by Akala
My father’s and my uncles’ experiences at school were so horrendous that they viewed school as a cultural and intellectual war zone, where victory in battle was won by every black student that emerged with As from a fundamentally racist, classist institution. So when, in my last year of primary school, I complained to my dad about another teacher psychologically bullying me in vindictive ways that only an acute observer would see, he did not respond as his parents would have done, by beating me and telling me to ‘just listen to your teachers’. Instead, he came up to my school from West Sussex and met with the headmistress. When the headmistress tried to dismiss his claims that the teacher was patronising me and generally being intimidating and bullying, my father, six foot two and fifteen stone, got up and stood over the seated headmistress. Speaking in his softest, most patronising voice, he said: ‘Now look, I’m speaking softly and being nice, aren’t I? Yet we both know you are intimidated, don’t we?’
The headmistress told my dad that he had made his point and that she would speak to the teacher in question, which to her credit she did. The teacher’s response was a characteristic mix of sarcasm, total dismissal and feigned concern. She declared to the whole class that we were having an official ‘be nice to Kingslee day’ or ‘BNTK day’ – yes, she did abbreviate it and even wrote it on the board in big capital letters – and that Kingslee would today be able to do and say anything he wanted without anyone speaking back in response. Of course, I understood what was happening and tried to stay silent that day, but she directed every question at me, insisting to the class that Kingslee had to be given the chance to answer first, as it was BNTK day today after all. I was ten years old.
Had my parents told me that my negative experiences in school were a result of my own behaviour entirely, or had they not had the intellectual equipment to adequately challenge my mistreatment, like so many of their class and generation, I would have likely dropped out of school entirely. But luckily they took an active interest in my schooling and had no problem coming to my defence against ‘the system’. My mum understood that white children in general and rich white children in particular would be given the benefit of the doubt and that I would not; my dad and all of my uncles knew how threatened many in British society, even some ‘liberal’ white women, felt by educated black children, especially boys, and how hard they would work against my educational attainments, even if sometimes only subconsciously. Were it not for their understanding and support, and that of a few radical teachers (of all ethnicities), ironically my intellectual aptitude, my willingness to read and question beyond the syllabus, may well have led me away from formal education entirely.
Even as an adult, the shock some people still have at a ‘smart black guy’ often provides me and my friends with priceless moments of comedy. Of course, I can tell the difference between someone genuinely complimenting my public speaking as they would any other speaker and someone shocked that I ‘speak so well’ – for a cockney-sounding darkie. When I’m on a television programme or a panel and the opposing person feels the need to patronisingly let me know that ‘you actually made quite a good point’ as if they are still processing the fact of it, one wonders whether race, accent (a class indicator) and dress code are all factors. It’s hard to imagine them feeling the need to let a RP-speaking white Cambridge professor of my age know that he actually makes a good point, though perhaps some of these types are just that patronising. I’m sure many northerners or ‘scousers’ have felt similarly patronised based on the stigmas attached to their accents, and my friend who is a professional writer of Cypriot origin, whose father ‘came up’ in Hackney, often talks about his early jobs working in various companies where his colleagues and bosses could not believe that ‘you read Hermann Hesse? You?’ So as always there is much crossover between assumptions based on class indicators and race (race itself being one of the biggest and most obvious class indicators).
It’s also interesting how class norms can be a disability going into certain spaces, like televised debates, because the truth is that working-class people often don’t have time for all the poncey doublespeak, and when someone is openly patronising and rude our natural response is to tell them to fuck off or, if they are rude enough, to offer them a trip outside for a good old dust-up. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to fight that urge.
My composer friend and I often joke about the look of shock on some white people’s faces when they’re introduced to him as the composer of the music they just heard the orchestra play; and when they try to politely hide their shock and/or resist the urge to ask who helped him do it. No, I am not joking, the question ‘who helped you do it?’ has been asked of him many times. What’s most funny is that my composer friend confuses and confounds the racial stereotypes of everybody. He is very traditionally ‘well spoken’ – even posh – and a classical composer. He is also one of the best-dressed men going and manages to pull off ‘out there’ fashions that most brothers would never try, such as tweed suits and ponchos. Black people sometimes hear the accent, see the clothes and assume ‘he wants to be white’, because they have sadly internalised the idea that there are only certain types of authentic ways to be black. I’ve seen their shock too, when they realise how ‘black’ his politics are despite the suits, the piano and the RP. He actually knows far more about African history and culture than the vast majority of dashiki-wearing Afrocentrists. White people often make the same mistake and say the strangest of things to him, again thinking that he is not one of ‘those’ black people – you know, the ones that respect and love themselves.
