Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

The ‘golden age of capitalism’ had ended in 1973, and the 80s saw the start of the rollback of the post-war welfare state, increased sell-off of public assets and the embrace of an individualistic ‘self-made’ logic by the very generation that had become wealthy with the support of free universities and cheap council houses,

and had literally been kept alive by the newly constructed National Health Service.

For black Britain, the decade began with the New Cross fire/massacre of 1981,

So, after our grandmothers had helped build the National Health Service and our grandfathers had staffed the public transport system, British MPs could openly talk about repatriation – we were no longer needed, excess labour, surplus to requirements, of no further use to capital.

So, after our grandmothers had helped build the National Health Service and our grandfathers had staffed the public transport system, British MPs could openly talk about repatriation – we were no longer needed, excess labour, surplus to requirements, of no further use to capital.

The government and the education system failed to explain to white Britain that, as the academic Adam Elliot-Cooper puts it, we had not come to Britain, but ‘rather that Britain had come to us’. 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.

Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire – ‘fuck the bloody foreigners’.

Never mind that waves of migration have been a constant in British history and that great many millions of ‘white’ Britons are themselves descendants of Jewish, Eastern European and Irish migrants of the nineteenth century,3 nor that even in the post-war ‘mass migration’ years, Ireland and Europe were the largest source of immigrants.4 And, of course, let’s say nothing about the millions of British emigrants, settlers and colonists abroad – conveniently labelled ‘expats’.

In a barely disguised move in the 1968 and 1971 immigration acts ‘grandfather clauses’ were placed into the legislation, which allowed the white citizens of the Commonwealth to continue to keep their freedom of movement without having to use explicitly racial language.5

Multi-ethnic Britain is a result of what scholar Paul Gilroy calls our ‘convivial’ culture, the normal everyday decency of ordinary people that for the most part keeps the peace in the face of enormous challenges.

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.

In short, we are trained to recognise the kinds of racism that tend to be engaged in by poorer people.

Poor people racism, bad, rich people racism, good.

Most people, it seems to me at least, hate poor people more than they hate poverty.

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.

This ‘if you just pull your socks up’ trope also ignores the reality that many Britons (and people around the globe) are poor and getting poorer through no fault of their own under austerity – the technical term for class robbery. Can a nurse whose pay increases are capped at 1 per cent – below the rate of inflation – by politicians who have not capped their own pay, change the fact that he or she is literally getting poorer every passing year, despite doing the same bloody hard work?

With 10 per cent of Britain’s prisons now privatised and many more using prison labour, such seemingly illogical right-wing virtue signalling from the head of London’s police starts to look like ‘vested interests’ and to signal tumultuous times ahead.

I find the whole idea that we can transcend our experiences; and take a totally unbiased look at the world to be totally ridiculous, yet that’s what many historians and academics claim to do.

The personal is the political,

they believe that all black people, regardless of class, nationality, political inclination or personal achievements, share racial credit for the shortcomings of the African continent’s post-independence leadership.

Conversely, they also believe that all those racialised as white, no matter how mediocre they may be in terms of personal intelligence and actual achievements, share some racial credit for the works of Russell, Da Vinci and Tesla, and for the prosperity of the modern ‘West’

Third, the idea that one should be grateful that your government does not kill, torture or imprison you for your criticisms is an extremely low bar of expectation coming from people who are apparently proud of their nation’s democratic credentials.

But if you point out the simple and obvious fact that long after the official colonial period Western governments have been perfectly happy to install and support the most gruesome of dictatorial regimes and also overthrow democratically elected presidents as and when it suits them, this will be labelled ‘blaming the west for everything’.

The idea that the Irish were essentially savages still lingered with us in England until the 1960s, with the infamous ‘No Irish, no blacks, no dogs’ sign being just one example. Yet in the Americas, Irish immigrants became big supporters of black slavery, the confederacy and white supremacy, and ended up as a significant portion of slave owners throughout the Americas – though still far less than the English or Scots.

Despite their own very real experience of oppression in Ireland, once in the Americas, particularly during the nineteenth century, the Irish came to understand very well the benefits of learning to be white, and learn quickly they did.4

During slavery, white and black Americans had lived in the closest proximity imaginable, with black women often wet nursing and raising white children, and of course ‘sexual relations’ and rape were entirely normal. But once black people ceased to be white people’s property, proximity became a problem,

Class affects everything, even racism, but in complex ways, and a phrase like ‘white privilege’ is not an absolute but a trend, a verifiable factor in human history produced by the philosophy and practice of institutionalised white supremacy.

