Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

let’s say nothing about the millions of British emigrants, settlers and colonists abroad – conveniently labelled ‘expats’.

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.

Good people are not racist, only bad people are. This neat binary is a great way of avoiding any real discussion at all.

already own more books than I could ever read, yet I often still go to bookshops just to look at, browse and smell the pages of a freshly printed one

I am partly a product of Britain’s injustices, of its history of class and race oppression, but also of its counter-narrative of struggle and the compromises made by those in power born of those struggles. I am a product of the empire, and also of the welfare state.

Just a little bit of money can be the difference between life and death, even on the same London street.

If tougher sentences alone worked to reduce crime, the USA would surely be crime free by now?

People seem rather happy to align themselves with the Dunkirk spirit but rather less interested in even acknowledging the ‘Amritsar spirit’.

You need not worry though as adjectives and slogans are not counter arguments of course.

the idea of race and white supremacy pioneered in eighteenth-century Europe, combined with newly formed nation states and industrial technology, took the human capacity for and practice of barbarity to levels rarely if ever before seen in history.

Is state education designed to encourage more Darwins and Newtons, or to create middle-management civil servants and workers?

To blame individual teachers or write this phenomenon off as just a few bad apples is not only to completely ignore decades of studies, but also to refuse to confront one of the key contradictions of British modernity.4

White supremacists, as much as they don’t want to admit it, make themselves slaves to black excellence when they allow its existence to unbalance their entire sense of self.

anti-blackness became one of the bedrocks of the emergent capitalist economies of western Europe and North America.

racism, far from being marginal or just a side effect, has been absolutely central to developing Euro-American prosperity.

The fact that such outspoken uncompromisingly anti-white supremacist political figures as Ali and Marley are also global humanist icons shows quite clearly the innate difference between black nationalism and white nationalism as political imperatives.

What does it say about this society that, after two centuries of being one of the most successful human traffickers in history, the only historical figure to emerge from this entire episode as a household name is a parliamentary abolitionist?

It allows one to offer a person’s ‘African-ness’, a concept that did not yet exist in the period, as an explanation for their behaviour. ‘Africans sold their own people’ is the historical version of ‘black on black violence’.

It’s also fascinating that Geldof did not assert that British people – much less all white people – were eternally shamed for their role in enslaving their fellow human beings,

During the period of decolonisation, the British state embarked upon a systematic process of destroying the evidence of its crimes.

Either the natives were too stupid to know what was good for them, or perhaps what was being offered was not such a sweet deal after all.

Those that kill for Britain are glorious, those killed by Britain are unpeople. If we truly cared for peace, would we not remember the victims of British tyranny every 11 November too?

It is about social engineering and about the conditioning of expectations, about getting black people used to the fact that they are not real and full citizens, so they should learn to not expect the privileges that would usually accrue from such a status.

Rich people crime good, poor people crime bad.

They will have careers, you will get a job. Wash, rinse, repeat.

it’s obvious that the police are there to protect the state, not ‘the people’.

no two countries have the same history and thus no two countries have the same systems of social control, thus no two countries in essence have the same racisms.

I often look at the world and just think fuck it, why bother, but I know that’s how we are supposed to feel, that’s why the corruption is so naked and freely visible – to wear down people who have the conviction that things could be better.

‘to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world.’

European unity, if not of course the EU itself, was fostered in no small part by the pan-European project of racialised enslavement and the joint Scramble for Africa of the European powers.

The ability of Britain to invade almost the entire planet and then for a significant portion of the country to proclaim themselves victims of some kind of invasion or colonisation may well not seem directly ‘racial’, but it certainly echoes quite clearly the way white America, with its long-term history of racist pogroms, lynching, slavery and segregation, has somehow emerged believing itself to be the victim of racial discrimination.17

It was not, to my mind at least, a choice between the EU and ‘independence’, but a choice between staying part of a flawed union or choosing to deepen ties with the American Empire and continue the ‘Americanisation’ of the British economy.

lamenting this apparent decline in the ‘white British’ population obviously asserts just how clearly we see whiteness and Britishness as being synonymous, which is usually something we deny.

This constant articulation of supremacy and victimhood has long been a cornerstone of white-supremacist discourse.

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.