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

by Akala

  So why have so many white people and publications been upset by black sporting achievement? I mean, I can’t imagine watching Russian or Chinese dominance in gymnastics and thinking I’m never going to try that because I am not Russian or Chinese, much less feeling ethnically inadequate. I can’t imagine watching Lord of the Rings and thinking, Oh, white people being excellent again, what a bummer. This brings us to one of the least spoken about aspects of Western racial mythologies over the past few centuries: the insanity it inflicts on many of its intended beneficiaries. An identity predicated on supremacy is not healthy or stable. An identity that says ‘I am, because you are not’ is what Hegel was talking about when he wrote his master–slave dialectic, even if he did not realise this himself. The long and short of it is that the master makes himself a slave to his slave by needing that domination to define him.

  White supremacists, as much as they don’t want to admit it, make themselves slaves to black excellence when they allow its existence to unbalance their entire sense of self. This racialised fragility is what caused the racist mob attacks in Britain in 1919 and 1958, the fire bombings of the 1980s and the now-famous case of Stephen Lawrence. Humans kill for a whole host of strange reasons, yet we rarely think about how strange it is for the colour of another person’s skin to provoke a strong enough reaction to want to murder them. We talk about white privilege but we rarely talk about the white burden, the burden of being tethered to a false identity, a parasitic self-definition that can only define itself in relation to blacks’ or others’ inferiority.

  This is the mentality that made lynching a form of light entertainment and made it illegal for black and white people to get married or even be seen together in the street in apartheid South Africa, the mentality that crafted the Nuremberg Laws and gave birth to theories of vast Jewish conspiracies behind every movement in history – from the ultra-capitalist banker to the Bolshevik revolutionary, those evil crafty Jews were apparently behind it all. It takes work to fear another people that much and while black people should be right to fear and even resent the history of white racial dominance, they should also feel, in a strange way, quite flattered by it. Despite what white supremacists claim, going to such extents as they have to prevent black excellence is really a rather huge compliment. For Jack Johnson’s success to lead to the search for a great white hope is, frankly, rather pathetic; for Jesse Owens to be able to spoil the worldview of an entire nation is, again, pretty sad. Dangerous as racism is, it also makes victims out of white people – like those of my school teachers that felt threatened by a child’s intelligence.

  I know some black and brown folk reading this will think I have gone crazy, but hear me out. As much as racism might piss me off, I’d never want to have been born anyone other than myself in this culture at this time. Why? Because in spite of whatever challenges I might face, I love my people, history and culture and I don’t need Chinese people or Indians or Spaniards to not reach their full human potential to feel good about myself; that is far too much power to give to another group. I can be inspired by the brilliance of Shakespeare or Stephen Hawking or Lao Tzu and it’s totally fine that they are not black. I’m sure people racialised as white but not aggressively tethered to a supremacist identity feel similarly. So while we are often encouraged to spill our hearts about how bad racism is as if we were its sole victims, and as if white people can’t even comprehend what is going on, I’d never want to swap roles and be the one spitting on children because they look different and want to go to school, or be ready to beat a child to death because they apparently whistled at a woman of my ‘race’.

  Granted these are American examples and the US is pretty extreme in all ways – positive and negative – but the UK has not been totally free of these insanities, even domestically. So when news anchors ask about race, why not turn the anthropological lens around? Let’s ask white people about whiteness on occasion and not allow the dominant identity to remain invisible, thus retaining its mystical power. Some activists would argue this would only ‘centre’ whiteness again and is thus problematic; I am not so convinced. It would have been great had Denise Lewis or Colin Jackson asked the commentator why he felt white people could not be inspired by Usain Bolt’s achievements the way that generations of writers who are not white men have been inspired by Shakespeare, Dickens, Steinbeck and Herbert. The way that all football fans, whatever their country of origin, have been inspired by Maradona and Messi. The way that the millions of us, including myself, who practise Asian martial arts have been inspired by Bruce Lee and Buakaw and the monks of Shaolin. What is it this man feels about white identity that makes him opine that white people are incapable of being inspired by the excellence of people that happen to be black, and is he correct? Why does he think so little of white people and why did his saying this in front of millions provoke little to no reaction?

  Whether it’s Linford’s Lunchbox, Jack Johnson’s unforgivable blackness in defeating the great white hopes, or Jesse Owens embarrassing Hitler on his own soil, the black athlete has had and continues to have a strange relationship with the white public imagination. In the 1960s and 1970s, Muhammad Ali occupied an iconic place in British popular culture, his legendary interview on Parkinson in 1971 exhibited such charisma and intelligence that it won him the admiration of audiences everywhere, even while he told white people that he’d frankly had enough of them.