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.

State schooling in Britain both today and when I was a child seems stuck in a Victorian-era paradigm, guided by notions of discipline, obedience and deference to ones betters, of becoming a good worker and getting a good job.

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.

My uncle always told me I was smart enough to pursue a career in quantum physics from an age when I did not even know what quantum physics was. Years later when I took up football, he was secretly disappointed and told my mum that he feared football would ruin me. He, like many others in ‘the black community’, essentially viewed black sportsmen mostly as fools who did very little for their community and rarely if ever used their platforms to speak out about injustices once they personally had made it, with obvious notable exceptions. People like my Uncle Offs were far more impressed by black academics like Walter Rodney and C. L. R. James than they ever would be by a footballer.

An identity that says ‘I am, because you are not’ is what Hegel was talking about when he wrote his master–slave dialectic, even if he did not realise this himself.

The long and short of it is that the master makes himself a slave to his slave by needing that domination to define him.

We talk about white privilege but we rarely talk about the white burden, 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.

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.

Cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee – the primary commodities of their days – were produced by human commodities with black skin, under what Sven Beckert rightly calls ‘war capitalism’.8 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.

we must realise that inhumane treatment of the lower orders was the norm in Europe at this time; in Britain, for example, poor people were still regularly hanged for small property theft, or transported to Australia in horrendous conditions and violently ejected from their lands so that those lands could be enclosed in a manner that would be repeated in the settler colonies of the future.

‘so far from the guilt of anything like a murderous act, so far from any show or suggestion of cruelty, there was not even a surmise of impropriety and that to bring a charge of murder would argue nothing less than madness.’

The most dramatic example of the revolutionary human capacities of black nationalism comes very early in its history in Haiti where, after the only successful slave revolution in human history, the independent black government made the white Polish and Germans who aided the revolution legally ‘black’ in 1804.18

‘I think he would be very proud of the continuing legacy of Britain in those places around the world, and particularly I think he would be amazed at India, the world’s largest democracy – a stark contrast, of course, with other less fortunate countries that haven’t had the benefit of British rule. If I can say this on the record – why not? It’s true, it’s true.’ Boris Johnson of Winston Churchill, on whom he has just finished writing a book ‘I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.’ ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ Winston Churchill

Once the French realised, as predicted at the time by British abolitionist James Stephen (and by the Haitians themselves), that the Haitians could not be re-enslaved, the French plan was to exterminate them all and start over again with newly enslaved people brought from Africa. The war that ensued became an explicitly genocidal one, in which the French troops were instructed to exterminate all of the blacks on the island.

Under threat of re-invasion, the French extorted a debt from Haiti in 1825 of 91 million gold francs for the loss of their ‘property’ – i.e. the Haitians themselves. It took up until 1947 to pay this ‘debt’, and in fact Haiti had to borrow the money to pay the debt from French banks.

But the ‘Wilberforce did it all’ idea also springs from two other ideological founts, one the aforementioned classic white saviour trope and the other a seemingly human need for simple solutions to complex problems, for great men instead of the convoluted mess that is human history – in short, a need for heroes.

If the British government abolished the slave trade way back in 1807 because of an inherent love for justice and for African human beings, how do we explain the British government backing apartheid rule, which did not end until I was seven years old? Remember that a regime of forced labour based on white supremacy was the cornerstone of apartheid.

the black British abolitionists living and publishing in England at the time, such as Mary Prince Ottabah Cuagano and Olaudah Equiano.

What I am saying is that power concedes nothing without demand or motive,

No one refers to the ‘white man’s burden’ any more, as it’s just too crude a phrase, so instead we speak of spreading democracy and human rights and of saving people from dictators, which funnily enough is almost exactly what the original nineteenth-century version of the white man’s burden claimed to be motivated by.

The victims of the transatlantic traffic did not think that they were being sold out by their ‘black brothers and sisters’ any more than the Irish thought that their ‘white brothers and sisters’ from England were deliberately starving them to death during the famine.

The state of slavery among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is much milder than in our colonies. For as, on the one hand, they have no land in high cultivation like our West Indian plantations, and therefore no call for that excessive un-intermitted labour which exhausts our slaves; so, on the other hand, no man is permitted to draw blood even from a slave.