by Akala
Even if we look at the differences between the racial regimes of the continental United States, where European settlers were the majority, and the Caribbean, where people of European heritage were a minority, we still see whiteness functioning as a fulcrum of power. In the USA, especially after slavery was ‘abolished’, there was a tendency toward the ‘one drop’ rule, which defined a person containing any vestige of ‘black blood’ as a negro and thus subject to Jim Crow discrimination. In the Caribbean plantations, there was a greater likelihood of ‘whites’ recognising their mixed-race offspring and even using these offspring as a buffer class in the plantation system. These different systems of race management have legacies that are with us until this very day; in the USA I am without a doubt a black person, yet the same light-brown skin that makes me a black person in America or even Britain, with all the stereotypes and issues that come with ‘blackness’, makes me a person of ‘high colour’ in the Caribbean. In the Caribbean, my complexion is associated with being middle class, with privilege and wealth and snobbery. Very few people of my complexion live in Jamaica’s ghettoes for example, which is part of what made Bob Marley’s story so unusual.
To understand just how flexible the boundaries of whiteness have been, even in America, we can look at the case of just one state. In the early twentieth century, Virginians made the first change in their definition of ‘mulatto’ in 125 years. From the Act of 1785 to 1910, a mulatto, or ‘coloured’ person, was someone who had a quarter or more negro blood. In 1910, that category expanded to include anyone with one sixteenth or more negro blood, and many people previously classified as white became legally coloured. Then in 1924, in a statute entitled ‘Preservation of Racial Integrity’, legislators for the first time defined ‘white’ rather than just ‘mulatto’ or ‘coloured’. The statute, which forbade a white person to marry any non-white, defined a ‘white’ as someone who had ‘no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian’ or no more than one sixteenth American-Indian blood. In 1930, the Virginia legislature defined ‘coloured’ in a similar, though slightly less restrictive way, as any person ‘in whom there is ascertainable any negro blood.’5
Despite pretending to be permanent, fixed and scientific, racial classifications have always been bent to the perceived needs or wills of ruling groups. For example, in colonial Spanish America mixed people could buy a certificate of ‘whiteness’6 and at a certain point under very specific circumstances in eighteenth century Georgia, when the frontier ‘needed protecting’ from Native Americans and the Spanish, even a black person could become white.7
At various points in history, Hindus, Arabs and even the Japanese could find themselves defined as honorary whites; racial theory was never as precise as we may assume it to have been today, it was always amenable to utility.8 In Brazil, where racial slavery lasted the longest, and where by far the largest number of Africans were taken, there emerged an incredible number of racial categories dividing the different portions of a person’s ancestry. Below are just a few of the possible 500 variations.
Branco, preto, Moreno claro, Moreno escuro, mulato, Moreno, mulato claro, mulato escuro, negro, caboclo, escuro, cabo verde, claro, aracuaba, roxo, amarelo, sarara escuro, cor de canela, preto claro, roxo claro, cor de cinza, vermelho, caboclo escuro, pardo, branco sarara, mambebe, branco caboclado, moreno escuro, mulato sarara, gazula, cor de cinza clara, creolo, louro, Moreno claro, caboclado, mulato bem claro, branco mulato, roxo de cabelo bom, preto escuro, pele.9
Regardless of how many terms there were to define people racially, Brazil, like all of the other former slave colonies of the Americas, worked to extend and maintain white supremacy long after slavery had ended, despite all its claims to being a racial democracy.10 From trying to import as many people from Europe as possible, expressly to lighten the population and get rid of what was often called ‘the black stain’, to becoming a home for fleeing European fascists, Brazil’s maintenance of horrendous racism can be seen very clearly today. I have visited Brazil many times and I can say confidently that you will struggle to see Afro Brazilians in the wealthy areas of Rio or even Salvador, and if you do find them there they are likely to be homeless or on their way back to the favela from doing some kind of menial work. This despite the fact that the majority of Brazil’s population is black and that Brazil has the largest population of black people in any country on earth, aside from Nigeria.
