Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - The Sunday Times Bestseller
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When I was child, black and brown voices in British politics were generally quite fringe to say the least. That situation has changed quite a bit, and though we should not overstate things, it really shows no signs of being reversible. As the percentage of the British population that hails from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean grows – it’s projected to be 30 per cent by 2050 – how will this affect dialogue, debate and the subsequent direction of British politics? Those of us who are directly connected to the ‘third world’ have very different renderings and rememberings of political events than mainstream opinion, and our traditions cannot help but continue to shape and be shaped by the future of Britain.
Part of this ideological battle is fought over popular memories of historical figures like Mandela and Castro, and can be seen playing out in real time in the ‘Rhodes must fall’ campaign – a campaign in Britain directly inspired by students in South Africa demanding that the worship of white-supremacist colonial figures like Cecil Rhodes be stopped, that statues of them be torn down out of respect for the victims of atrocities they promoted and in recognition of the hope for a different world order from one defined by empire, racial hierarchy and cold war geopolitics.
At the outbreak of the First World War, the vast majority of the world was colonised by European powers – and the Ottomans – and race was a fully accepted way of accounting for human difference in international affairs among the great powers. Despite some doubts about overt displays of white supremacy, even after the carnage of the First World War British, American and French elites felt confident enough to reject out of hand Japan’s suggestion that a clause recognising racial equality be inserted into the treaty of Versaille.16 It would take another world war and the genocides perpetuated by the Nazis for the ‘enlightened’ governments of the democratic Western world to entertain the idea that white supremacy might not be a given.
Even when the Second World War ended, the colonised world still had an entirely different project confronting it than the European societies under whose flags they had fought. While European states focused on rebuilding themselves with massive amounts of help from the United States, their colonies now had the space, capacity and experience to fight for their own freedom against the very people with whom they had fought shoulder to shoulder against fascism. Make no mistake about it; in 1945, even after using their colonial troops to defeat the Nazis, both Britain and France had every intention of holding onto their white-supremacist empires.
It is one of history’s great ironies that the most extreme incarnation of white supremacy, the Nazis, did more to undermine white dominance, damage Western prestige and make space for ‘third world’ freedom struggles than any other force in the previous three centuries. For reasons of self-preservation only, you would have thought that western liberals would have learned this lesson, yet we live in a world where literal card-carrying Nazis getting punched in the face or being refused platforms to speak garners more liberal outrage than twelve-year-old Tamir Rice being executed on camera by the police while playing alone in the park. Only when I see the free-speech purists campaigning for the right of a Salafist who thinks 9/11 was wonderful to speak at America or Britain’s top universities will I perhaps believe in their sincerity. The way these people speak of free speech you would think that McCarthyism was a thousand years ago.
In the years since 1945, mass movements among the black, brown and yellow world majority have fundamentally remade the world; decolonisation may well turn out to have been the most significant historical process of the second half of the twentieth century, but you would never know this from mainstream historiography.17 Through this process, which included some radical critics from within the colonising societies themselves, the accepted racial hierarchy of the world has been so comprehensively redrawn that today even most bigots find it embarrassing to be called racist. Both Mandela’s ANC and Castro’s Cuba played complicated roles in this racial remaking of the world and both men had tremendous respect for the contributions of the other, but we do history a serious disservice when we allow it to be reduced to simple dichotomies.
My childhood was indelibly shaped by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, even though I lived thousands of miles away and the momentum of that struggle had swung decisively against the apartheid regime by the time my earliest memories were formed. Nelson Mandela was already a name synonymous with freedom and wisdom, justice and principle, by the time I took my first steps. However, it was not until over a decade later, when in my late teens I started to do a little reading and research of my own, that I even heard mention of Cuba’s contribution to anti-apartheid. This obvious omission, along with the simplistic narratives that surrounded Mandela and Castro, was a valuable lesson to me about how the powerful craft history and news media to their own ends. This realisation that major parts of recent political events could quickly be forgotten or indeed totally ignored if they did not fit the script helped encourage me to always seek multiple sources for a given story or situation, and compelled me to always distrust or at least question what I was being told and why I was being told it. A trait that frequently brought me into conflict with my teachers.
9 – The Ku Klux Klan Stopped Crime by Killing Black People
I was visiting my soon-to-be secondary school. These visits are a ritual; they are designed to give students a sense of the scale and scope of big school, to make sure the new terrain is somewhat familiar come September. During the visit, I got to meet the rest of my future year group and we toured around the school; I remember being impressed by the science labs with their Bunsen burners, but most impressed with the size of the football pitch, of course.
I’d like to note that my secondary was actually a pretty good school; it has produced a notable number of creatives and certainly played a key role in my development. I had some great teachers there and even better friends. Nonetheless, like everything else in life it was full of contradictions.
