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

by Akala

  11 – The Decline of Whiteness, the Decline of Race? (Or the End of Capitalism?)

  ‘Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world. This is the significant event, the fundamental experience, of our era.’

  – Achille Mbebe1

  ‘Certainly, the dominance of the West already appears just another, surprisingly short-lived phase in the long history of empires and civilizations’

  – Pankaj Mishra2

  It was 5 a.m. in Hong Kong, an hour I would normally consider to be the dead of night, but it was my first time in the city and I only had twenty-four hours there so I was eager to get up and about. I looked out of my hotel window to see the slowly rising sun and to my shock I was greeted by a vision of a whole city already coming awake. Scores of people were scurrying about as if it was the middle of the day, but they were clearly not on their way to work. I could see old couples doing Tai Chi on their rooftops, people going for walks, running, playing basketball and meditating. Beyond the skyscrapers and the prosperity, the contrast of the green mountainous beauty with the bustling city, the endless shopping malls and hotels, what stuck with me about Hong Kong was this early morning ritual. I had seen something similar a few weeks before when I visited Hanoi and I thought it was a carnival day, but apparently not, it was just a typical Tuesday morning. It felt very strange to see people doing such ‘unusual’ exercises – a few people were stick fighting, one guy in Hanoi had been practising with a sword – so publicly and at such an early hour.

  Though I myself practise an Asian martial art and grew up watching Kung Fu films, what interested me was not the stereotype of ninja-Kung-Fu Asians being seemingly confirmed, but rather just how average everybody was. These were not Shaolin super-Asians but regular folks, including grandparents, mostly not of a great standard of training but just trying to keep fit, and somehow the early hour combined with the sheer volume of people struck me as politically significant. In my mind, this simple morning ritual spoke of a culture on the ascent, and I saw in it a togetherness that may well have been entirely absent for those that participated in it. This is when I accepted that everything the scholars were saying was true, that unipolar Western dominance was over and that the return to pre-eminence – or at least to parity – of Asia awaited us.3 A couple of years later, the Beijing Olympics happened and we all saw an opening ceremony that was so spectacularly impressive that you could almost not help but read it as China officially announcing to the world that the century of shame was well and truly over and that the Middle Kingdom was back to business as usual.

  There were little signs that the world could see this too: one day I walked into the massive Foyles bookstore on Charing Cross Road and as I was staring at the shelf labelled ‘The Classics’, I noticed something strange. Up until now the classics had always meant books written within the ‘Western’ tradition; it did not matter that Africans and Asians had millennia of written literature too.4 Not any more. On the shelf before me I saw Chinese and Japanese classics, like The Romance of Three Kingdoms, The Tale of Genji and The Water Margin. Times were changing.

  Less than a century ago, the Chinese in British-ruled Hong Kong lived in squalid, segregated ghettoes and were governed by racist legislation;5 today the ethnic Chinese of Hong Kong are on average some of the richest people on the planet. How quick the pace of change in world affairs. When China was militarily and economically weak and politically fragmented by external and internal forces, Chinese people left China as exploited indentured servants and found themselves on the receiving end of many of the same racist assumptions and discriminatory immigration legislation as other ‘subject races’. Today you can check into any Park Lane hotel and you are as likely to see a Chinese guest as any other nationality. Over the past few decades, China has pulled at least 500 million people out of poverty (the Communist propagandists at the World Bank actually put the figure at around 800 million), industrialised at a pace faster than any nation before and today stands at the leading edge of many green technologies, and it has managed to do all of this without invading and colonising half the planet.

  For these and many other reasons – despite obvious and undeniable injustices in China – you would think China would be universally admired by those who claim to believe industrial capitalism to be the holy grail of human achievement. Yet reading about China in the press, I can’t help but feel a tinge of the old ‘yellow peril’ sentiment still lurking beneath the narratives. And if the brilliant documentary filmmaker John Pilger is correct, the USA is already in the process of waging war on China. Watching The Coming War On China, his documentary on the subject, and looking at an image of the American military bases that surround China, and knowing a little history of US foreign policy, it’s hard not to fear the worst.

  Under Barack Obama, the US government made it official that they were planning a ‘pivot to Asia’, and while of course the discourse is couched in suitably liberal language for public consumption, anyone with any kind of background in international relations – including the more honest American analysts – knows that ultimately this policy will be about ‘containing’ China. Translation: America intends to continue dominating the world, regardless of what the majority of the world’s people want. Remember that more people in the world see the USA as the greatest threat to world peace than any other country, and this is according to results from American polling companies, before the election of that man that is currently in the White House. For example, a Gallup poll of 2014 asked 66,000 people from sixty-five countries which nation they thought was the greatest threat to world peace, and a quarter thought the United States, with just 6 per cent saying China. This trend is echoed in earlier polls.