During one of my trips there, I got a very real personal taste of the Brazilian authorities’ attitudes to race. I was shooting a video for a song called ‘Yours and My Children’, which touches on police brutality in Brazil as one of its themes. We had been shooting all day in the Rocinha favela in Rio, which is said to be the largest slum in South America. We packed the equipment into the car and left, quite satisfied with our day’s work; my director and cameraman, both ‘white’ Brazilians, were in the front of the car, and I was in the back. As we left the favela one of the cars from the massive police blockade that seems to permanently surround the neighbourhood followed us and pulled us over.
Rather than demand to speak to the driver or see his licence, as one would assume the police would do when stopping a vehicle, they demanded that I get out of the back of the car. No sooner had I got out of the car than one of the policemen pointed his huge machine gun in my face and started shouting something at me, but unfortunately for me I had done the typical British thing and learned barely any Portuguese. The officer got more irate and seemed to take his gun off safety; I kept my hands in the air where they had been the whole time and said nothing. It is very strange; I have been in life-threatening situations a few times in my life and while you assume that fear will consume you, your reactions are often just odd, not out of bravery or heroism but just simply as a reaction to the absurdity of it all. In the moment, I knew I was so powerless that I actually just felt rather resigned. I had come to make a video for a song that was partly about Brazil’s horrendous police brutality, so I knew very well how often their police shoot people, even children.11 How ironic would it be if I get shot by the police while making this video? I thought, as I stared down the barrel of the officer’s gun. I think I even let out an awkward chuckle at the thought.
Then, in a flash, the director of the video ran over to me and pulled up my top to reveal my waist to the officer, and I immediately understood. The director and the officer exchanged a few more words and the relieved policeman lowered his gun, got back in his car and drove off. As we drove back to our destination the director and cameraman explained what had happened, even though we all already knew. The officer had been shouting at me to pull up my top and show that I did not have a gun on me; he had obviously assumed that I was a favela drug dealer accompanying my two rich clients somewhere – because why else would an Afro Brazilian be in a car with two rich kids? – and that I was likely to be strapped. The director claimed that the policeman had genuinely been getting ready to shoot me, as he assumed I was Brazilian and just being difficult by not pulling my top up. Once the fracas was over and the officer put his gun down, the director got to explain to him that I was not ‘one of those people’, i.e. not from the favela but actually from the UK. The officer, like most Brazilians, just looked bemused at the idea that I was not a Brazilian.
My director and cameraman felt so palpably uncomfortable at having to confront such an obvious example of white privilege that I practically had to counsel them for the rest of trip to assuage their guilt. It wasn’t their fault, but they nonetheless knew that they lived in a society where tens of thousands of poor people – overwhelmingly darker skinned – were murdered every year, thousands of them by police. By being descendants of later migrants to Brazil from Italy and Germany, brought in to whiten the country, they would likely never face what is a daily reality for most of their fellow citizens. This vast difference in opportunity and outcome exists through no direct fault or merit of either party, but rather through the traces of history and the random luck of birth. Still, while w
hiteness can usually be taken for granted by those it protects, the absence of whiteness can literally be the difference between life and death even in an ostensibly colour-blind country like Brazil.
