by Akala
The idea of race, i.e. the idea that human phenotypes or ethnic/religious origins tell us something significant about the genetic, moral and intellectual capacity of human beings, and that this something is permanent, unalterable and hierarchical, was only properly codified in the eighteenth century. Ethnocentrism, bigotry and even a type of ‘proto-racism’ have existed for millennia, but race and racism as we think of them are very new.3 Race and ethnicity are often conflated, as race used to mean what we now think of as ethnic or national groups. Today ethnicity, as distinct from race, is a grouping of human beings based on culture, religion, geography or language. The demarcation line for what separates one ethnicity from another can be and in fact almost always is vague and imprecise. People can share the same language, religion and nation yet perceive themselves to be ethnically different.
Race is much more crude and can unite two peoples that share none of these things in common or divide two peoples that share all of these things in common. Ethnicity, much like race, can be and has been a lethal division used to justify subhuman treatment by dominant ethnic groups, but just because ethnic tensions share many of the characteristics of ‘race’ does not mean we should conflate the two. Joseph Ziegler, Benjamin Isaac and Miriam Eliav-Feldon outline the clear difference between race and ethnicity in the book The Origins of Racism in the West:
The Spartans kept their neighbors, the Messenians, in perpetual collective submission and categorized them as ‘between free men and (chattel) douloi’. The helots were treated with notorious brutality and their hatred for the Spartans was commensurate. Yet there is no suggestion they were ever seen as anything but Greek, nor is there evidence that they were seen as inferior by nature.4
So the Spartans considered the Messenians to be ethnically different but not racially different; that is, not permanently and unalterably inferior. Racism proper claims to be based on scientific truth. Thus while anti-black prejudice had existed to a certain degree in the Middle East among Jewish people and Muslims, and even in ancient Rome, it never developed into racism in the way we have come to understand it. Similarly, anti-Jewish pogroms, ghettoisation and hatred of Jewish people had existed in Europe for centuries, but it was only when the Nazis picked up the current of pan-European race science and applied this to a long and deep seated anti-Jewish prejudice that we got biological racism toward the Jews. As alluded to earlier, the Nazi Nuremberg Laws were directly inspired by American race laws in the Jim Crow south, and thus the scientific racism that had been used to justify colonising, and even where ‘necessary’ exterminating, Africans, Asians and the indigenous people of America and Australasia was returned to Europe and visited on Jewish people and others.5 If we go further back in history, it seems that European hatred of Jews in the medieval era informed the development of racial ideas about the ‘other’ in Africa and Asia,6 much as anti-Irish racial thinking informed British attitudes towards other ‘savage’ groups.
Yet the origins of race as a concept also has roots in a dialogue that was actually nothing to do with ‘race’ at all. Ziegler, Isaac and Eliav-Feldon continue:
The word ‘race’ first emerged in France, not in Spain or Portugal. It was not coined to denigrate a despised minority or an alien people with strange skin colour or to justify colonisation or enslavement. The word emerged in the context of the discourse on nobility in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and was hence not initially racist. It was linked to the transformed and growing importance of blood in defining and describing nobility in general and royal nobility in particular.7
Racism as a word only really came into popular usage during the 1930s, and specifically in relation to the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Nazis and American hatred of other European immigrants.8
We will almost certainly always have a degree of ethnocentrism in human societies but to conflate this with racism proper is lazy and dangerous. Ethnocentrism can be overcome, but overt racism or the idea of permanent hierarchical racial difference is a chasm much deeper and more difficult to surmount. Thus German prisoners of war were able to dine with white Americans during the Second World War, but their African-American ‘comrades’ and ‘countrymen’ were not. Thus the post-war British government preferred to pay to settle German and Italian prisoners of war in Britain than allow ‘too many’ non-white British citizens from the Commonwealth to come here, even though the Commonwealth citizens were paying their own way. The Germans and Italians were seen as ethnically but not racially different thus they could be – and have been – made into white people and thus truly British or American. Despite the Nazis’ genocidal rampage and their attempts to take over the world and the war with Germany, a German was still preferable to a black person in British and American post-war racial ‘logic’.9
The idea of racial hierarchy only lost much of its credibility because its three most unapologetic twentieth-century proponents were all defeated, to a greater or lesser extent. They were, of course, the Jim Crow South, apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany. But there is absolutely no reason to assume that what the scholar George M. Frederickson calls ‘overtly racist regimes’ could not return, though today an obsessive focus on essentialised cultural, ethnic and religious differences often serves many of the same functions as overt racism.10 While the overtly racist regimes have fallen, one only has to spend a little time on the Internet, looking at comments on videos or following social media threads about migrants, police brutality, terrorism or any other potentially racialised issue to see that the idea of race and racial hierarchy is perhaps as strong as it ever was for many millions of people today.
