaps unintentional, masterstrokes in psychology, she replied something to the effect of: ‘Yes, I’m white, but I’m German and they’re English.’ It didn’t matter that my mum was not really German – she was born in Germany and brought up in Hong Kong before returning to the UK, as my granddad was in the army – or that I was technically ‘English’: my mum had set up a mental safety valve for me so that I could feel comfortable reporting racist abuse to her without having to worry that I was hurting her feelings. Even at five, I had somehow figured out that there was a group known as ‘white people’ to whom it was now clear my mother belonged and that many of these people would get offended at the mere mention of their whiteness. I somehow knew instinctively that whiteness, like all systems of power, preferred not to be interrogated.

  I told my mum that the boy had called me a ‘Chinese black nigger bastard’. I felt naughty even saying the words back. My mum must have had to resist the urge to laugh before the anger set in. What a combination of words! We have to give the lad – or more probably his parents – ten out of ten for originality when it comes to racial abuse, for I have never before or since heard this particular racial epithet repeated among the predictable slew of clichés that peppered my childhood; coon, wog, darkie, coloured, nigger (obviously nigger) and even occasionally Paki – racists are notoriously imprecise with their insults. But as someone of mixed heritage with yellowish, light-brown skin, a round face and ‘slanted’ eyes, the insult was as close to an accurate description of my physiognomy as a five-year-old is ever likely to come up with. Looking at my great-grandmother and knowing the history of Jamaica, it is indeed quite likely that I have some Chinese ancestry, so even in this little boy’s insult there was the trace of history, of empire and of the global movement of peoples.

  This is my earliest memory of a racist insult directed at me; there were countless more to come, of course. The overriding feeling that I remember from the numerous instances of verbal racial abuse growing up was a sense of shame, a shame that was somehow incomparably deeper than a boy insulting your mum, the other taboo that, when broken, was almost sure to result in a fight. Racist insults leave you feeling dirty because, even at five years old, we already know on some level that, in this society at least, we are indeed lesser citizens with all the baggage of racialised history following us ghost-like about our days. We are conquered people living in the conquerors’ land, and as such we are people without honour. At five years old we are already conscious of the offence caused by our black body turning up in the wrong space, and have begun to internalise the negative ideas about blackness so present in the culture.

  For example, way back in the 1940s, African-American psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark came up with an experiment known as the ‘doll test’ to examine black American children’s perceptions of race in the era of Jim Crow. The test involved giving children dolls that are exactly the same in every way except for colour and asking them questions about which doll is beautiful, which is bad etc. The results showed that black children had far more positive associations with the white doll, and the test eventually came to be used as part of the evidence for the negative effects of discrimination in the landmark ‘Brown vs. Board of Education’ case. The experiment has been repeated several times in the USA and even as far afield as Italy, right up until recent years, and you can watch many of the results in videos online. You will see that even now both black and white children generally understand very early that blackness is a synonym for bad and that whiteness is synonymous with wealth, power and beauty. The saddest part in the test comes when, after having identified the black doll as ugly and bad, the black children are asked which doll looks most like them, and you see the children hesitate as it dawns on them what that means. Children become race conscious very early despite what even well-meaning parents may want to believe.

  For black children in Britain, our bodies commit the sin of reminding people racialised as white of an uncomfortable truth about part of how this nation became wealthy, and that the good old days when white power could roam the earth unchallenged are over. They now have to contend with one of their empire’s many legacies; a multi-ethnic mother country. Those portions of white Britain that have bothered to get to know ‘people of colour’ or by simple fact of geography are located near them, like in Camden, seem for the most part to have adapted to and accepted this difference as an at least bearable fact of life. It’s ironic that people living in the most ethnically homogenous parts of the country often fear the contamination of difference the most, but this irony holds true across the world. As James Baldwin famously observed, ‘segregation has allowed white people to create only the Negro they wish to see.’

  I was angry at the boy for his words, angry at the world for breaking my innocence, for making me aware so painfully early that my mum and I were not the same, and never would be again. Perhaps I already knew this before that day and was in denial; perhaps this day was just a confirmation rather than a revelation. Looking back now I feel shame for the other boy’s parents – what kind of parent teaches their five-year-old child to think and act this way? The reproduction of such anti-human racist ideas is, to my mind at least, child abuse, but as racism is so endemic we tend not to see it that way.

  As the racist insults continued to come, I learned to throw punches in response. This proved quite effective, but I was naturally a soft-hearted boy and would often cry when I got home even if I had won the fight because I didn’t like hurting other people. We set up other defences; my primary school was very mixed ethnically and economically speaking, but the black children in my year group united against would-be bullies by pretending to be cousins (as all black children whose parents know each other do); we made up a secret language called ‘African’ (even though we were Caribbean), and other children got jealous.

  From that day onwards, my relationship with my mother was not just the relationship of mother and son, but of a white mother to a black son. Race had intervened in our relationship and would be a mediator of it forever more, marking both our actions and attitudes, colouring our conversations and heightening the usual conflicts between mother and son, mapping onto them the loss and suffering of the black world at the hands of ‘whitey’ and the strange mix of guilt, fear and superiority that a great many white people feel every day as a result, but rarely talk about openly. It did not matter that my mother’s family was piss poor by British standards, that they had their own history of being victims of horrendous institutional abuse or even that she was half Scottish and thus had her own quarrels with the English: race overrode those complicated nuances in our relationship because it more often than not also overrode them in British society.

  My mother’s reaction, to her credit, was not to run from the painful truths of the society we lived in and hope for the best, but to confront the fuckery head on. Another boy on another day called me a ‘black bastard’ (minus the Chinese and nigger parts) and my mum told me I should say ‘yes, thanks’ any time a racist came at me with that one, first because it would disarm them and second because it was true – I was b
lack and my parents were not married when I was born, and neither of these things were anything to be ashamed of. She also told me I was black, not mixed race – she understood biological reality of course, but she also understood that race was social not scientific. She knew how I’d be treated when the time came, she knew the challenges I was facing were serious and that confusion would not help me.

  My mother’s understanding of race politics and even her general education were massively affected by her contact with British Caribbean ex-pats. Education was not particularly encouraged in my mother’s household growing up, and certainly not for girls. My mum’s father was an ignorant, violent, unapologetically racist man. He was also conditioned by the class and gender relationships of his day, thus when my mum got the highest exam grades of her siblings – she had three brothers – he told her she must have cheated. When my mum’s teacher encouraged her to go to university her response was to laugh uncomfortably and say, ‘No sir, that’s for posh people’; it seems she had learned her place well. However, my mum had made friends with the only other black family (apart from my father’s family) in the village, which was the family of my godfather, the man to whom this book is dedicated, Uncle Offs. Uncle Offs’ father was a university-educated schoolteacher back in his native Guyana, he was heavily into radical politics and it was expected that his children would get a good education and ideally go to university. My mum was encouraged by Uncle Offs’ family to attend university, and so she did, pursuing a degree in Caribbean history precisely because of this influence. Black Britons’ refusal to accept the class impositions of this society are in no small part what has made our presence here so challenging both for us and for Britain as a whole. My mum’s induction into a radical anti-colonial black politics fundamentally shaped how she raised her children.