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

by Akala

  Similar ‘white decline’ demographic time bomb articles have been circling in US and European media for some years now, and this demographic shift is what white extremists are laughably labelling ‘white genocide’. In reality, it is only the threat of a continued reduction in white privilege – a potential sharing of global power and the spread of equality before the law and the institutions of the state to people not racialised as white. In America, people racialised as white, whether they become a minority or not, will still hold virtually all of the key levers of economic, military and political power. There are no groups I know of with a history of barbecuing white people in front of thousands and collecting their body parts as souvenirs, there are no black police officers refusing to treat white people as victims as they lie dying in the street, and then putting their families under surveillance when they campaign for justice, and there are no torture camps in the third world to which white citizens are deported to stay in for years without trial or due process.

  Though the threat from Islamic fascist terrorists is real enough, they are equally willing to kill black and brown people as white people – in fact, the vast majority of people killed by Isis, Boko Haram and Al Shabaab have been in Africa and the Middle East, obviously. Thus there is no reason for white populations to be any more afraid of or more willing to entertain a flat cultural essentialism about almost 1.8 billion Muslims than the rest of us. Though it’s entirely understandable and human that a portion of the people racialised as white fear that, if they become a ‘minority’ (which means seeing whiteness as a defining factor, obviously), others will do to them as they have done to others, the idea of white racial victimhood – at this point at least – is laughable. So laughable that when you ask for specific examples of ways in which white people are victimised for being white, if you get any answer at all it is likely to be ‘People just assume I’m a racist.’

  However, the narrative of white racial victimhood is very useful in class terms for the white ruling classes. By demonising the undeserving ethnic other with whom poor whites have more materially in common, the upper classes can use a racial solidarity rooted in the history of dominating the other to mask a history and reality of exploitation. Those that instrumentalise race in this way generally could not give two shits about the ‘chavs’ in Liverpool or the ‘rednecks’ in Alabama.

  There is nothing even remotely resembling genocide happening to white people.

  If white people choose to have fewer children because they are more prosperous – a pattern we see repeated in other rich non-white nations like Japan – that is totally their free choice. Similarly, white and ‘non-white’ people voluntarily having sex with each other now that they are free of state-imposed apartheid laws or widely acceptable moral scorn, thus producing little mongrels like me, is hardly in the same conceptual universe as physical extermination, but that is how warped the white nationalist worldview is.

  As we watched the Neo-Nazis march through Charlottesville chanting ‘The Jews will not replace us’ on their way to defend a statue of a man that fought a war to keep slavery, we are confronted by the lunatic contradictions of white-supremacist identity. While claiming to be supreme, these people clearly do not believe what they are selling, for if Aryans are inherently superior there would be no need at all to worry about Jews or niggers ‘replacing’ them. Surely an innate Aryan supremacy should make them by definition irreplaceable? This constant articulation of supremacy and victimhood has long been a cornerstone of white-supremacist discourse.

  Today, life in Western Europe, Australia and North America is, by the material standards of the world and human history, really quite spectacularly wonderful – even for those of us that grew up poor. Europe has enjoyed an unprecedented level of peace and prosperity for the past seven decades, free from the kinds of major conflicts that have defined so much of its history.

  You would think that today would be a time that Europeans, particularly those on the political right, would be celebrating the spectacular domestic success of their model of capitalism, for never before in European history has healthcare, education, peace and prosperity been so widespread as it has in the era since 1945. Yet strangely we find not optimism and dynamism coming from the European right, but rather a lament for the supposedly dying continent and the inevitable ‘decline of the West’ and even, at the extreme end of now-acceptable paranoia, fear of an apparently imminent takeover by the Muslims.19

  These thinkers are not particularly original but rather are echoing an old refrain that goes back at least a century to writers like Oswald Spengler, Maddison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who bemoaned the decline of the West and/or the white race at the very time when white supremacy and Western pre-eminence were at the peak of their global power. But even the threat of Muslim terrorists starts to look far less daunting when viewed against the long and very recent history of violence in Europe such as the British in Ireland, the IRA, ETA, GRAPO, post-Franco right wing militias in Spain and during Italy’s Years of Lead, and certainly not like an existential threat to the continent’s survival. The fact that the terrorism of Islamic fascists has been characterised as a failure of multiculturalism but the equally murderous terrorism of the above groups was not is in itself quite fascinating.

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  In some ways, though, the ‘decline of the West’ lot are correct that the Europe they imagine is indeed doomed, because it never really existed in the first place. This lilywhite Europe where everyone knew their place, things were peaceful and everyone got along simply melts into thin air against the historical record of land clearances, the violence of nation-state formations, religious purges, anti-Jewish pogroms, the Hapsburgs, Napoleon, a couple of world wars and the inquisition.