7 – Police, Peers and Teenage Years
The first time I was searched by the police I was twelve, maybe thirteen years old. There was no adult present and I was not read my rights; this is both completely illegal and entirely normal. Apparently, someone ‘fitting my description’ had robbed someone. During that same year, I saw one of my older friends get chopped in the back of his head several times with a meat cleaver by another boy of his age. That these two trends – illegal and racialised treatment by the state and the attempted murder of one working-class black boy by another – would enter my life for the first time in the same year is more coming of age than coincidence. The violence of the state, the violence of my peers – both integral and inescapable parts of black male adolescence in London.
In fact, violent working-class youth gangs have been part of life in British inner cities – as has the over-inflated moral panic about them – for well over a century, as this London Echo report from 1898 makes clear:
No one can have read the London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds papers and not know that the young street ruffian and prowler with his heavy belt, treacherous knife and dangerous pistol is amongst us. He is in full evidence in London – east, north and south. The question for everyman who cares for streets that are safe after dark, decent when dark, not disgraced by filthy shouts and brutal deeds, is what is to be done with this development of the city boy and the slum denizen? Not one tenth of the doings of these young rascals gets into the press, not one half is known to police.1
From the panic over ‘garroting’ – a form of street robbery often involving a choke hold – of the 1860s onwards,2 the history of these gangs in Britain is a very well documented historical issue, dramatised in the BBC TV show Peaky Blinders and written about in scores of books. They remain a national problem to this day; in 2015 a national study found the north-east of England to have the highest rate of knife crime in England and Wales, and in 2017 many of the most horrendous knife crimes, such as the stabbing to death of a two-year-old and a seven-year-old and the murder and dumping in the woods of a sixteen-year-old girl, did not happen in London and were not committed by black teenagers. Glasgow was dubbed the Chicago of Britain as long ago as the 1920s because of its notoriously violent gangs,3 and while teenage stabbings seem to have been drastically reduced in the city, the violence of organised crime is still a very serious issue f
acing Glaswegians.4
So while violence of the organised-crime and teenage-gang varieties has been with us for some time and continues to affect regions of the country where very few black people live at all, if you live in London and read the London press, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a) black boys are the only demographic that have ever been affected by this issue and b) London is one of the most violent cities in the world. In reality, class is a far bigger factor than race in this issue and, as noted above, London is not even the most dangerous area of Britain, let alone Europe, let alone the world. So while my narrative in this chapter will focus on working-class black boys in London, that is much more a result of proximity and familiarity than because I’m adopting the silly and obviously racist ‘black-on-black violence’ narrative so loved by US and UK media and law enforcement. We will deal with the ‘black-on-black violence’ trope later, but for now it’s enough to note that even in London, when you adjust for class, the ‘ethnic model’ of explaining street crime falls away entirely.5 It’s also important to note that while London feels incredibly dangerous for teenagers it remains, in reality, a far safer city than media hysteria would have you believe, and the vast majority of murders in the city are committed by adults, not teenagers. All of this must be kept in mind as I tell you some genuinely horrific instances of violence that I experienced growing up.
In some cultures, they mark your entrance into adulthood with a spiritual quest, a physical challenge, a camping trip, a commune with the elders or with an exchange of long-held ancestral wisdom. In the inner cities of the UK, teenage boys racialised as black are instead introduced to the fact that the protection of the law does not apply to our bodies. There is no equality before the law. The whole of society knows this to be true, yet they pretend otherwise. When you meet your own powerlessness before the institution that claims to be protecting you, you feel both stupid and cheated. Stupid because how could you possibly have been so naïve as to believe any of the fancy rhetoric about equality when the signs were clear all along? Cheated because you nonetheless know you have been wronged.
During your coming of age, you will also come to know that boys just a few years older than you are now killers. Boys that helped you build sandcastles and pushed you on the swings, boys you looked up to as great footballers and fast runners, boys that you saw spill ice cream on their T-shirts and cry when they fell on the tarmac and split their knees open. Some of these very same souls now kill each other and while you don’t yet quite understand how or why, you will have to learn, fast. Some of your older friends and cousins will inevitably go to prison, some will be killed and a very small number will succeed in attaining the trappings of British middle-class life via the roads or by legal means. As you look at your ‘olders’, your realistic life options – if you can’t play football or rap – will smash you in the face. You will shit yourself.
While London is not a dangerous city by global standards it is hard to overstate just what a scary place London is to be a working-class black male teenager. You are in one of the wealthiest cities ever built, yet the vast majority of your friends and family live in some of the worst poverty in Europe;6 the opportunities seem to be everywhere yet very few people you know manage to grab them. You know West African ‘uncles’ with PhDs from back home who have ended up working as cleaners and security guards and while you don’t judge those jobs – everyone has to earn a coin – it’s not what you want for your future.