Back to the visit; we also got to meet some of our future teachers. One look was enough. It may sound dramatic or presumptuous but that’s often all it takes. Eyes tell so much when they are left to wander unguarded. I could tell from that first simple glance that it was going to be a long five years and that my relationship with this particular teacher was going to be a major source of stress throughout secondary school. Adults think they can fool children but children are often able to judge a character so accurately and so quickly it’s almost like a sixth sense. So it was when I first met that teacher. Her eyes could not hide her disdain for this mouthy, overconfident, articulate, obviously working-class boy. I could feel a sense of racial discomfort coming from her as well; I’d started to be able to sense this type of feeling.
I officially joined the school that September and my initial impression was proved right in quite spectacular fashion. My clashes with this teacher began almost immediately. Our worldviews were so radically different – my political heroes were Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, hers were Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill – it was never going to work out. She believed in Britain’s inherent moral superiority and that the British Empire was essentially a civilising mission, while I had an unusual amount of information for a teenager – courtesy of pan-African school – that contradicted, or at least challenged, much of what she believed. When we argued about the Scramble for Africa she reproduced the old railways argument, the one that goes something like, ‘colonialism gave the natives railways, so it was good, the end’.
Another time she went as far as saying that ‘Europeans did not actually know Africans were human so you can’t really blame them for enslaving Africans, whereas when they got to China the humanity [of the Chinese] smacked them in the face.’ I was not aware of the Opium Wars at the time, nor did I have much information about the treatment of Chinese indentured labour, so I’m not sure how exactly I countered this. I wish I had known back then that British-ruled Hong Kong was governed by some of the same kind of racist apartheid
laws as South Africa and other colonies. In short, the Chinese were treated just like other subject races, albeit for a shorter time period – so clearly British imperialists were not ‘smacked in the face’ by the humanity of the Chinese, despite the historical achievements of Chinese civilisation. In the end, I think I asked something like ‘Why did colonisers and enslavers rape their human property so frequently if they didn’t know that they were human?’ Anyway . . .
This teacher used to refer to certain boys in our class as ‘sandpit boys’, meaning to infer that they had the mental aptitudes of five-year-olds playing in a sandpit. These were generally boys who were not fortunate enough to have had the radical community education and, perhaps, the family encouragement that I had benefited from. One of these boys in particular I knew from primary school – he had a mother that was a severe alcoholic and often suffered clear and obvious parental neglect. Rather than investigate what the reasons might be for their lack of confidence and participation in the classroom, the teacher labelled them sandpit boys. By contrast, Anne Taylor – my favourite primary school teacher – went well beyond the call of duty and used to feed this same boy. She even bought him some shoes once. How big a difference a teacher’s personal attitudes can make.
I don’t think ‘chavs’ existed as a term back then, but no doubt it was that type of stereotyping of people from less fortunate family circumstances that the form tutor was aiming at when she called them ‘sandpit boys’. By association of class, I should have been one of the sandpit boys. After all, was I not on free school meals just like them? Did my clothes and shoes not speak of my family’s dire finances? Could you not hear the poverty in my accent and see it in my skin, my walk and my eyes? But I was among the top of the class for all subjects (except art of course!), something which strangely bothered some teachers, this one included, but seemed to spare me the nickname. Nevertheless, I felt a class affinity for the ‘sandpit boys’; I felt like I could see what was happening to them and wished I could give them what I’d been given.
During another debate, this teacher compared the exclusion of girls from our lunchtime football games to Jim Crow-era US racism. While I totally accept the severity of gender oppression, this seemed to me a rather odd comparison given that there were no signs excluding girls from the football pitch – let alone lunchtime lynchings – and that the state did not enforce this ‘no girls on the pitches’ policy, and I said as much to her. What her comment did show was that she was able to recognise how gender conditioning could subtly shape the expectations and behaviours of girls and prevent them from going somewhere that they were not ‘really’ being prevented from going, for there is no doubt that the boys controlled the football pitch every lunchtime, and would have probably viewed girls trying to play football as an incursion.
My teacher could not, however, understand how young boys from poorer, less educated families came to be intimidated by an education that no one was ‘really’ preventing them from attaining. She told me confidently that all women had harder lives than any men on the planet (she meant brown and black men, of course), not out of feminist solidarity with the brown and black women of the global south – as you will understand more fully in a moment – but rather to tell me that I was essentially complaining about nothing when I spoke about historic racial injustice.