  But just because the supposed golden age never existed does not mean that people will not strive after it. On 21 January 2017 the far-right parties of several major European countries met for the first time in the German city of Koblenz to outline their ‘vision for a Europe of freedom’ – I am entirely unsure who it is Europe is colonised by and needs to be free of, but again we see a clear articulation of a sense of victimhood. Very few, if any, of these parties espouse an easily recognisable ‘old school’ white-supremacist discourse for now, but when regional leaders in the German ADF party are talking openly about how Holocaust guilt has ‘strangled’ Germany we are already in the territory of Nazi apologia being acceptable in public discourse. These far-right groups were extremely explicit about the inspiration they took from the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory in the US, with the French far-right politician Marine Le Pen calling 2016 ‘the year the Anglo-Saxon world woke up’ (in reference to Trump’s election) and the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders paraphrasing Trump’s slogan after the Koblenz meeting by tweeting #WeWillMakeOurCountriesGreatAgain.

  Most of the animosity of these groups has so far gone towards Muslim immigrants, but black people who are not Muslims watch carefully, as we are certain that people willing to accept flat generalisations about 1.8 billion Muslims or wild theories about global Jewish conspiracies will invariably not be crying over a few dead black people. These groups and their ideas are not fringe, as liberals seem to wish they were, and liberalism seems to be entirely ill-equipped to meet and challenge them. It seems to me ridiculous to believe that there will not be major conflicts in the coming decades in Europe between the Muslim populations, far-right groups and the state that will inevitably also have consequences for black and brown non-Muslims and for anyone else who just wants to live in peace. Burying our heads in the sand or pretending that Europe is now so enlightened and democratic that the pogroms against outsiders that have characterised so much of its history prior to 1945 cannot return is pure delusion.

  Think about it like this; whilst people in Europe like to feel as if they/we are so much more racially enlightened than the Americans in almost all European countries the percentage of the population that is not racialised as white is less than 5 per cent of the total –
though this is projected to increase sharply over the next generation – and yet we have all the racial fear-mongering, immigration detention, barely disguised racially motivated migration legislation and, in the case of France, visible and clear segregation. It’s easy to point to America as the racist state, but how will Europe react to its changing demographics coupled with a relative loss of global power? We will soon see.

  On the other side of the world, how will Australians and New Zealanders adapt to the reality of their geographic location? Will they accept the inevitable reality that China, India and Japan are likely to be their most practical business partners in the twenty-first century, or will they cling to the notion that they are part of Britain’s white dominions? Having visited both countries, I must confess it’s a little unfair to simply lump them together on this question; New Zealand seems to be further ahead than Australia in adapting to this rapidly changing world in terms of domestic ‘race relations’, yet Australia seems to understand its ‘Asian’ location very well in business terms.20 The long-term ‘demographic’ effects of business and trade relations with industrialized Asian economies are obvious enough.

  The key question therefore becomes this: what happens once money no longer whitens? When whiteness is no longer a metaphor for power? When whiteness is no longer default? When Chinese or Indian actors can be ‘universal’ sex symbols in the way that Brad Pitt and George Clooney are thought to be? When the world’s leading economies are decidedly in Asia? Whiteness will have to find a totally new meaning. This process is already well underway, and some of the problems we are seeing in the West discussed above are the pangs of people racialised as white getting used to this new world. It is one of the central arguments of this book that some of the major political currents in the Western world today must be understood through the racial reframing of the world. A reframing that has been taking place since 1945, and only looks like accelerating in the years to come.

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  The boundaries where ‘race’ ends and class, geopolitics or ethnic, national and regional conflicts begin are of course blurred. There are literally billions of people alive today who’ve had far more extreme experiences of poverty, brutal law enforcement and exploitation than I have simply because of where they were born. So while I critique imperialism, I also acknowledge the contradiction of my own ‘Western’ privileges, brought about in part – ironically – by my proximity to whiteness. If the Brazilian police had shot me that day it would certainly have made some level of news. If they shot me now, my being better known would perhaps shine an international light – in the UK at least – on Brazilian police brutality far brighter than the deaths of tens of thousands of Afro Brazilians.

  In closing, it is worth asking what the formative race and class experiences of a child born in 2018 into a similar family to mine might be. If current trends continue, for the most part the answers don’t look very positive. They will be even more likely to go to prison than I was, as Britain’s incarceration state has expanded greatly during the course of my lifetime. They will probably be far less likely to receive adequate healthcare, as the NHS continues to shrink and/or be privatised. The banana skins will almost certainly not return and the small black middle class is probably now permanent, but the 2018 child will likely have far less chance of ‘lifting themselves out of poverty’ than I did, as the mechanisms that helped make that possible for me continue to be deliberately eroded.

