Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

‘mother country’ of the British Commonwealth, the seat of the first truly global empire, the birthplace of ‘the’ industrial revolution and the epicentre of global finance.

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.

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.

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.

It is interesting to note that even a disproportionate number of black America’s revolutionary icons are lighter skinned; Malcolm, Martin, Muhammad, Angela Davis and Huey Newton – partly reflective of the history of the ‘one drop rule’ in America in that if any of those people who are very ‘light’ had been born in the Caribbean, their skin tone and the history behind it would have almost certainly meant that they would have been born middle class or aristocracy or at least be perceived as such.

Was part of Bob Marley’s ‘marketability’ his light skin? Would Obama have been elected if he had two black parents and jet-black skin? We’ll never know, but I personally doubt it.

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.