  On the one hand, the black athlete has totally destroyed the myth of white genetic superiority time and again, yet for many this has served not as an example of black excellence, discipline and achievement in one of the only obvious routes out of poverty for working class black youth, but rather as conformation for the existence of some deviant mystery nigger gene. Today, black athletes representing Britain is a norm – there are no more banana skins and no more bullets in the post for black footballers playing for their country. The nation has just had to get used to an England football team that is half black, and if current youth-team trends are anything to go by, set to get ‘blacker and blacker’ into the future. The Premier League, much like the NBA and NFL in the USA, would simply not be the brilliant spectacle it is without black athletes, yet the same institutional controversies surround them; a palpable lack of black managers and coaching staff and, of course, no owners at all in a field so disproportionately dominated by people of African heritage.

  Yet there have still been scandals surrounding football and racism, even in these now golden post-banana-skin years, most famously former Aston Villa manager Ron Atkinson calling Marcel Desailly ‘a fucking lazy thick nigger’ in 2004. Atkinson was working as a commentator for ITV at the time and did not realise his mic was still recording – the comment was actually broadcast in some parts of the world. Atkinson had to resign from ITV in shame, but had the comment been made off air, we can have strong doubts whether that would have been the case. As his defence, Atkinson claimed that he was ‘one of the first managers to give black players a chance’. He obviously thought this made him sound less racist, when of course what it suggests is that he thinks black players need to be ‘given’ a chance, i.e. they do not work hard and automatically deserve their places like others based on merit, they are ‘given’ their chances by the inevitably white ‘authority’ figures like him. You would never hear a manager claim he was one of the first to give white players a chance. There were several puzzling things about the episode, not least Big Ron’s claim that it was just a mistake to have such a vitriolic phrase as ‘lazy thick nigger’ ready for one apparently bad game by a footballing legend such as Marcel Desailly. Also, and predictably, a crew of black ex-players lined up around the block to defend Big Ron and let the world know that he was not a really a racist – yes, those black people do exist, those that would rush to defend someone calling their colleague a ‘lazy thick nigger’ but are totally silent about issues the rest of the time. At the time of writing two separate stories around racism in football have recently broken, one involving a number of former
Chelsea youth team players accusing two former coaches Graham Rix and Gwyn Williams of inflicting regular racist abuse during their years at the club. It is alleged that Rix and Williams routinely referred to black children at the club as monkeys, coons, niggers, wogs, spear chuckers, even telling one of them that ‘if his heart was a big as their cock he might be a great player that ran more’.2 The other story was a confessional from England under-17 World Cup winner Rhian Brewster about the regular racist abuse he has had to deal with whilst playing for Liverpool and England and his dismay at a lack of action from the authorities.3

  Which brings us onto the bigger question: what is blackness? And what is it about blackness in the bigots’ mind that could provoke an adult to feel so threatened by young boys in their care who dream of one day playing in the Premier League? Or provoke sexual insecurities so deep that a lynching could ensue at the mere thought of sexual intercourse between a black man and a white woman in the Jim Crow south?

  What I want to look at here is the construction of blackness in the racist imagination and the specific form of historical prejudice meted out to people on the grounds of having black skin or being defined as black. That hatred for darker-skinned people is a global issue can be glimpsed from the beatings and discrimination meted out to African students in India, or the monkey chants aimed at black footballers in Eastern Europe – Eastern Europeans were major victims of slavery, historically speaking, and never embarked on racialised globe-trotting empires like their Western neighbours – or the strange mix of fear, revulsion and intrigue that greets black people in many parts of south-east Asia – which stopped me from getting a taxi on one of the busiest streets in South Korea for almost an hour. I asked my Korean friends if I was being paranoid, and they just laughed and said of course not.

  Despite this global pattern, blackness is defined very differently from place to place. One of the reasons that I know that white people are being obtuse when they pretend to not understand something as basic as white privilege is because, being ‘half white’, I have myself been treated entirely differently based on the perception of my blackness in a given society. In Britain and the USA I am racialised as black, in South Africa I am coloured, in Brazil I am a Carioca, a person from Rio, across the Caribbean I am ‘high coloured’ as previously mentioned – and in all places I am treated accordingly. In northern Africa, where I pass for a brown-skinned Amazigh local, darker-skinned black people are regularly referred to as Abeed, meaning slave, and I am not because I am light enough to ‘pass’.

  It is interesting to note that even a disproportionate number of black America’s revolutionary icons are lighter skinned; Malcolm, Martin, Muhammad, Angela Davis and Huey Newton – partly reflective of the history of the ‘one drop rule’ in America in that if any of those people who are very ‘light’ had been born in the Caribbean, their skin tone and the history behind it would have almost certainly meant that they would have been born middle class or aristocracy or at least be perceived as such. If mixed-race-looking Malcolm X or Angela Davis were born in Jamaica, they would have been ‘uptown people’, and thus had an entirely different life experience than the one they had in America, based simply on the different perceptions of the very same colours in different places. On the other hand, if you moved them to Brazil they would again be associated with those from the bottom of the society. Was part of Bob Marley’s ‘marketability’ his light skin? Would Obama have been elected if he had two black parents and jet-black skin? We’ll never know, but I personally doubt it.