  While this has obviously not been a book about China, what I have tried to show is how globe-shifting forces, ideas and events well beyond our individual control shape the lives and times of individuals like you and me and consequently determine a certain degree of our experiences, however much we might like to believe that we are in control of our lives. How ‘the West’ in general and Anglo-America in particular will react to a nascent Asian power and prosperity, how they will contest global trade and military relationships, will be one of the key drivers of questions about race and class in the twenty-first century. Just as the Cold War shaped race and class relations in the mid twentieth century6 and just as European geopolitical dominance in the nineteenth century made white supremacy a ‘credible’ way of understanding the world for so many.7

  Now that Europe is no longer the centre of gravity in world politics or economics, and now that the biggest Western power is pivoting to Asia – no prizes for guessing where that means the US is pivoting away from – how will Western Europeans react to dropping to ‘third place’ behind Asia and the USA in economic and military terms? How will American politicians and military personnel react when faced with the choice of preserving American power through alliances with Japan and India against China or being loyal to their European cousins? If you’ve read enough political history, the likely answer to that one seems fairly obvious. It’s easy to see how, in the twenty-first century, the very idea of race and even ‘Western’ society itself could easily come apart at the seams.

  Similarly, from a pan-Africanist perspective, how will successful ‘black Westerners’ react to this changing world? Will we maintain emotional links with the interests of the global south beyond a generation or two or will we fall into the trap of the ‘black bourgeoisie’ that black American writer Franklin Frazier famously lamented way back in 1957? Will relative comfort and privilege change us for the worse? When all of the Caribbean- and Indian-born post-war generation are dead, as will soon be the case, and we are just British people, how will this affect our political consciousness? I say ‘we’ because I make no pretensions to super humanity and I wrestle every day with my own doubts, weaknesses, egotism and greed. I often look at the world and just think fuck it, why bother, but I know that’s how we are supposed to feel, that’s why the cor
ruption is so naked and freely visible – to wear down people who have the conviction that things could be better.

  There is a picture of several Indian women in saris I often use in one of my lectures about perception. The women appear to be in their fifties and thus would usually be referred to as ‘aunties’. An Indian ‘auntie’ might conjure images of a wise older woman preparing a delicious biryani with a secret recipe that, despite years of observing auntie at work, her British-born younger relatives just cannot replicate. The image of a Jamaican grandmother is not entirely dissimilar, for if there is anyone that has come to represent love, caring, great cooking and wise familial authority it is the grandmother or ‘auntie’.

  When I show this picture to an audience, I ask them to add a caption that will tell me what is happening in the picture. Students are invariably aware that some kind of trick is at play but nonetheless a flurry of hands go up with the usual assumptions; ‘they are at a wedding’, ‘auntie has just shared her secret biryani recipe with the family’, ‘it’s Diwali’. After these few guesses, the audience looks more intently at the picture and starts noticing the details; the men in the background wearing glasses, the fact that the women are in what looks like a classroom and not a kitchen, and eventually the small screens in the distance that show faint images of satellites and planets, and the answer dawns on someone. ‘It’s the Indian satellite mission to Mars,’ someone shouts, and a collective pause is followed by laughter as people realise the significance of the trick.

  This image may prove to be one of the most important metaphors for the twenty-first century – the picture features Seetha Somasundaram, the Programme Director of the ISRO (Indian Space and Research Organisation) space science programme, Minal Rohit, project manager of the methane sensor for Mars and Nandini Harinath, the Deputy Operations Director for the Mars Orbiter Mission. These ‘aunties’ in the picture – despite some sexist claims by Internet trolls to the contrary – were some of the most senior scientists on the Indian mission Mangalyaan, a rocket that reached Mars in 2014, a feat which was achieved for around 10 per cent of the cost of NASA’s Maven rocket, which was launched just a week later.

  If there was one image that I could pick that sums up the stupidity of racism and sexism, the legacies of anti-colonial struggles, and the potential of all people to be brilliant, this might well be it. This image of older brown women leading the world in literal rocket science, an area of work so challenging that it has become the metaphor for intellectual difficulty. The twenty-first century could well turn out to be a shit century in which to be a bigot clinging to old assumptions of gender, race and the eternal supremacy of a particular culture or geographic region, or alternatively old hierarchies might well continue to reassert themselves. But the fact that India has achieved this in less than a century of independence from Britain, and at a time when the country still has more desperately poor people than any other, only makes it all the more fascinating to contemplate what the future holds.

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  The Ancient Egyptians believed that their pharaoh was sacred, a representation of God on Earth, indeed the very essence of monarchy is rooted in this religious idea of divine kingship. As long as Kemetic (Egyptian) civilisation was strong and stable, technologically unparalleled by its contemporaries and militarily able to defend itself, this illusion of divine kingship may well have felt truly plausible. As someone who has been fascinated since childhood by Ancient Egypt, I’ve always wondered how the people of that land might have reacted when they realised that their king was not so divine after all; that their land could be conquered by foreign barbarians and that the universe offered them no pre-ordained special treatment as a result of their monarch’s relationship with the divine. One could even argue, as the Ghanaian pan-Africanist scholar and novelist Ayi Kweh Armah has, that this belief actually paralysed the Ancient Egyptians and made them unable to cope with the reality check when it came. How else do we explain their ability to build complex structures that still puzzle modern engineers alongside their failure to build a proper defensive fort across the thin strip of land through which the successive invaders that had constantly threatened the kingdom had come?

