Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

I often work in prisons where, as you can imagine, a large section of those I work with are young black men. Some of the work we do is around creative writing and the young men write raps invariably filled with boasts about how many niggers they will shank and shoot. I don’t judge them, how could I? I used to carry knives and I even used to rap quite like that even though I knew better, I simply ask them what they would think if I rapped about killing honkies. I remind them that my white family are poor, that we come from Scotland, that Glasgow is often more violent than London and that twenty million plus Russians alone died in the ‘white on white violence’ of the Second World War.