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

by Akala

  Another brilliant black American, Ta-Nehisi Coates, followed his idol – the great James Baldwin – in romanticising Paris in his book Between the World and Me, which no doubt surprised black and brown Parisians no end. The Paris of the 1960s was no racial paradise, with the 1961 massacre of some forty-plus Parisian-Algerians during Algeria’s war for independence and the clear segregation of that era. Nor is the Paris of today anything close to a racial utopia. It’s strange that anyone could visit Paris and fail to notice the visible racial segregation of the African and Caribbean ‘French’ population ghettoised in ‘Bronx’-style housing projects. It is even stranger that these obvious things could escape some of the most perceptive and insightful black Americans writing specifically about racial injustice. One could be forgiven if these romantic insights were about London, where on the face of it the segregation is not so visible unless you go to the prisons, but for Paris nothing of the sort could be argued, even at a glance. Middle-class black African diplomats studied at some of America’s top universities back in the 1940s and 1950s and, due to their nationality and class location, some of them had a great time in America, but that was hardly a representative black experience for the America of that period.

  It’s not that these people are uniquely ignorant – far from it, the people I just mentioned are all incredibly smart people – it’s that power and prosperity can blind us all and I’m sure that there are insights I have missed or faux pas I have made while travelling that someone operating from a different social location or with more local knowledge might have noticed or been sensitive to.

  It really should be unsurprising that wealthy black American artists and writers who travel to Europe for work and are surrounded there by well off, probably well educated, likely liberal-minded white Europeans who are fans of theirs would not experience the sharp end of European racism. The obvious mistake these people made is to universalise the experience of the privileged foreigner. I might conclude from staying in five-star hotels in Manhattan – which I also did on my first trip to NY – that New York is a multicultural and incredibly wealthy paradise; I have, however, spent enough time in the Bronx since to know that’s not the case. What’s more, upon encountering American police I have literally seen them breathe a sigh of relief when they hear my British accent and realise that I am not one of ‘their’ negroes.

  What is most sad for us is that these black American icons are our icons too. We view their slights in exactly the same way as black Americans would were these comments directed at them, i.e. as one of our own dissing us, quite like Bill Cosby’s infamous respectability rants against poor black people in America.

  Of course, many black American academics and icons have engaged with ‘the struggle’ during their time in the UK and Europe. For example, just nine days before he died, Malcolm X visited Smethwick in the West Midlands, where there had been a history of racial segregation and where a Conservative MP had run the election slogan ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’.10 In short, I do not want the above to be seen as broad strokes of condemnation, but rather a thread that picks up on some contradictions and tensions that will continue as multiple black voices continue to arise. West Africans have made similarly ignorant generalisations about black Americans, British Caribbeans were very ignorant and mean to newly arriving West Africans when I was young and so on.

  I am a pan-Africanist, which means I am for cultivating a proper mutual understanding between the populations of Africa and its various diasporas – given that we face similar and connected historical challenges – to the extent that this is possible without being idealistic. The issues discussed here are some of the misunderstandings of class, location and specific histories that are likely to resurface in our transatlantic dialogues. Black Americans have been and will continue to be the most culturally prominent, visible and, for now, the most prosperous black population in the world, located as they are in the centre of today’s only real empire, the richest nation ever. The situation for black Britons mirrors that of our US cousins but in microcosm, in that we are obviously not any smarter than Afro Brazilians or black French people, but the global prominence of the English language and our location in the other imperial power affords us a global audience that Afro Brazilians or black French people simply do not have.

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  On the surface of things, a direct comparison between the ‘black experience’ in Britain and America may seem totally superficial because the historical differences are so vast. Black Americans were enslaved in America, in the land where they now reside, so when slavery was reformed – not abolished – in 1865 they were subject to a whole century of overt and essentially state-approved violent and legislative terrorism, both after and during the brief period known as the Reconstruction. This terror reached its apex in the 4000-plus spectacle lynchings that occurred in the early part of the last century, exhibiting some of most fantastical savagery in the annals of history which were often watched by thousands of white people, including children, in a picnic-like atmosphere. Eggs and lemonade were consumed, commemorative postcards were created and the body parts of black people that had been roasted alive, castrated and carved into pieces were kept as souvenirs.11 Clearly, nothing like this kind of white-supremacist terrorism has occurred in twentieth-century domestic Britain.