In all of the former slave colonies of the Americas where whiteness was pioneered as a tool of social control, it pretty much worked a treat. For all the centuries slavery went on – with just a few notable exceptions like the Polish in Haiti, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and the multi-ethnic working-class rebellion that almost took over New York in 174112 – no matter how deplorable the conditions for poor whites may have been, they rarely joined the side of the enslaved in the scores, perhaps hundreds of rebellions against slavery throughout those years. Indeed, free blacks and mulattoes, often property owners and sometimes even slave owners themselves, were far more likely to join and even lead slave rebellions out of racial nationalism alone. This was also because even free blacks and mulattoes were subject to intense discrimination. For example, in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in the late eighteenth century, the unusually large and wealthy group of free people of colour were not permitted to become doctors or lawyers, to eat, pray or be buried with whites, nor to dress like whites. They even needed a permit for dancing and were forbidden from taking their French fathers’ surnames.13
To greater or lesser degrees this discrimination against free communities of colour existed right across the Americas, but after slavery was reformed or ended race became even more important, as ‘free people of colour’ ceased to mean anything, seeing as all black people were now technically ‘free’. New systems of slavery were invented, particularly in America, and even more sadistic ways of publicly killing and torturing black people than had existed during slavery became common.14 Ironically at least during slavery a black person’s status as property sometimes acted as a barrier to killing them or damaging them beyond repair (though I do stress, only sometimes). During slavery, white and black Americans had lived in the closest proximity imaginable, with black women often wet nursing and raising white children, and of course ‘sexual relations’ and rape were entirely normal. But once black people ceased to be white people’s property, proximity became a problem, so segregation was enforced along with anti-miscegenation laws that made what was common during slavery – sex between the races – a crime after it. Having defined themselves as superior and marked themselves out as racially distinct for the purposes of being able to own other human beings and profit from their labour, whites understood that they had made themselves a potential target for racial revenge now that black people were free. The entire history of the USA since 1865, particularly in the southern states, has been indelibly shaped by this fear.
When we think of white supremacy and segregation (if we think about them at all), we tend to think of the American south before 1965 or of South Africa before 1990, but virtually all European colonies were ruled by white-supremacist legislation of one form or another, though to massively varying degrees. In British-ruled Hong Kong, for example, the Chinese had to carry night passes, were banned from attending certain schools and going to the theatre at certain hours and had to travel in separate rail carriages from ‘Europeans’. The rat-infested Chinese slum ‘below the peak’ of Hong Kong had much in common with other racialised slums across the ‘third world’.15
Back in Europe itself, whiteness had long been associated with beauty and divine light and blackness with evil and demons. However, sixteenth century writers and thinkers were still able to recognise that their standards of beauty were only relative, as evidenced in many writers’ works, including Shakespeare’s series of sonnets to a female love interest of his that he repeatedly describes as black, usually referred to by others as the ‘Dark Lady’. However, during the eighteenth century thinkers like Voltaire, Kant and Hume started to espouse an openly white-supremacist philosophy.
While it’s absolutely obvious that white people have no monopoly on ethnic hatreds or dominating and brutalising other human beings, in my personal opinion – and I do believe it’s somewhat grounded in the evidence – the idea of race and white supremacy pioneered in eighteenth-century Europe, combined with newly formed nation states and industrial technology, took the human capacity for and practice of barbarity to levels rarely if ever before seen in history. It was Europe’s capacity for and mobilisation of greater organised violence that colonised the planet, not liberal ideas, Enlightenment Humanism or the Protestant work ethic. And the dehumanisation of the racial other made mass killing particularly permissible and thus was central to Western dominance. The Second World War is often seen as the peak of this brutality in world history, and what the Nazis did as an aberration. But however much some try to divorce Nazi Germany from this earlier history, the reality is they were very much inspired by American race laws when crafting laws to govern ‘the Jews’, as well as drawing on the much wider and longer pan-Euro-American dialogue about race and eugenics. The practice of what came to be known as genocide apparently seemed perfectly acceptable, even admirable to mainstream Western political figures – including Winston Churchill – when its victims were a ‘lower-grade race’.16 The Nazi genocides sprang from a much longer history of articulating white supremacy that had been developed on the plantations of the Americas, practised in colonising the globe and then codified into a respected philosophy during the Enlightenment and the long nineteenth century. We will return to the specifics of the idea of ‘race’ as opposed to just white supremacy later, though the two are inextricably linked.
The sole non-‘Western’ nation to successfully adopt and apply ‘Western’ ideas in the nineteenth century was Japan. Imperial Japan quickly and consciously adopted European technological innovations during a period known as the Meiji Restoration, and went on to have its own brutal nationalist empire. Imperial Japan’s capacity for extreme brutality was one of the main things that actually undermined the idea of white supremacy in the early part of the twentieth century.17 All of the pleading and protesting or even attempts to valiantly fight back with obviously inferior weaponry by non-white colonised people around the globe did very little to dent European imperialists’ self-confidence and their appetite for brutality; if anything it only further convinced imperialists of the innate inferiority of the savages. Only once Japan showed that ‘Asiatics’ could beat or at least equal white people at their own game did mainstream Western thought seriously start to entertain what the few radical critics of imperialism had long been saying; that imperial expansion could not go on unchecked and that white people were not, in fact, supreme – even in the capacity for cruelty.
