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

by Akala

  Class affects everything, even racism, but in complex ways, and a phrase like ‘white privilege’ is not an absolute but a trend, a verifiable factor in human history produced by the philosophy and practice of institutionalised white supremacy. The idea that millions of white people still being relatively poor somehow proves that white privilege does not exist is such a juvenile and historically illiterate argument I’m surprised it is taken at all seriously. There were poor whites in the Jim Crow south, apartheid south Africa and the slave colonies of the Caribbean yet no one would be silly enough with the benefit of historical distance to claim that white privilege did not exist back then. But at the time poor whites in Saint-Domingue for example felt and claimed to be oppressed because they were too poor to own slaves! The practice of legally privileging all people racialised as white literally came about so ruling groups could buy the racial loyalty of poor whites, not to entirely eradicate their poverty. Thus you will hear people talk about ‘the white working class’ in Britain as if whiteness infers indigeneity even though most immigrants to Britain, even before we joined the EU, have been ‘white’ people.

  This is why, in spite of all the sufferings of poor people in Britain, there was a ‘Keep Britain White’ campaign and not a ‘Keep Britain Celtic, Norman and Saxon’ one. These people understood very well what whiteness meant to them emotionally and psychologically, even if its material benefits were meagre.

  The mental and emotional benefits of whiteness are why my granddad – working class, a soldier who had been tortured in battle, an uneducated alcoholic with few serious accomplishments to speak of – could still say ‘well at least I am not a nigger’ as frequently as he did. What did my grandfather understand about whiteness that so many pretend they cannot?

  And it’s also why, though my mum was far from rich and had a great many sufferings of her own to speak of, she still shared a degree of racial discomfort when faced by the questioning eyes of her five-year-old son. But she sought and led him to answers, and did her best to rise to the challenge staring at her from the little person she had created.

  3 – Special Needs?

  My schooling, like everything else in my life it seemed, was an entanglement of contradictions. My primary school was not as ‘mixed’ as my secondary, where the ratio of children hailing from around the globe seemed to be at least half of the student body, but there were still a fair few black and brown children in every class and the economic differences between the families in the school were vast. Like my house, my primary school sat in the nexus between Highgate, a leafy, very wealthy, overwhelmingly white London semi-suburb, and Archway, an area not quite as rough as nearby Tottenham but still nonetheless an area of concentrated council estates packed with the children of Irish, Caribbean and Cypriot immigrants. My primary school was probably one of the better ones in the area and so attracted slightly more of the Highgate crowd than the Archway lot, but that seemed to only highlight how differently we were treated by some of the teachers.

  From my first year I encountered what can only be described as bullying, not from other students as one might expect – the odd racist insult and normal fights aside – but from some of my teachers. My very first teacher felt I had too much to say for myself; he was annoyed that I was a ‘know it all’, apparently. He was so irritated by my self-confidence, my willingness to speak, to offer opinions and even to know the answers to questions asked – all traits that schools are apparently supposed to encourage – that he told me that I was not allowed to speak in class at all unless he pushed my ‘magic button’. My magic button was an invisible spot on my chest that he would poke, thus allowing me to speak. His poke was hard and painful enough that this device had its intended outcome; I stopped asking to speak or to answer questions in class at all. I was five years old.

  Yet it was only during my final year of infants that I really started to appreciate how much an adult, even a teacher, could find a child’s intelligence a reason to be pissed off. I’d been on a trip to Jamaica during the summer holidays before returning to start the new school year. I had the same teacher that I had at the tail end of the year before for some reason. Knowing how talkative I was and what I had just experienced, my mum asked my teacher if she would allow me to take story time that week and tell the rest of the class about everything I had seen in Jamaica – that way I would get it out of my system and not get into trouble for talking in class. The teacher reluctantly agreed, until I actually started to tell my stories, that is. During one of my tales, I told the class that Jamaica was thousands and thousands of miles away and my teacher, clearly annoyed by having to give me this platform, interjected sarcastically with ‘and I wish you were still there.’ I was crushed by the comment and my stories stopped that day.

  The second incident I remember occurred when my mother asked to bring some books from class home for the Christmas holidays and my teacher refused because I had previously lost one behind the apparatus at the play centre. My mum said she would pay for the book if it was not found, but still the teacher refused. I’m not quite sure whether my mum came back into the school another day when my teacher was not there or if it was the same day, but somehow we were left alone in the classroom and my mum decided to ‘steal’ a whole set of books, so I could read over Christmas anyway. I pleaded with my mum, ‘No, you can’t do that Mum, you’ll get me into trouble’, but she said, ‘Don’t worry son, we’ll bring them back after the holidays.’ So off we went, with a whole set of the top level books available for my age group. Despite my teacher’s insistence that she was reading with me regularly, my mum was convinced I was not being pushed hard enough to reach my potential, and was determined to properly assess my reading level for herself. Over that holiday period, my mum made me read the whole set and it became very clear that the books I was being given in class were well below my level. Then the tension finally reached a head.