  There was also no formal segregation in the UK, by which I mean there were no laws officially preventing black people from voting, from renting houses where they chose to and from enrolling in whatever state-funded schools they lived within the catchment area of, though some MPs did openly call for a colour bar. British Caribbeans came to the UK voluntarily, on their own purse and as British citizens exercising the rights inherent in that citizenship. Post-war Britain adopted the principles of social democracy, meaning that the death penalty was abolished by 1947 and that all British citizens, regardless of colour, had access to higher education, healthcare and a degree of social security. This means that the state cannot racialise these institutions – the death penalty, healthcare and education – in the same way and to the same degree as the United States, thus eliminating some of the material basis for the most extreme racism. Black Brits emigrated into a society with an already established white underclass and were mostly dumped in areas where that underclass already lived; black Americans and the indigenous peoples were the foundation of the US underclass.

  So a comparison between British and American racism seems ludicrous then, doesn’t it? Well, not so fast – yes, domestic Britain’s social democratic racism is certainly quite distinct from America’s formal and then de facto apartheid. However, once we expand our scope to include the entire British Commonwealth, the situation looks quite different. As you saw in the chapter on empire, during the same years that Americans were enjoying their lynching picnics Britain had put hundreds of thousands of British Kenyans into concentration camps and engaged in brutality every bit as savage as the American south. While South African apartheid has usually been associated with the Afrikaner-led National Party and its rise after 1948, Britain played a key role in originally developing South African apartheid.

  Yes, black Brits emigrated from the Commonwealth ‘freely’, but their free migration cannot be divorced from the neocolonial economics and deliberate underdevelopment in which the British state is implicated. Even within that migratory history we can glean that race was every bit as important to Britain’s rulers as it was to those of the USA in the post-war era; British governments were just rather more subtle about it. Yes, there was no formal segregation on British soil, but the post-war governments spent tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to bring European migrant workers and refugees to Britain while working extremely hard to limit the number of non-white British citizens from the Commonwealth that could come to Britain, even though that was their legal right and even though they – unlike the European refugees arriving at the same time – were paying for themselves. Additionally, Westminster encouraged the white d
ominions to keep their whites only immigration restrictions even though the entire Commonwealth had fought the Nazis together. The reason for this was without a shadow of a doubt about ruling-class racism and nothing else.12

  Even within domestic Britain there have been some striking parallels between the black British and black American experience, most obviously seen with the aforementioned disproportionate incarceration and suspicious deaths in police custody, though of course the scale of both problems is far, far greater in the US. Within media and among Britain’s senior politicians, a social Darwinian racial explanation for crime has taken root, one that was clearly borrowed from American parlance; the issue of so called ‘black on black’ violence, or excessive melanin syndrome, if you will. As former Prime Minister Tony Blair put it:

  What we are dealing with is not a general social disorder, but specific groups or people who for one reason or another, are deciding not to abide by the same code of conduct as the rest of us . . . The black community – the vast majority of whom in these communities are decent, law-abiding people horrified at what is happening – need to be mobilised in denunciation of this gang culture that is killing innocent young black kids. But we won’t stop this by pretending it isn’t young black kids doing it.

  I’m unsure who these people Mr Blair was referring to are, those that apparently pretend black people don’t ever kill, but I am yet to come across them. No one is more familiar with black people’s capacity to kill than other black people if by virtue of nothing else but proximity.

  This narrative of a uniquely black criminality became so strong in the London of my youth that a special police department was set up to tackle black-on-black violence! A person could take a totally superficial look at America without reference to history, see the horrendous violence in Chicago, and start a simplistic narrative about ‘black-on-black crime’, but the fact that this narrative has become so deeply embedded in British media, policing and political discourse just looks unbelievably bizarre when viewed nationally.

  When I was growing up, part of Britain was a war zone. Until the 1998 Good Friday agreement brought an ‘end’ to what is known as ‘The Troubles’, thousands of people had been killed in Northern Ireland as a result of the conflicts there. Even during the 1990s, the Troubles included multiple shootings and bombings that killed scores of people, including the 1998 bombing by the UVF that killed the three Quinn brothers aged nine, ten and eleven. If you asked someone why Northern Ireland – or indeed Glasgow – was so violent they would almost certainly give you a history lesson in both cases, one about the British Empire and its legacies in Ireland in one case, and the resultant conflicts between Catholics and Protestants there, and the other an interlinked story about the legacies of class neglect and deprivation in what was one of the poorest parts of Western Europe, the ‘housing schemes’13 of Glasgow. Neither of these explanations would be ‘making excuses’ for the violence of either region or the peoples there, but simply be trying to give some context for one of the most complex human phenomena; murder.

  Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century – who do you think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? – you can imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as ‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

  Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but simply because they are ‘black’, and sometimes because they listened to too much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome. The fact that yellow-on-yellow crime, mixed race-on-mixed race crime or white-on-white violence just sound like joke terms but black on black violence has ‘credibility’ speaks very loudly about the perceived relationship between blackness and depravity in this culture.

  I could quote dozens and dozens of articles from the 1990s from all sections of the British press carrying this thread of ‘blackness and crime’, but I won’t bore you. What we should note though is that this style of reporting has changed very little in three decades. For example, on 3 September 2016, Rod Liddle from the Spectator wrote an article with the headline and subtitle:

  Why don’t Black Lives Matter want to ban the Notting Hill Carnival?

  Protestors would do well to focus on black-on-black crime – but they don’t and they won’t14

  Beneath the headline is a gruesome photo, that presumably was taken at that year’s carnival, of a young man with a bloody blade in his hand looking directly at the camera and in the background what appears to be another young man who he has just stabbed in the leg, with a crowd of scared and shocked onlookers who have clearly just run away from this conflict further in the background. What’s fascinating is that both the stabber and the stabbed in this picture are both visibly ‘mixed race’, but of course there is no such thing as mixed race-on-mixed race violence, because these young boys only kill because of the black half of their genetics, stupid. Presumably only their black halves go to prison and/or die too – which is great news for me. The ‘writer’ goes on to argue that Black Lives Matter UK should apparently protest Notting Hill Carnival because it’s a greater danger to black people than the police; that year there were five stabbings, according to the article.

  The idiocy of this line of argument is so juvenile I’m not sure I should even patronise you by bothering to deconstruct it but I will, despite myself. Black Lives Matter protest a history of racialised violence in the USA, Britain and elsewhere, where white vigilantes and police literally get away with killing black people because in the not so distant past black people were thought to be and legally classified as subhuman; in the case of the USA, these killings are often caught on camera. If white police officers and/or vigilantes went to prison when they killed black people on camera, there would be no Black Lives Matter movement. Thus the article destroys its own flimsy ‘argument’ by pointing out that there were 400 arrests that year at Carnival, presumably including that of the young man who is glaring at us with a bloody knife in his hand in the picture. And therein lies the point: the young man will be arrested. If the person he stabbed died, with such convincing photo evidence he will almost certainly go to prison for murder. But no matter how many police in America get caught on camera shooting people or how many police in Britain have verdicts of unlawful killing returned against them, almost none of them will go to prison, or even so much as lose their jobs.

  There is an even more sinister suggestion coming from these ‘why don’t black people protest black-on-black crime?’ journalists; the idea that all black people are implicated in the actions of all others, that if a single black human kills another anywhere at any time on the planet then the rest of us lose our right to protest systemic state injustice, or any racist wrong done to us for that matter. Would these white people like us to turn this argument around on them? Somehow I doubt it. But it is notable that displays of transatlantic black solidarity nark so many people.


  Where does all this leave us? What are the prospects for any kind of revived black-led justice movements? What new cultures might emerge from the new interactions between Britain’s inner cities and those of America? In what ways might the black Atlantic evolve in the coming years? Any practical pan-Africanism to my mind must also recognise difference and diversity; it’s no good saying ‘anti-black racism exists, so black people must become a simple monolith’. While black America’s particular racial history has produced a political tradition that cannot in any honest way avoid centring the black–white dichotomy, it’s understandably hard to convince our Igbo homies that fled Biafra or those that fled the civil war in Sierra Leone that mighty whitey is the sole – or even in many cases the primary – issue. It’s notable that while black-American political scholarship has been grounded in critiquing race and white supremacy, continental African scholars and activists – who obviously understand the legacies of colonialism and white supremacy just as well as anyone – have chosen, as is proper, to also focus their critiques on the failures, greed, corruption and murder of Africa’s own ruling elites.

  Can we, the Caribbean and black-American descendants of racist chattel slavery who have been made ‘black’, tell the Yoruba people, of whom there are almost fifty million, that they must simply forgo their specific ethnic history of over 2000 years in favour of simplified black solidarity, simply because racism exists? Should Jamaican Rastas ignore the history of religious persecution, police brutality and class snobbery they have suffered in Jamaica, simply because ‘we are all black’? Or will the approaches and dialogues have to be more subtle and nuanced? As black Britain becomes majority West African, how important is it not to forget the battles that the first generation of post-war Caribbean migrants and their children fought so that later black migrants would not have to? Can black America incorporate the very different political traditions and experiences of the Caribbean and West Africa, and how does this entire conversation relate to the human situation as a whole and the inequalities, conflicts and challenges facing everyone? Only time will tell.