The threat posed to some people’s entire sense of identity by an exhibition of human excellence inside a black body is an amount of fear, sideways admiration and contempt for another group of humans that I can’t even imagine being constantly burdened by. These seemingly odd responses to black excellence did not pop out of a vacuum, but rather stem from centuries of anti-black marketing in European literature, thought, philosophy and historiography. Take the ‘historians’ that claimed that Africans, unlike the rest of humanity, had no history, and thus when they found evidence of this supposedly absent history from ‘pre-colonial’ Africa – from the ruins of great Zimbabwe, to the manuscripts of Timbuktu, to the sublime metal art of Ile Ife and Benin – set about trying to look for a non-African source for these works. In some cases, scholars were more willing to entertain the idea that aliens were responsible for African history than Africans! This ‘intellectual’ trend was pioneered by those who took the conditions of enslaved people – that is people physically prevented from attaining an education – and decided that their perceptions of the intellectual aptitude of slaves represented the permanent and genetically pre-determined state of all black people. To smarter and more humane European thinkers, even during the nineteenth century, it was obvious that an enslaved person had very good and obvious motivations for hiding and/or playing down their intelligence, and that any technological gaps between Europe and West Africa were no more likely to be due to skin colour than the technological gaps that existed for centuries between the olive-skinned Romans and the ‘white’ people to the north and west of them, or indeed between Song China and tenth-century Britain.
Euro-America’s ability to dominate black people has not been read as one more chapter in a long history of human exploitation and domination, but rather as permanent racial superiority and inferiority. Thus, as late as the 1990s, ‘top’ academics could argue that racialised differentials in IQ scores in the USA had absolutely nothing to do with the material history of that nation, but rather that black people were just genetically inferior. Of course, the obvious parallel argument that white people are genetically inferior to South East Asians, now that people from that region score higher on the Western – eugenics inspired – IQ test, has certainly been far more muted.
While I am not suggesting that people who are shocked at my friend being a classical composer or by my other homie who is a trauma surgeon would publicly
admit or even honestly believe that black humans are genetically inferior, this is nevertheless the historical propaganda they are responding to and have been influenced by. Britain, it seems, is trapped by its own history and the conflict with its own liberal rhetoric. Are we really trying to encourage and normalise black academic excellence in the UK? Or would we prefer the extra cost of imprisonment and crime that comes further down the line after neglect, just so one can still feel superior? What are the long term demographic and political consequences of creating a prosperous and thus potentially politically powerful black middle class? Let’s just be honest. If we want to fix the racial and economic disparities in the criminal justice system or at least reduce them, combat teenage gang violence, produce better educated children and create a generally better society, then the work starts in the primary school, not in the prison.
4 – Linford’s Lunchbox
‘The Negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness, and if we wish to understand him at all, we must put aside all our European attitudes . . .’
G. M. F. Hegel
‘[Africans are] the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere great enough to arrive at regular government’
Georges Cuvier
‘One is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis.’
Frantz Fanon
On 1 August 1992 I sat down to watch the final of the men’s 100-metre sprint at the Barcelona Olympics. I was just nine years old but athletics and football had by now become a virtual religion for me, though I never quite inherited the obsession with cricket from the older generation of Caribbeans. The whole family fell silent as the men took their starting positions; we were all rooting for Linford Christie, the British champion and one of the foremost black British figures of a generation. Along with Ian Wright, Soul2Soul, Lenny Henry and Lennox Lewis, Linford was part of the strange phenomenon of black Brits winning an informal and unspoken access to a contingent ‘Britishness’ through sports, culture and entertainment.
Black excellence in sport and entertainment has been a particularly contradictory feature of Anglo-America; on the one hand it echoes old stereotypes about natural rhythm, brawn over brains and ‘natural’ animal athleticism, and on the other hand it creates a noticeable schizophrenia: how could black people remain second-class citizens when some of the greatest representatives of ‘British’ (or American) excellence to the world were black? How could England fans keep throwing bananas at black football players now that half the national team was black? How could white America keep claiming the niggers were inferior post Jesse Owens, Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali? The contradiction was glaring.
This dichotomy, and the way people handled it, came to life for me in that first week of August 1992. Linford won the Olympic gold medal in the 100 metres that night, one of only two British athletes to do so since Harold Abrahams in 1924. My house went wild. We were so happy for Linford, yet as we watched him drape himself in the Union Jack we felt the discomfort, joy and confusion of black households up and down the country: happy for Linford, but resentful of the flag that to us represented the National Front, colonialism, police brutality and the Babylon system.
Many of our grandparents proudly saw themselves as British subjects and had no real issue with the flag, indeed many thousands of them had fought under it. However, by the time of Linford’s victory we had become so disheartened by decades of institutional racism that most of us accepted we probably would never really be ‘British’ in the way white people could be, even the millions of ‘White British’ people whose immigrant grandparents arrived at the exact same time as ours. Norman Tebbit’s infamous 1990 ‘cricket test’, in which black Britons were invited to pick a side when England played the West Indies, showed both how exclusive some people’s concept of national belonging was and exposed the area of sport as a key site of national and racial anxieties, loyalties and frictions.