  On a global level, what might the definitive political struggles that inform the political consciousness of my 2018 equivalent be? Formal apartheid almost certainly cannot return to South Africa, though a civil war that will have racial and ethnic complications still seems entirely possible, and I sincerely doubt that the white farmers newly returned to Zimbabwe will attempt to restore the old pre-1980 undisguised racial order (having been to Zimbabwe many times myself, I can guarantee black Zimbabweans simply would not stand for it anyhow). But America could quite feasibly be split into ethno-states by extreme violence, as empowered white nationalists wish for it to be. Similarly, pogroms against European Muslims and, by ethnic extension, Sikhs and random brown people who ‘look Muslim’, as well as continued terrorist attacks by white nationalists and Islamic extremists and the wider reprisals and discrimination those attacks will be used to justify, seem to me quite likely to be common features of twenty-first-century continental Europe, but unlike in previous centuries Europe is unlikely to be able to spill its domestic conflicts out onto Africa, Asia and the Americas.

  As you may be able to tell, I am not particularly optimistic about the future and I hope to be proved spectacularly wrong. I fear the only question for the life of someone like me born in 2018 is how extreme the tragedies and carnage they will surely live through will be. With that said, as you have surely noticed by now many victories have been won before and they will be won again. Formal Apartheid fell when it did because of black South African resistance, international pressure and material assistance from Cuba. The National Front were run out of London by black Caribbeans, South Asians and an important set of ‘white British’ allies. British law firms have brought cases against the state on behalf of Kenyans tortured in British concentration camps during the 1950s, and while the scale of the payouts they received was meagre in comparison to the horrors inflicted, the enormity of the British government’s lies and deception regarding empire was placed under a critical spotlight by these cases like never before. So my apparent lack of hope is more a recognition that tragedies will inevitably occur, that many of these coming tragedies will be racially charged and stratified by class but that real people will react in all of the myriad of ways they have done before – which includes reacting by giving birth to new traditions of resistance and creativity and working to create new futures. For children born in 2018 into relative poverty and racialised as non-white, the future seems filled with massive potential for change for the better brought about by a relative democratisation of global and local power, but equally the possibility of a reassertion and legitimation of extreme forms of bigotry combined with the increased inequality that is affecting everyone.

  The answers to these questions, and the shape of the world children born now will inhabit, will be determined not just by politicians and billionaires, but by millions of supposedly ordinary people like you and me who choose whether or not to engage with difficult issues, to try and grasp history, to find their place in it, and who choose whether to act or to do nothing when faced with the mundane and mammoth conflicts of everyday life.

  Notes

  CHAPTER 1 – Born in the 1980s

  1. La Rose, John, The New Cross Massacre Story (London: New Beacon, 2011)

  2. The Moonshot youth club and the Albany theatre, both popular with black youth and sites of anti-racist organising, had been gutted by fire in the previous years before New Cross as well as an earlier racist petrol bomb attack on a party in nearby Ladywell back in 1971.

  3. Kushner, Tony, The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys, 1685 to the Present (Manchester: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Panayi, Panikos, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 2010)

  4. Panayi estimates that 700,000 Irish migrants have come to Britain since 1945 (in addition to the 1.5 million that came between 1800–1945). Total migration from the whole of south Asia since 1945 he estimates to be around 1 million; total migration from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean since 1945 he estimates to make up 2.4 million of the 6.2 million total.

  5. Paul, Kathleen, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)

  6. Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia or convivial culture? (London: Routledge, 2004)

  7. Williams, Elizabeth, The Politics of Race in Britain and South Africa: Black British Solidarity and the Anti-apartheid (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017)

  8. Britain engineered a coup against the democratically elected Cheddi Jagan in 1953 in British Guiana and, even tho
ugh Iran was never a British colony, Britain and the US that same year engineered a coup against the democratically elected Mohamad Mosaddeq.

  9. Linebaugh, Peter, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Verso, 2006)

  10. A June 2017 report by the Resolution Foundation found that Brits born between 1981–85 had on average just half the net wealth of those born just five years earlier. D’Arcy, Connor and Gardiner, Laura, The Generation of Wealth: Asset Accumulation Across and Within Cohorts (June 2017). Retrieved from URL www.resolutionfoundation.org/app/uploads/2017/06/wealthpdf

  11. Prison Reform Trust Bromley Briefings 2017. Retrieved from URL www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/Bromley%20Briefings/Summer%202017%20factfile.pdf

  12. Eastwood, Niamh, Shiner, Michael and Bear, Daniel, The Numbers in Black and White: Ethnic Disparities in the Policing and Prosecution of Drug Offences in England and Wales (London: Release Drugs, the Law and Human Rights, 2013)

  Interlude: A Guide to Denial

  1. During a 2005 interview on 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace, Freeman literally said that the way to end racism was to stop talking about it. He has repeated similar sentiments about the race and class work in multiple interviews since.

  2. Draper, Nicholas,The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Hall, Catherine, Legacies of British Slave Ownership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)