My relationship with her and a few other teachers meant that school felt like a battleground instead of a joy, a constant war of attrition with people who did not want the best for me but nonetheless were supposed to be educating me. The teachers that were in my corner told me I could not let ‘them’ win, I could not drop out of school or allow myself to be expelled like so many of my friends. It was almost as if I was representing not just myself but rather that my academic success – and that of one or two others – was a vindication of young black boys as a group. The school, for all its Camden liberalism, knew very well that black students were being expelled at much higher rates than other students, but did not really attempt to investigate the issue. In just one example of how far this ambivalence spread, my sister’s sociology teacher told her that when a new group of students joined the school certain teachers would bet, based solely on a child’s name before even having met that child, about the likelihood of said child actually finishing school. If the child were named Leon Smith or Wayne Johnson – typical black names – then they would bet against him. More often than not, they were proved right.
All of this is just the background to the final showdown.
During one particular debate in Year Ten, the shit really hit the fan. Some context: there was another teacher in our school who was a member of the Nation of Islam and he ran an extracurricular history class for black students. It’s worth remembering that Spike Lee’s Malcolm X film was still in public consciousness and the NOI had also been very visible during the Stephen Lawrence trial, so people tended to be more aware of who the NOI are than they would be today. These extracurricular classes became a source of tension for some teachers and the school temporarily suspended the classes, though they never explained why. I started a petition in response to this suspension and for whatever reason the classes were reinstated. I was never sure if my petition had any effect or not, but I was caught in the act of collecting signatures by the deputy head, who looked rather embarrassed. That same teacher from the NOI had designed a history module called ‘Black Peoples of the Americas’ that he managed to get onto the school history syllabus. The other teacher declared quite openly that this was her least favourite module and that she hated teaching it. It is in the context of that module that many of our most heated debates about race took place.
One day during the module, we somehow got onto debating the NOI, and she asserted that the ‘Nation of Islam was essentially the same as the KKK, but black.’ This has become a rather clichéd argument among some white conservatives, and it essentially equates black people who are living under apartheid saying not nice things about white people with a tradition of actual violent terrorism. The message is clear: white people’s hurt feelings are conceptually equivalent to black humans’ actual lives. No matter that mainstream white anthropology had argued for generations that black people were not human and many societies set up literal human zoos to demonstrate that; no matter that during the era in which the NOI’s racial ideology was formed all of Africa was colonised and racial slavery was still in living memory for some; no matter that black people’s supposed sub-humanity was enshrined in the founding of the USA and that lynchings were still common when the NOI was founded in the 1930s. None of that context was needed in terms of explaining the appeal of the NOI’s ideas. If whiteness is used to legitimise slavery, genocide and colonialism, is it really a surprise that at least a minority of people victimised in this way would turn around and argue that white people were inherently evil?
Anyway, I argued back that no matter what their opinions were on racial evolution – or other flaws for that matter – the NOI had no history of lynching white people, of collecting their body parts as souvenirs, of bombing white churches and of killing children and pregnant women. What’s more, the NOI did much good, like cleaning up drug addicts and policing some of America’s worst black ghettoes, helping to stop crime (the NOI had indeed sent some its members, unarmed, to challenge the drug dealers in some of the toughest US inner cities). The debate had been raging for pretty much the whole lesson, ranging over various subjects, and I knew the class were siding with the logic of the fifteen-year-old boy rather than the middle-aged university-educated teacher with greying hair. Losing the argument was clearly too much for her to bear and her response was so profoundly racist, even by her standards, that it still shocks me to this day. She blurted out:
‘The Ku Klux Klan also stopped crime by killing black people.’
Now I know you are probably reading this in disbelief, but I’ll repeat it for clarity and so you can be sure it’s not an extended typo.
‘The Ku Klux Klan also stopped crime by killing
black people.’
Now imagine standing in front of students whom you are supposed to teach, in one of the most multicultural areas in the world, and saying that killing black people, including children, with all the spectacle and pomp of a summer fete, is somehow crime fighting. The genocidal implications of this statement are obvious. I’m sure that she and the many others that think like her would indeed be totally happy to see black humans wiped from the face of the earth. I’m equally sure that for such radicalised extremists having to teach self-assured little black boys who have actually read a few books must be like torture. How many more people like her have to teach children they actually hate, but just happen to never have had their hatred brought to the surface?
I told her to fuck off about ten times in response. My composure was completely gone and the slight arrogance that I had been feeling at outsmarting my teacher had been ripped away from me. Now I felt only rage and hurt. I knew she did not like black people but I had not fully grasped the extent and depth of her hatred before that day. I felt dirty and ashamed, and something that was like confusion but wasn’t quite that. Black people have never really been able to understand the revulsion and compulsion to violence that our skin generates in these kinds of people, a hatred so profoundly illogical I doubt even those that feel it can really explain it.