As Linford ran back around the track, close to tears, draped in the Union Jack, with thousands of adoring fans cheering and millions watching at home, I doubt he had any idea how the tabloid press would convey his victory in the coming days. Watching at the time, I certainly had no idea.
I walked into the newsagent’s in the days after Linford’s win and, oddly for a nine-year-old, was browsing through one of the tabloids – maybe taking a sneaky peek at page three, to be honest – when I stumbled upon the strangest cartoon. There had been a hosepipe ban that summer, and this cartoon featured a caricature of Linford Christie with a huge bulge in his trousers. The ‘hose pipe inspector’ was pointing to the bulge and informing Linford that ‘there is a hosepipe ban you know’, or words to that effect. I knew this was very strange and that there was something significant in this story being run just after the highlight of Linford’s career, but of course I get the significance a little better now.
In the days and weeks after Linford’s historic victory, the press was not focused on his contribution to British sport but instead full of stories about ‘Linford’s Lunchbox’, a less than subtle euphemism for his apparently huge penis. Presumably Linford had the exact same penis for his entire career and did not get a transplant on the night of 31 July 1992, so why had the press chosen this moment, the moment of the greatest glory in an athlete’s career, to objectify Linford in such a way?
The obsession with Linford’s Lunchbox was said to have been begun by the Sun, who on the 6 August 1992 ran a feature entitled ‘10 ways to pack your lunchbox like Linford’. In this feature, they got a black model to pack his shorts full of goodies to achieve ‘that look’. Other newspapers, including some of the broadsheets, ran their own stories about ‘Linford’s Lunchbox’, and it became a sort of cultural cliché. If you ask any person of my age or older about ‘Linford’s Lunchbox’ they are likely to know what you mean and to remember that particular race at the Barcelona Olympics. Prior to that night, I’m not sure much thought had been given to Linford’s penis in particular, as all of the male athletes wore similar Lycra shorts. The question is, would Linford’s penis ever have become a story if he had not won?
Linford made his feelings about the distasteful nature and poor timing of the comments pretty clear, which only damaged his already rocky relationship with the British media. Linford’s concerns were generally brushed off or dismissed as him being oversensitive, even by some black journalists like Tony Sewell at the Voice, who accused Linford of being a ‘big girl’s blouse’ and claimed that ‘celeb guys’ – like Linford – made him ashamed to be a black man. Rather odd, to say the least.
The lunchbox ‘scandal’ reached its iconic peak when Linford appeared on ITV’s Sport in Question with Jimmy Greaves, Chris Eubank, Ian St John and a journalist from the Mail on Sunday called Patrick Collins. After a question from an audience member about the media treatment of him, Linford Christie again made it quite clear that he felt the media had treated him unfairly and overlooked his achievements in favour of an obsession with his ‘Lunchbox’. This Sport in Question episode then descended into a row that will be – and has been – written about for decades because of what it said about race, sexuality, culture and British politics. Patrick Collins defended the press and accused Linford of ‘seizing’ on some negative comments and making generalisations about the media, despite Linford pointing out that even the broadsheets had carried the ‘Lunchbox’ story in the wake of his Olympic gold. Jimmy Greaves told Linford he should wear something more appropriate if he was so offended, and let him know that ‘he has never offended me with it [his penis], I can tell you’ and that ‘a lot of women are fascinated by it’.
Unsurprisingly, Chris Eubank then took the side of Linford and entered into an argument with Jimmy Greaves, where Mr Greaves revealingly told Eubank that he should not have entered the ring to the song ‘Simply the Best’ – essentially that he should have been more humble and known his place. Why we
re these thoughts on the tip of his tongue? By the end of the dialogue, Linford wound up crying and the mood entirely changed once Greaves realised Linford was actually seriously offended.
It is an iconic moment in British television and I felt an enormous sympathy for Linford and actually feel that his tears, far from making him a ‘big girl’s blouse’ as Tony Sewell said, showed a fragile and human side of black masculinity that is rarely if ever seen on British television. It’s fairly clear to all that Linford could snap Jimmy Greaves’ neck in two if he chose to, but instead of raging and becoming ‘the angry black man’ – though there is certainly a place for that – Linford cried, a perfectly valid response to the rage that a person might feel when their spectacular achievements have been overlooked in favour of their genitalia. Stuart Pearce, Paul Gascoigne and many other British footballers have publicly cried at iconic moments in their careers and received sympathy and support, so it’s rather a shame that a writer at Britain’s main black newspaper took this moment as a chance to have a dig at Linford for not being man enough, rather than to examine the dynamics that were really at play.
