Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

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.

Severe class inequalities persist, and while it’s probably unrealistic to expect a society with which everyone can be satisfied, by European standards the British class system is still particularly pernicious.

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.

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

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

slavery, apartheid, Jim Crow, a man’s right to rape his wife and the chemical castration of gay people were all ‘legal’ at one stage of very recent history,

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?

The media’s decision, in the crucial first forty-eight hours after the incident, to unquestioningly parrot the police’s version of events

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

we too, like so many ‘less civilised’ nations around the world, have a caste system.

If you have ever attempted to discuss a social ill with a person who is intensely invested in the order of things as they are, you will have no doubt been met by some rather odd and profoundly anti-intellectual responses.

I can promise you that wealthy and middle-class Jamaicans – though few in number – have better material conditions of life than the poorest people in the UK.

Bigots here are helpfully suggesting to black people that the unfinished project of political pan-Africanism still awaits us.

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.

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

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.

blackness can accommodate difference far more easily than whiteness can

I did not yet have any knowledge of the Mongols, fascist Japan or the Abbasids; I did not know that the olive-skinned Romans often considered the people we now think of as white to be savages and had invaded their homes and enslaved them without much of a second thought;

black rage has never really morphed into the hatred of white people that white paranoia would like to believe it has, not even in the former slave states of the Americas.

We would call this child trafficking if it had been done by a non-Western state.

‘Whiteness is a metaphor for power,’ James Baldwin tells us. ‘Money whitens,’ say the Brazilians.

in the first two generations of census data in the Virginia colonies there were no humans defined as white; the people we now think of as white were at that point still predominantly defined by other factors, such as the region of Europe from which they came.

He argues that the ancestors of European Americans started to be defined as ‘white’ in response to labour solidarity between African- and European-American bondservants, especially after Bacon’s Rebellion of 1696,

European ruling elites began doling out privileges, like the...

white privilege became all the more important, as it literally became the difference between still being a human being and becoming a piece of property.

there are many striking parallels between the way the Irish were treated and the way later racialised groups would be.

many people previously classified as white became legally coloured. Then in 1924, in a statute entitled ‘Preservation of Racial Integrity’, legislators for the first time defined ‘white’ rather than just ‘mulatto’ or ‘coloured’.

Having defined themselves as superior and marked themselves out as racially distinct for the purposes of being able to own other human beings and profit from their labour, whites understood that they had made themselves a potential target for racial revenge now that black people were free. The entire history of the USA since 1865, particularly in the southern states, has been indelibly shaped by this fear.

during the eighteenth century thinkers like Voltaire, Kant and Hume started to espouse an openly white-supremacist philosophy.

It was Europe’s capacity for and mobilisation of greater organised violence that colonised the planet, not liberal ideas,

however much some try to divorce Nazi Germany from this earlier history, the reality is they were very much inspired by American race laws when crafting laws to govern ‘the Jews’, as well as drawing on the much wider and longer pan-Euro-American dialogue about race and eugenics.

Imperial Japan quickly and consciously adopted European technological innovations during a period known as the Meiji Restoration, and went on to have its own brutal nationalist empire.

Question: how much of the rewriting of eugenics history was a reaction to what white supremecists did in Germany and how much was a reaction to non-whites in Japan busting the concept that whites were supreme

All of the pleading and protesting or even attempts to valiantly fight back with obviously inferior weaponry by non-white colonised people around the globe did very little to dent European imperialists’ self-confidence and their appetite for brutality;

Had Japan come to dominate the modern world we may now be discussing the prejudices of the Japanese. In fact, despite the collapse of the Japanese empire, the brutality of imperial Japan is still a sore point in much of South East Asia and China, quite rightly and understandably.

even the Daily Mail turned into a ‘left-wing snowflake’ that bemoaned Japan’s refusal to apologise for the brutality they inflicted on Brits during the battle of Hong Kong,

Thus whiteness has always functioned as a tool of domination, as Charles Mills puts it: ‘Whiteness is a phenomenon unthinkable in a context where white does not equal power at some structural level.’

Many of the most celebrated intellectual icons of the last few centuries, from Jefferson, Roosevelt and Wilson to Lincoln, Kant, Hume, Churchill, Hugo, Hegel and many more otherwise intelligent and in some cases very brilliant people, openly espoused their belief in innate white supremacy, so it is rather odd that we are so squeamish about the phrase now.

Britain never practised open white supremacy on domestic soil as it did in the colonies,

the most deprived and violent regions of Britain remain areas that are almost exclusively white,

Class affects everything, even racism, but in complex ways, and a phrase like ‘white privilege’ is not an absolute but a trend,

he told me that I was not allowed to speak in class at all unless he pushed my ‘magic button’. My magic button was an invisible spot on my chest that he would poke, thus allowing me to speak. His poke was hard and painful enough that this device had its intended outcome; I stopped asking to speak or to answer questions in class at all. I was five years old.

In the group we did work that was well below what I was intellectually accustomed to and thus I started to fall behind, to become lazy, bored and even resent the lack of challenges

I was being shown the very best of British achievements – Newtonian physics, the theory of evolution, the steam engine – yet being led away from my natural desire to pursue these interests by the outdated bigotry and class conditioning of some of my educators.

This is the ultimate failure of discrimination within society : stealing ambitions from anyone outside the stereotypes

whether education should be a site of power, a place to reproduce the social, societal norms, or a place to be encouraged to question and thus attempt to transcend them and be an active participant in remaking them.

Let alone any sense that we plebs should contemplate participating in the governing of the country.

I left school without knowing what capitalism was, much less a mortgage, interest rates, central banking, fiat currency or quantitative easing. The word imperialism had never been used in the classroom, much less ‘class struggle’.

modern British identity grew with and was shaped by the fundamentally and undeniably racist British Empire.

The reaction of the establishment was of course to deny the truths set out by Coard – before eventually admitting he was in fact correct – but more shockingly to tap his phone and have the police threaten his nephew, such is the weaponised history of black education in Britain.

The response of the British Caribbean community and progressive teaching staff was to attempt to try to tackle what they knew was an endemically and unfairly racist system. In every major Caribbean community, black supplementary schools were set up,

It is a very odd community indeed that simultaneously takes their meagre resources – remember most British Caribbeans are working class even now – and uses them to set up extra schools for their children, that manages to find volunteers willing to staff these schools every weekend for decades and is at the same time ‘anti-education’, as black people have so often been represented.