Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

Once slavery in the Americas was exclusively reserved for humans of African origin, black skin became a signal of merchandise rather than humanity, property rather than personhood and thus anti-blackness became one of the bedrocks of the emergent capitalist economies of western Europe and North America.

It wasn’t free trade or open markets, but military rule, forced servitude, national monopolies and absolutely no semblance of democracy that helped modern Europe and America to develop. Racism gave slave owners the justification for an unprecedented experiment in the denial of liberty and forced servitude and thus racism, far from being marginal or just a side effect, has been absolutely central to developing Euro-American prosperity.

The idea that black Africans were savage heathens, and thus slavery was a good and necessary stage in preparing them for civilisation, became so embedded in Euro-Christian thought that even some abolitionists accepted and parroted the idea.

an entire corpus of supposedly scientific racism was spawned that sorted humanity into gradations of race and even excluded some groups from the ranks of humanity altogether. These theories could be used to justify what we would now call genocide,11 with the dehumanisation made legally explicit in Britain with cases such as that of the infamous slave ship Zong, where 133 Africans were thrown overboard when the ship got into difficulty.

drowned peoples represented goods, not humans,

blackness to become the colour of freedom,

of revolution and of humanity.17

The revolutionary and oppositional nature of black identity is also part of why so many millions of people racialised as white are inspired by the black culture, music and art in spite of all racist propaganda that they have been exposed to asserting that these people – and thus their culture – are inferior.

Scottish nationalism in our times is rooted in a rejection of English superiority and a refusal to be dictated to by Westminster rather than in the same racist imperial fantasies that nourish so much British nationalism.

Blackness continues to represent traditions of resistance and rebellion such that even today, when young people in Britain who are not black wish to participate in an oppositional culture they flock to hip hop and grime, and before that Reggae, in a way that black youngsters never did and never will to punk or grunge – much as we may personally like both genres.

Are we really to believe that a British parliament that had only just come to abolish the labour of its ‘own’ children felt such a loving affinity for faraway negroes?

regarding death as infinitely preferable to slavery,

burning for revenge for the fate of their friends and relations

£20 million was found for slave masters – to engage in mass executions of the very same people one had apparently set free out of sheer and undying love.

This is how they can support terrorists in Libya while claiming to save Libyans with humanitarian bombs, and then let people fleeing from Libya drown in the sea while the Foreign Secretary makes jokes about clearing away the dead bodies to a laughing audience; or how they can sell arms to the Saudis for them to kill Yemeni civilians at the exact same time that they are waging war in Syria under the rubric of humanitarianism.

During the period of decolonisation, the British state embarked upon a systematic process of destroying the evidence of its crimes. Codenamed ‘Operation Legacy’, the state intelligence agencies and the Foreign Office conspired to literally burn, bury at sea or hide vast amounts of documents containing potentially sensitive details of things done in the colonies under British rule.

Can Britain ever behave in the world like the democracy it claims to be, or is such a thing entirely impossible?

Those that kill for Britain are glorious, those killed by Britain are unpeople.

What is most fascinating about British intellectual discourse is that we can see brutality ever so clearly when it wears Japanese or German or Islamic clothes, but when it comes to looking in the mirror at the empire on which the sun never set – the eighteenth-century’s premier slave trader, the mother country of the Commonwealth and one of the pioneer countries in developing and then putting into practice the Enlightenment philosophy of white supremacy – so many suddenly become blind, deaf and dumb, unable to see murder as murder.

a tendency to cling onto one’s culture more fiercely when alienated from its source.

cultural capital.

‘ethnic limit’

This diaspora identity solidified in opposition to the Britishness that black people were denied,

It’s a shame that successive Jamaican governments and the Jamaican elite have not yet found an effective strategy to convert this global goodwill and cultural capital into a programme to uplift the nation.

What does it mean to have the old plantocracy and later migrants into the country control all the wealth and power?

Ethnocentrism can be overcome, but overt racism or the idea of permanent hierarchical racial difference is a chasm much deeper and more difficult to surmount.

The idea of racial hierarchy only lost much of its credibility because its three most unapologetic twentieth-century proponents were all defeated, to a greater or lesser extent. They were, of course, the Jim Crow South, apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.

the idea of race and racial hierarchy is perhaps as strong as it ever was for many millions of people today.

London is not even the most dangerous area of Britain, let alone Europe, let alone the world.

When you meet your own powerlessness before the institution that claims to be protecting you, you feel both stupid and cheated.

I could literally be one of a handful of children on free school meals – of any ethnicity – that was also in the top 1 or 2 per cent of mathematicians of my age and be on my way to an elite maths class during the summer holidays, but I’d ultimately still be viewed as little more than a potential criminal by those with the power.

It’s interesting that many black parents have felt sending their children back to far poorer societies would cure their bad behaviour in England, suggesting that the parents see England as part of the problem.

When we look at the prison system we cannot fail to notice the backgrounds of the prisoners and the guards, overwhelmingly from poorer families, in contrast to the judges and lawyers; generally from much better off families. It all seems like one big racket.

visit any primary school in any ‘hood’ in the UK, black or otherwise, watch the children’s playfulness, their sensitivity, their willingness to learn and then ask yourself in all seriousness how any of these little spirits will become killers within the next decade. In fact, you could equally visit any of the top private schools and ask how some of those children go on to become the political psychopaths who justify wars with all sorts of profound rhetoric, knowing full well the killing is for profit and for strategic advantage. Rich people crime good, poor people crime bad.

We recognise that willingness to do violence is an almost universally admired male trait from Wall Street to West Hollywood to Whitehall. Crime does pay and young people can see that as clearly in their ends as they can out there in the big wide world. The problem with our crime is just that the scale is too small.

Gangsters, i.e. persons involved in actual organised crime, tend to be too busy making money to kill someone for looking at them the wrong way.

The point is that male children in our society are willing to kill each other over very little.

What is it about masculinity in our society that makes young men from entirely different ethnic backgrounds and geographic regions often react to the challenges of being poor with such territorial displays of violence?

The sense of hopelessness and fear

The pressure to accumulate, the understanding that poverty is shameful, the double shame of being black and poor, the constant refrain of materialism coming from every facet of popular culture, the empty fridge, the disconnected electricity, the insecurity of being a tenant with eviction always just a few missed paycheques away, the stress and anger of your parents that trickles down far better than any capital accumulation, the naked injustices that you now know to be reality and the growing belief that one is indeed all of the negative stereotypes that the people with the power say you are.

I’d rather live in a city and a society and a world where less desperation exists: this is as much common-sense self-preservation to me as it is ‘altruism’.

I can tell you that if most youts in the hood could genuinely see a legal path to just a decent middle-class living without having to be spoken to and treated like a total idiot for thirty years, 95 per cent would take it.

How much of this self-segregation is caused by the seemingly natural human appetite for tribalism, and how much is due to the social processes that shape a shared identity?

by thirteen we have learned the meanings and implications of our racial identities quite well

For black children, encounters with the state and its agents, outright interpersonal racism and much else teach you a sense of shared blackness and by thirteen this black identity is usually solidified.

You internalise both a sense of black unity and common struggle and at the same time a sense of self-hatred, a belief that other young black boys are a danger to you, and both possibilities wrestle one another constantly.

aware that the school system and the larger society did not really want to see me prosper despite all their liberal claims to the contrary,

the children that grew up with the safety blankets of money and whiteness have gotten twice as far working half as hard,

These things are all the results of political decisions taken, decisions informed by the perceived class interests and worldviews of our rulers and their rulers.

‘if you wish to avoid civil war you must become an imperialist’.