Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

Where we do discuss race in public, we have been trained to see racism – if we see it at all – as an issue of interpersonal morality. Good people are not racist, only bad people are. This neat binary is a great way of avoiding any real discussion at all.

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

I make no claims to objectivity. I find the whole idea that we can transcend our experiences; and take a totally unbiased look at the world to be totally ridiculous,

social forces can manifest in and shape the life experience of a random child, born to a father racialised as black and a mother racialised as white, in early 1980s England.

It’s so absurd to suggest that you don’t see a person’s colour

The reproduction of such anti-human racist ideas is, to my mind at least, child abuse, but as racism is so endemic we tend not to see it that way.

Tellingly, I never had a similar moment with my father or any of the men in my life where I realised suddenly that they were black and I was not, which speaks to the way in which whiteness and blackness have been defined and understood in Britain.

It was Europe’s capacity for and mobilisation of greater organised violence that colonised the planet, not liberal ideas, Enlightenment Humanism or the Protestant work ethic.

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.

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.

The question we should ask today is not ‘were we as bad as the Germans?’ But rather, is it possible to critically and honestly reflect on Britain’s history in an attempt to build a more ethical future?

Britain is not some innocent virgin nation quietly minding her own business that has been placed under siege.

the idea that all black people are implicated in the actions of all others, that if a single black human kills another anywhere at any time on the planet then the rest of us lose our right to protest systemic state injustice, or any racist wrong done to us for that matter.

Many black Britons are well aware that 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.

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.