  In a sense, I think whiteness has functioned quite similarly to divine kingship, paralysing those who are intensely invested, trapping them into a resentment of the reality that they are obviously not superior. For several centuries, people racialised as white were often taught – sometimes by some of the best minds in ‘their’ societies – that they were inherently superior to other human beings, that they could disregard the feelings of their ‘negro’ slaves, their Indian subjects and their vanquished Mandarins without having to fear consequences because their supremacy was in fact eternal, pre-ordained by god or science or culture.

  When major shocks to this system did come, people racialised as white were often unable to process what was occurring. During the Haitian Revolution, for example, the white French came up with all kinds of fantastical theories about the rebels being white people in black face rather than accept the obvious fact that their former slaves had risen against them, as human beings are likely to.8 This denial was best summed up by one French colonist who said, ‘All experienced colonists know that this class of men have neither the energy nor the combination of ideas necessary for the execution of this project, whose realisation they are nevertheless marching towards.’ Similar racial reactions can be observed in response to Reconstruction in America and particularly the rise of Imperial Japan, which caused a diplomatic racial crisis in the Western world.9 The politicians of the time were very careful not to speak too openly about this racial anxiety and historians have generally neglected this factor since, but a few scholars have taken the time to show us just how much impact the Pacific War had on the racial balance of world power.10

  Despite a seemingly pervasive belief that only people of colour ‘play the race card’, it does not take anything as dramatic as a slave revolution or Japanese imperialism to evoke white racial anxieties, something as trivial as the casting of non-white people in films or plays in which a character was ‘supposed’ to be white will do the trick. For example, the casting of Olivier award-winning actress Noma Dumezweni to play the role of Hermione in the debut West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child got bigots so riled up that J. K. Rowling felt the need to respond and give her blessing for a black actress to play the role. A similar but much larger controversy occurred when the character Rue in the film The Hunger Games was played by a black girl, Amandla Stenberg. Even though Rue is described as having brown skin in the original novel, ‘fans’ of the book were shocked and dismayed that the movie version cast a brown girl to play the role, and a Twitter storm of abuse about the ethnic casting of the role ensued. You have to read the responses to truly appreciate how angry and abusive they are.11 As blogger Dodai Stewart pointed out at the time:

  All these . . . people . . . read The Hunger Games. Clearly, they all fell in love with and cared about Rue. Though what they really fell in love with was an image of Rue that they’d created in their minds. A girl that they knew they could love and adore and mourn at the thought of knowing that she’s been brutally killed. And then the casting is revealed (or they go see the movie) and they’re shocked to see that Rue is black. Now . . . this is so much more than, ‘Oh, she’s bigger than I thought.’ The reactions are all based on feelings of disgust.

  These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was ‘some black girl’ all along. So now they’re angry. Wasted tears, wasted emotions. It’s sad to think that had they known that she was black all along, there would have been [no] sorrow or sadness over her death.

  The film and play examples may seem trivial, and it’s easy for most sane people to denounce such idiocy, but the racial reactions to Reconstruction, civil rights, decolonisation and the rise of Japan were anything but trivial and I sincerely doubt that the reactions to the return of China and what that means for world affairs will
be trivial either. I believe to some extent we are living through another crisis of whiteness, perhaps the final one, and that this crisis is tied up with several other complicated political and historic threads, such as the looming ecological disaster, domestic class conflict, Islamic fascism, the pivot to Asia and, if the Marxist scholars are correct, the very end of capitalism itself, though I am aware that capitalism’s inevitable end has been predicted ever since its beginning!12

  Recent events in Anglo-America cannot but compel us to reflect on all of these threads. I am no fan of Barack Obama and recognise that he was in essence – beyond the Kenyan dad, the beautiful black family, the singing of Al Green and the fist bumps – not substantially different from other US presidents, in that he continued America’s wars, arms industry, deportation procedures, drone programme and general global aggression, but we cannot help but reflect on the election of the man that has succeeded him. It is notable that white-supremacist groups cheered the election of Obama in 2008, as they hoped and believed that the racist backlash would support their agendas; they were not mistaken.

  The election of Donald Trump, a reality TV star with no previous political experience and a man openly endorsed by Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, the KKK and other beacons of light, has been sold to us even by some notable white ‘leftist’ and liberal commentators as a rebellion against the status quo, the rage of an apparently forgotten group of Americans. These people seem to know nothing about American history or race politics or worse, they are choosing to cover for white supremacists. In either case, their views are not supported by the data at all.