The first time I was searched, or at least the first occasion I remember – there were so many it has become kind of jumbled – went roughly as follows. I was on my way home from the youth club at my school, it was a warm summer evening and still light outside though it must have been at least 7 p.m. As I turned the corner just one street from home, I saw a police car in front of me and I knew they’d seen me too. I did my best trying-not-to-look-guilty walk, even though I had not done anything wrong. They pulled over and told me to wait there. As one officer made his way over to me he asked ‘Where are you from, Tottenham? What are you doing round here?’ Tottenham is a much rougher and distinctly blacker area than Camden or Archway, even though it’s just a short bus ride away; we both knew what he was trying to say. The officer’s question already let me know that in his eyes I was dirt; that is, matter out of place.7 As the three officers got close, two of them held my arms and told me they were going to search me because someone fitting my description had robbed somebody round here earlier that day. I tried to read them my rights. Mr Muhammad, one of our teachers – you’ll meet him more in the next chapter – had given us black boys a sheet with information about our rights when stopped by police printed on it, as he knew from experience that such encounters were absolutely inevitable for us.
The officers didn’t care. Two of them held my arms, another rummaged through my pockets and then a fourth officer emerged from nowhere holding a camera and filmed the whole thing, pointing the camera in my face. I knew this was odd even then; in all the times I have been searched since, never has an officer pushed a camera in my face. They found nothing on me, of course; I was still a full good boy at this point, I didn’t even smoke. I’d tried weed just once, way too young, because my older sister gave it to me! As quickly as they had come they left, no apology, no words of consolation, and no explanation. Gone. I walked the rest of the way home and thought about what had just happened. I concluded that I was officially becoming a man now, so I didn’t bother to tell my mum about the encounter when I got in.
Over the next few years being searched by the police became virtually a bi-monthly experience. The most explicitly racialised time was in Elephant and Castle, when a group of us happened to be with our white friend. The police searched the four black boys only, and said ‘keep it real’ to our white mate while doing their best ‘gang sign’ poses as they drove off, obviously making fun of the fact that he hung around with niggers. The most embarrassing time was perhaps when I was on my way to the Royal Institution maths masterclasses mentioned earlier. As I stood there having my pockets rummaged through, the absurdity of racialised policing really hit me. I could literally be one of a handful of children on free school meals – of any ethnicity – that was also in the top 1 or 2 per cent of mathematicians of my age and be on my way to an elite maths class during the summer holidays, but I’d ultimately still be viewed as little more than a potential criminal by those with the power. I was late for class that day and did not bother to explain why to the teachers because I simply assumed – or feared – that my rich white professors would refuse to believe that the police just stopped people for no reason, and would end up looking at me with suspicion.
Once I was older and could afford a car, my main contact with police has been getting pulled over and having my car searched. One time, not far from my mum’s, they rummaged through all the receipts I was keeping in the glove box for my company tax return and threw them all over the car. I complained; one officer told me to fuck off. I remember wondering how many young entrepreneurs who were not black experienced this kind of thing. By the logic of British capitalism, I had done everything right; a working-class boy that had used his talents to start a company and could now even afford a brand-new car. By the professed logic of the system, I should be rewarded and praised for my entrepreneurial spirit rather than harassed, presumed to be a criminal and spoken to by ‘public servants’ as if I was not a taxpayer.
Another time, when I was driving my girlfriend’s car, we were pulled over on Sloane Square. The officers rummaged through her laundry bag on the side of the street. They posed the same questions I’d been asked years before, only slightly updated: ‘What are you doing here? This car is registered to Croydon.’ Matter out of place again. Apparently, some officers don’t understand that the literal purpose of a vehicle is to travel. My trauma surgeon friend had the humiliation of the police calling the hospital where he works when they pulled him over, because they just could not get their head round the idea that a young, athletic-lookin
g black man driving a Mercedes could be a doctor and not a drug dealer. He literally saves lives for a living and gets paid well for it, but can still be assumed a criminal and treated accordingly. Class and race have a funny relationship, eh? A young black man can change his class location by learning to save lives, but it still will not free him from the stereotypes associated with blackness.
When I started writing this book, I had not been pulled over in about five years – a personal record. The last time I had been pulled over was about 5 p.m. on a weekday. I had just picked up my nephew from school and noticed that a police car was tailing me. As we pulled up outside our house, the police flashed me and I stopped, as is the usual procedure. The officer got out and came to my window to speak to me. ‘Is this your car?’ ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘What do you do for a living?’ ‘There have been an unusual amount of car thefts in this area’; the usual slew of questions and statements. I replied that it was five in the evening, that I clearly had a child sitting in the back, and that the child was visibly in full school uniform, thus it was not at all difficult to deduce where I might be coming from and what I might be doing. I informed him that it was indeed my car and that he could have easily called the DVLA to check if the car had been reported stolen before bothering to waste my time. I also told him that I taught theoretical physics at Cambridge University for a living. This lie had become a standard joke of mine when I got pulled over; I figured if the police wanted to mess with me then I’d mess with them. I kept an entirely straight face and I know the officer fought the urge to question me further on it, perplexed by the complexity of the title, with all the implications of education, class and access that would come with such a profession. Had I said that I was a rapper, that too would have come with its own set of assumptions. I could just as easily have said that I teach Shakespeare for a living, which would have actually been partly true, but for some odd reason I did not think of that.
