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I was not born with an opinion of the world but it clearly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me.
They did not explain that the wealth of Britain, which made the welfare state and other class ameliorations possible, was derived in no small part from the coffee and tobacco, cotton and diamonds, gold and sweat and blood and death of the colonies. No one explained that our grandparents were not immigrants, that they were literally British citizens –many of them Second World War veterans – with British passports to match, moving from one of Britain’s outposts to the metropole. Nobody told white Britain that, over there in the colonies, Caribbeans and Asians were being told that Britain was
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millions of British citizens were stripped of their citizenship and the freedom of movement that a British passport gave them, simply because they were not white. In
‘convivial’ culture,
Britain has two competing traditions – one rooted in ideas of freedom, equality and democracy, and another that sees these words as mere rhetoric to be trotted out at will and violated whenever it serves the Machiavellian purposes of power preservation. This is how the UK can have the largest of the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq and yet still have a government that entirely ignored its population on an issue with such globe-shifting implications.
Poor people racism, bad, rich people racism, good.
Most people, it seems to me at least, hate poor people more than they hate poverty.
our evaluation of what constitutes ‘crime’ is not guided by morality, it is guided by the law; in other words, the rules set down by the powerful, not a universal barometer of justice – if such a thing even exists.
Just a little bit of money can be the difference between life and death, even on the same London street.
We all know that black Brits – already seven times more likely to be imprisoned than their white counterparts, and already more harshly treated at every level of the justice system – are going to make up a disproportionate amount of any further increase in Britain’s incarceration state.12 Poor people of all ethnicities will make up most of the rest.
. in a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, for whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races – those who, unlike us, are raced – appear.
polite denial, quiet amusement or outright outrage that one could dare to suggest that the mother of liberty is not a total meritocracy after all, that we too, like so many ‘less civilised’ nations around the world, have a caste system.
self-induced stupidity
People seem rather happy to align themselves with the Dunkirk spirit but rather less interested in even acknowledging the ‘Amritsar spirit’.
our bodies commit the sin of reminding people racialised as white of an uncomfortable truth about part of how this nation became wealthy, and that the good old days when white power could roam the earth unchallenged are over.
As James Baldwin famously observed, ‘segregation has allowed white people to create only the Negro they wish to see.’
blackness can accommodate difference far more easily than whiteness can
Paradoxically as I looked at the centuries of slavery and colonialism, assessed the state of modern Africa and had daily encounters with the intense racial self-hatred of many black people I also wondered if there was something innately wrong with us, if ‘we’ were destined to be history’s losers forever more or if we were just naturally more kind hearted than white people and this kind heartedness translated as weakness in the real world.
black people could still emerge from those tragedies as the criminals in public discourse?
‘Money whitens,’
‘now you have money, you are so successful that you are an honorary white man’
‘you are rich because you are white, because you are white you are rich.’
assumes white people to be the normal ‘raceless’ group, which of course could not be further from the truth.
if whiteness really is a metaphor for power, how is that power actually exercised?
As indentured servitude turned to chattel slavery and slavery came to be reserved strictly for people of African heritage, this white privilege became all the more important, as it literally became the difference between still being a human being and becoming a piece of property.
But once black people ceased to be white people’s property, proximity became a problem, so segregation was enforced along with anti-miscegenation laws that made what was common during slavery – sex between the races – a crime after it.
‘Whiteness is a phenomenon unthinkable in a context where white does not equal power at some structural level.’
The practice of legally privileging all people racialised as white literally came about so ruling groups could buy the racial loyalty of poor whites, not to entirely eradicate their poverty.
Real-life racism makes you paranoid, even in children it creates the dilemma of not knowing if someone is just being horrible in the ‘normal’ way, as people so often are, or if you are being ‘blacked off’ – as me and my friends call it.
Is state education designed to encourage more Darwins and Newtons, or to create middle-management civil servants and workers?
Thus it can be said that even though I left school with almost straight As, I had learned very little critical thinking in formal schooling.
British identity, despite all of the liberal rhetoric to the contrary, is obviously seen as synonymous with whiteness; modern British identity grew with and was shaped by the fundamentally and undeniably racist British Empire.
In the largest LEA in their sample, one of the largest in the country, black students entered the school twenty points above the national average as the highest performing ethnic group and in that very same LEA they left school as the lowest performing of all groups, twenty-one points below the national average
These seemingly odd responses to black excellence did not pop out of a vacuum, but rather stem from centuries of anti-black marketing in European literature, thought, philosophy and historiography.
This ‘intellectual’ trend was pioneered by those who took the conditions of enslaved people – that is people physically prevented from attaining an education – and decided that their perceptions of the intellectual aptitude of slaves represented the permanent and genetically pre-determined state of all black people.
Euro-America’s ability to dominate black people has not been read as one more chapter in a long history of human exploitation and domination, but rather as permanent racial superiority and inferiority.
how could black people remain second-class citizens when some of the greatest representatives of ‘British’ (or American) excellence to the world were black?
white people’s black guy,
the fact that black excellence in a particular field needs ‘explaining’,
the master makes himself a slave to his slave by needing that domination to define him.
they allow its existence to unbalance their entire sense of self. This racialised fragility is what caused the racist mob attacks in Britain in 1919 and 1958, the fire bombings of the 1980s and the now-famous case of Stephen Lawrence.
the burden of being tethered to a false identity, a parasitic self-definition that can only define itself in relation to blacks’ or others’ inferiority.
Despite what white supremacists claim, going to such extents as they have to prevent black excellence is really a rather huge compliment.
Dangerous as racism is, it also makes victims out of white people
yet the same institutional controversies surround them; a palpable lack of black managers and coaching staff and, of course, no owners at all in a field so disproportionately dominated by people of African heritage.
blackness is defined very differently from place to place.
that they would have been born middle class or aristocracy or at least be perceived as such.
From 1910 to 1970 between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families to be raised either by white families or in children’s homes across the country.
As long as whiteness is a metaphor for power, blackness must of course function as a metaphor for powerlessness, and as long as money whitens, poverty must blacken.
For most of history, the people doing the enslaving came from similar(ish) regions of the world to those being enslaved.