  I’m not sure precisely how it occurred, but at some point during the course of the year I had ended up in a ‘special needs’ group outside of regular schooling; these groups were for children with learning difficulties and those for whom English was a second language. It is both necessary and admirable that schools make such provisions for those in need of them, but how did I come to end up in such a group? I was born in England and, shamefully, to this day the only language I speak is English; at home I was already reading books for young adults by this age, so clearly neither learning difficulties nor linguistic challenges could explain my being there. I knew at the time that something was amiss about me being in the group but as they gave us hot chocolate and biscuits every session, I was in no rush to leave. In the group we did work that was well below what I was intellectually accustomed to and thus I started to fall behind, to become lazy, bored and even resent the lack of challenges now inherent in my day’s schooling, but I also got the chance to get away from my teacher. On some level I also thought I had done something wrong and that the group was some form of punishment, so I don’t think I quite communicated to my mother that I had been taken out of formal classes.

  Which brings us to the crux of the matter – if I genuinely had learning difficulties my mother and stepfather would surely have been consulted beforehand or at least informed that I was to be placed into this group, but they were not. For reasons best known only to my teacher, she had decided to put me in this group without informing my parents. I’m not sure exactly how long I stayed there, perhaps a month or two, then by total chance one of the staff from my pan-African Saturday school happened to be visiting my ‘normal’ school and noticed that I was in the special needs group. My Saturday school had already been telling my mum that something was up with my behaviour and attitude and now they knew what it was. They immediately informed my mum about me being in the special needs group and she was, of course, furious.

  Now that my mum had found out, she quizzed me about the group and I revealed just how deeply the problems ran. I did not like this teacher at all, I thought she hated
me; I offered my mum a litany of reasons for why I was actually glad to be out of her class. She had told me she wished I had stayed in Jamaica; she always overlooked me to answer questions in the class and even got annoyed by me being a ‘know it all’ (that one again); she was generally horrible to me; sent me out of class for little to no reason and had even hit me with a ruler and a book, on separate occasions. My mum could not believe what she was hearing, that a teacher had hit me and I had not told her – she was livid with me and with the situation, but most of all with the teacher in question.

  Needless to say, the very next day my mum marched up to the school and demanded a meeting with my teacher. I sat there uncomfortably, wanting the ground to swallow me as my mum quizzed her, demanding answers about why I had been placed into the group, why she sent me out so frequently and why she shouted in my face. My mum then dropped the bombshell ‘and why did you hit my son, with a ruler on one occasion and with a book on the other?’ or words to that effect. The teacher had already seemed uncomfortable but now she lost her composure entirely. ‘I admit to tapping him,’ she said, ‘but it’s not because he is . . .’ She trailed off and stuttered, looking at me and then at my mum, trying to find the right word to describe me. I imagine she wanted to say ‘coloured’ but knew that was an outdated expression; she perhaps then mulled over calling me black, but looking at my white mother made that seem inaccurate, so she blurted out ‘it’s not because he is brown’. My mother had not mentioned race up to this point but it had been an unspoken subtext hanging in the air, and now the teacher, of her own volition, had made it central.

  The mix of relief at having finally spoken her mind, embarrassment, shame and indignation on the teacher’s face has stayed with me until now. I can still see her sat back on her chair, I remember the exact classroom at the end of the corridor on the first floor next to the headmistress’s office, the door that I had stood outside of so many times, the large scary windows that let in an unbearable amount of light on the odd days that it was sunny and the tiny little chairs for the future adults. It was now clear to us all that whatever abuses I had had to deal with from this woman were entirely a result of her discomfort at having to teach little brown children, particularly those with a little too much brains and a little too much to say for themselves.

  I was removed from the group and I re-entered formal schooling, but the rest of that year was fraught with difficulties and I started to hate school, resentful at having to obey someone that I knew did not like me simply because I was brown. I remember a supply teacher came in for a week, to my relief. When reading time came I picked The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming and she told me I could not possibly read that and gave me something ‘more suitable’. It may have just been honest disbelief that a seven-year-old could read such a book, but I took it to be disbelief that I could possibly read such a book, and so the incident has stayed with me. Real-life racism makes you paranoid, even in children it creates the dilemma of not knowing if someone is just being horrible in the ‘normal’ way, as people so often are, or if you are being ‘blacked off’ – as me and my friends call it.