Had Japan come to dominate the modern world we may now be discussing the prejudices of the Japanese. In fact, despite the collapse of the Japanese empire, the brutality of imperial Japan is still a sore point in much of South East Asia and China, quite rightly and understandably. I’m sure the same Brits that think critics of the British Empire should just ‘get over it’ would not think or say the same when talking to a Korean or Filipino about being occupied, enslaved and tortured by the Japanese, though I’m not entirely convinced they’d feel much empathy either. Revealingly, even the Daily Mail turned into a ‘left-wing snowflake’ that bemoaned Japan’s refusal to apologise for the brutality they inflicted on Brits during the battle of Hong Kong, when remembering the seventy-fifth anniversary of the British defeat there.18
But while white people have no monopoly on oppression, and hierarchies run by people other than ‘whites’ may well share many of the same features, it does not change the fact that whiteness from its very inception in the slave colonies of the New World was a supremacist identity, an identity aggressively predicated on what it is not. Thus whiteness has always functioned as a tool of domination, as Charles Mills puts it: ‘Whiteness is a phenomenon unthinkable in a context where white does not equal power at some structural level.’19
The concept of whiteness goes hand in hand with the concept of white supremacy – hence why the progress against white supremacy that has been
made so far feels, to some white people, like an attack on their identity. This is obviously not white genocide; in fact if white people were experiencing anything remotely resembling a genocide white nationalists would not throw the term around so lightly. But when a given group is used to having all of the political power, and virtually unlimited privilege to define and name the world, any power sharing, any obligation to hear the opinions of formerly ‘subject races’ – who would have once been called uppity niggers and lynched accordingly – can feel like oppression. However, while whiteness seeks to create a monolith, in that it aims to mask significant class oppression and ethnic conflict between people who are all supposedly white, people racialised as white are obviously not a monolith, and intra-European ethnic, class and national conflicts may well again override any fragile sense of white unity, as they have so many times before in history.
Many of the most celebrated intellectual icons of the last few centuries, from Jefferson, Roosevelt and Wilson to Lincoln, Kant, Hume, Churchill, Hugo, Hegel and many more otherwise intelligent and in some cases very brilliant people, openly espoused their belief in innate white supremacy, so it is rather odd that we are so squeamish about the phrase now. Even stranger that we are trained to think of white supremacy as the invention of some supposedly obscure hooded lunatics in the American South. This belies reality, first in that the KKK at their height had many millions of members, and second because, as shown above, white supremacy was a mainstream and openly espoused legal, political and moral imperative until the latter half of the twentieth century, so hardly ancient or remote history.
The picture is nevertheless complicated in Britain – at home, if not in its former empire – and might provide some of the reasons why white people here sometimes find terms like ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege’ either inapplicable to Britain or hard to understand. First, Britain never practised open white supremacy on domestic soil as it did in the colonies, so those of us who hail from the colonies have a different understanding of British racial governance, even if we were born here. Second, the most deprived and violent regions of Britain remain areas that are almost exclusively white, such as the rough parts of Glasgow, Belfast and north-east England, a subject to which we will return later. Can the white people who burned to death in Grenfell Tower along with the ‘ethnics’, or were crushed to death at Hillsborough and then demonised in the press as thieves, or the dead at Aberfan, be said to have had ‘white privilege’? I can totally see why this might at first seem absurd to some people. Especially in relation to Kensington and Chelsea, where the working-class Muslim population in the north of the borough so visible during the Grenfell fire contrasts sharply with another large population of Muslims in the south of the borough who hail from the Gulf states, and are rich enough for the paupers to know not to aim their hatred of Muslims at them as they drive up Kensington High Street in their Louis Vuitton-patterned Lamborghinis.