  But perhaps the most unusual way of setting the boundaries of blackness I have ever encountered has to be in Australia. I have toured in Australia twice and gone there to do Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company work on a separate occasion. I have appeared on panels there with activists and thinkers and done workshops with school and youth groups. In Australia I met many people that to me looked white and certainly would be perceived as such in any country I have ever visited apart from Australia, yet they swore they were blackfellas – as Aboriginal people often call themselves – and the intensity with which they spoke about their blackness let me know they had really seen and been through some things, that they were not trying to be cool, that they really had lived blackness in the harshest sense Australia could possibly muster. How could this occur that people that literally have a ‘white’ complexion (but Aboriginal features) came to be seen as black? The root of this seeming oddity of course has to be sought in history. From 1910 to 1970 between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families to be raised either by white families or in children’s homes across the country. This was a policy of forced assimilation designed to get Aboriginal Australians to forget and forgo their traditional culture and language. Physical and sexual abuse were rampant, the children were functionally undereducated and were often taught that their families and community had willingly forsaken them. These victims of this process are today referred to as the stolen generations. The ‘white’-looking Aboriginal people I encountered along with all the other gradations of mixed-looking Aboriginal blackfellas are one of the legacies of this insane and genocidal process. No wonder they so fiercely defend their blackness when Australia had literally physically stolen their grandparents and tried to erase every aspect of their black identity. There is little doubt that today blackfellas in Australia, even the nearly white-looking ones, are treated and viewed more harshly than a relatively well-off black British visitor such as myself is, showing again how race and class can adapt and change depending on time and place. Australia attempted to reconcile with this history – to a degree – during the 1990s with the ‘Bringing them Home’ report and expressions of regret from the then prime minister John Howard, but terrible treatment of Australia’s indigenous population and the resentment that results from this treatment continue to pose a serious challenge to the country.4

  That even black people can seriously internalise anti-black sentiment can be seen in the massive trend for skin bleaching across black communities, and old Caribbean sayings such as ‘anything too black cyan good’. As long as whiteness is a metaphor for power, blackness must of course function as a metaphor for powerlessness, and as long as money whitens, poverty must blacken.

  If anti-black prejudice is global, to massively varying degrees of course, has this always been the case and, if not, how did it become the case? This is what I will try to answer below; however, I would like to note that I am not going to address the caste system in India here for the simple reason that I don’t know enough of that history to do it any real justice. What we are looking at then is the development of anti-black prejudice in the cultures of the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the Americas.

  Interestingly, while the Bible and the Koran are both free of anti-black prejudice, in some ways the story of anti-blackness is rooted in the history of the Abrahamic faiths and sort of begins with a random Bible verse that does not even mention colour at all. Genesis 9:18–25 talks about the sons of Noah; Ham, Shem and Japeth. Ham and all his children were cursed to be slaves because According to this verse, Ham did not cover his naked father.

  Despite the actual verse not mentioning Ham’s colour at all, from this passage a whole mythology developed around black people being the cursed sons of Ham and therefore eternally suited for slavery, well over a thousand years before the invention of ‘race’ as we think of it. While the colour symbolism of black as bad and white as good has existed for thousands of years, across many cultures including in Africa, there is no reason that this esoteric colour symbolism should have been applied to human beings’ skins, and social structures designed accordingly.

  That is something that came about more through slavery. Slavery is a common and ancient institution. It has existed right across the planet from the largest empires to the smallest tribal groups. It has underpinned the most admired periods of European history; Ancient Greece, Imperial Rome, the Florentine renaissance, the (European) Enlightenment and the I
ndustrial Revolution. For most of history, the people doing the enslaving came from similar(ish) regions of the world to those being enslaved. The very word slave comes from Slav, meaning Slavic, because so many ‘white’ Eastern Europeans were enslaved by other ‘Europeans’ and even sold to Muslims by them for centuries. Slavery in medieval Europe, the Mediterranean and the ancient world, though common, never came to be racial in a white–black binary sense. Even in the quintessential ancient ‘European’ empire, Rome, a society partly built by plantation-style slaves, blackness and slavery never came to be widely associated, yet when we think of ‘slaves’ today it tends to conjure images of black Africans enslaved in the Americas. The process by which this became the case has its roots in the ancient and medieval world.

  While a certain degree of cultural chauvinism is near universal, with the expansion of Arab Islam from the seventh century and European Christianity – first Roman from the fourth century then western from the fifteenth – that chauvinism came to be linked to the spread of a written monotheistic theology claiming to be a universal truth. While Muslim jurists, unlike their Christian counterparts, continually upheld the idea of racial equality in theory, in reality most of the enslaved in the empires of the Islamic world came to be black, and though lighter-skinned and even ‘white’ people were enslaved by the Ottoman, Abbasid, Fatamid and Moroccan empires, black slaves were particularly devalued, costing less, given the lowest jobs and in general prevented from attaining more sought-after roles as ‘easily’ as their lighter skinned counterparts. As for the women – who made up most of the enslaved in these regions, unlike later in the Americas – they were seen as less beautiful than their white European fellow slaves, with the notable exception of the Abyssinians.