  My mum became extra diligent in observing my relations with the teacher; she saw my enthusiasm and behaviour deteriorate and stressed herself out trying to find possible solutions. She spoke to my black Saturday school and they confirmed that, despite their best efforts, I was still misbehaving and my grades were slipping. My mum toyed with changing my school, she even considered sending me to private school knowing that I was probably ‘bright enough’ to get a scholarship of some kind, but I was entirely against the idea. I was excited at the prospect of a more challenging education but I complained to my mum that I would be surrounded by ‘posh white kids’ at private school and therefore it was an absolute no-go. As hard as state education was proving, I’d take my chances with my multicultural inner-city school over and above the cultural isolation of being the only poor child among rich kids and the only brown child among white ones. By seven, I had understood my ‘social location’ already and was not willing to venture into such spaces of alienation.

  By the end of the year my near depression over school life had become so acute that when it became time for us to enter a new school year, the first year of ‘juniors’, my mum pre-emptively had a row with my new teacher. Clearly stressed, she – in retrospect unfairly – scolded him, ‘If you’re not going to bother to fucking teach my son just let me know now and I’ll just pull him out of the bloody school altogether.’ To the teacher’s credit, he was not put off by my mother’s swearing but actually rather impressed by her passion for her son’s education. He sat her down and they had a proper talk about the problems I’d been having; a conversation that ended with my mum agreeing to volunteer to come into the class on selected days to help children with their reading so she could keep an eye on me and be of use to the school as well. The effects on me were dramatic. While I was not overjoyed at the prospect of having my mother in my class – what child would be? – my new teacher took such an active role in trying to unpick some of the damage done to my self-esteem and my attitude to school that I could safely say he changed the entire course of my relationship with formal education.

  It helped that I admired him; he was a mountain of a man, an amateur body builder with a passion for American football and a very smart bloke too. What young boy would not want to be like him? I had not yet fallen in love with normal football and so under his influence I gravitated towards American football, persuading my mum to get me a ball and my friends to play this most un-English of sports with me. As you can imagine, young boys did not take that much persuading to throw themselves and each other to the ground; knees and elbows were cut and grazed on the concrete more times than I care to remember during this year-long obsession. My reading and attitude started to improve and I even got used to my mum being in class; in fact, I was proud that she was helping other children with their reading skills and one of my best childhood friends swears to this day that it was my mum who taught her to read.

  My relationship with this teacher became so close that he even gave me several American football books, expensive hardbacks that could not have been easy to replace. I am pretty sure I cried at the end of the year when I had to leave his class, but he would go on to look out for me for the rest of my primary school years. This would even bring him into conflict with my future teachers, those who did not have my interests so close at heart. He was of Polish origin but I think British born, and in retrospect I do wonder if his own experience of being an immigrant or the child of immigrants may have helped him to better cope with the challenges that such a diverse classroom presents. I never got to ask him about his upbringing during my school years and I have not seen him since, unfortunately.

  The next year of junior school was another major step backwards with a teacher that I clashed with, someone my older sister had already experienced and had not got along with, to say the least. She made my sister cry once by shouting at her and insisting that she was lying about having forgotten her homework at the house – to this day my sister swears that she had actually done the work. It’s only looking back now I realise how strange it actually is to shout in an eight-year-old’s face and call them a liar. My relationship with this teacher is best exemplified by two incidents, the first of which I will recount here. The other I’ll come back to later.

  It’s fascinating how impressionable a child is and how one seemingly insignificant experience can shape your life profoundly. For example, I nearly drowned twice as a child and had to be saved by a vigilant adult both times. As a result of these bad experiences it took me until I was thirty years old to actually become a decent swimmer. Something similar has occurred with drawing and handwriting. My handwriting is almost illegible and, spookily, it is almost identical to my father’s and grandfather’s writing, and I draw like a below-average five-year-old. I love visual art but, much like swimming, an early negative experience very much discouraged me from pursuing dra
wing throughout my childhood.

  In the run up to Christmas my new teacher – the one that followed our English-Polish body builder – had tasked all the students with drawing festive things, and I chose to draw a snowman. I was already quite insecure about my drawing, well aware that the ‘natural’ talent I had with numbers and words did not extend to art. However, with this snowman I was determined to prove myself and so I did – or at least I thought I did. I drew what to my mind was the best picture I had ever drawn, a round and believable snowman, complete with a Christmas hat and surrounded by falling snowflakes. Perhaps it was not all that good in comparison with the more artistic children but I was immensely proud of the piece and I turned it in to my teacher with great satisfaction. She never seemed to be satisfied with my work, but I was sure she would be this time. I was mistaken. She told me the drawing was rubbish, or words to that effect, then ripped it up and commanded that I re-draw it. I was devastated, but this was only the start. This process of re-drawing my unsatisfactory snowman continued for the next couple of days while the rest of the class had moved on to other pursuits. I was totally humiliated.