Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

We know for certain that this trend of underestimating black children’s intelligence continues right throughout schooling, which tallies with my experience and makes sense of the LEA data quoted above, where black children fall further behind the longer they stay in school.

In short, the study confirmed that teachers are human beings and that they project their biases and those of our society onto children.

What’s fascinating is that the British state, apparently committed to a quality education for all, has rarely and barely supported these massive community-led efforts to make sure black Brits attain a quality education,

Reading this, I'm getting a lot more sympathy for Diane Abbott sending her son to private school. It's taken 25 years to start seeing changes in tolerance in Scotland. No parent would wait that long.

Had my parents told me that my negative experiences in school were a result of my own behaviour entirely, or had they not had the intellectual equipment to adequately challenge my mistreatment, like so many of their class and generation, I would have likely dropped out of school entirely.

Is it any wonder that generations of families don't engage with education when teachers never engage with them?

Were it not for their understanding and support, and that of a few radical teachers (of all ethnicities), ironically my intellectual aptitude, my willingness to read and question beyond the syllabus, may well have led me away from formal education entirely.

In some cases, scholars were more willing to entertain the idea that aliens were responsible for African history than Africans!

Euro-America’s ability to dominate black people has not been read as one more chapter in a long history of human exploitation and domination, but rather as permanent racial superiority and inferiority.

If we want to fix the racial and economic disparities in the criminal justice system or at least reduce them, combat teenage gang violence, produce better educated children and create a generally better society, then the work starts in the primary school, not in the prison.

Norman Tebbit’s infamous 1990 ‘cricket test’, in which black Britons were invited to pick a side when England played the West Indies, showed both how exclusive some people’s concept of national belonging was

And this is why, even in England, I've always felt Scottish. Remember Scotland won the 5 nations that year.

Linford Christie again made it quite clear that he felt the media had treated him unfairly and overlooked his achievements in favour of an obsession with his ‘Lunchbox’. This Sport in Question episode then descended into a row that will be – and has been – written about for decades because of what it said about race, sexuality, culture and British politics.

Ben Carrington contrasts the rocky relationship between the British media and Linford Christie to the almost unconditional love offered to Frank Bruno by that very same press in the exact same period of history.

It seems even we had internalised this idea about black people being naturally athletic rather than seeing what was obvious; that sports and entertainment are two of the only fields where black success has been clear and visible in post Second World War Britain,

An identity predicated on supremacy is not healthy or stable. An identity that says ‘I am, because you are not’ is what Hegel was talking about when he wrote his master–slave dialectic, even if he did not realise this himself.

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.

we rarely talk about the white burden, the burden of being tethered to a false identity, a parasitic self-definition that can only define itself in relation to blacks’ or others’ inferiority.

Despite what white supremacists claim, going to such extents as they have to prevent black excellence is really a rather huge compliment.

in spite of whatever challenges I might face, I love my people, history and culture and I don’t need Chinese people or Indians or Spaniards to not reach their full human potential to feel good about myself;

What is it this man feels about white identity that makes him opine that white people are incapable of being inspired by the excellence of people that happen to be black, and is he correct? Why does he think so little of white people and why did his saying this in front of millions provoke little to no reaction?

Today, black athletes representing Britain is a norm – there are no more banana skins and no more bullets in the post for black footballers playing for their country.

If only. Just ask the England Euro2020 team

What I want to look at here is the construction of blackness in the racist imagination and the specific form of historical prejudice meted out to people on the grounds of having black skin or being defined as black.

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.

No wonder they so fiercely defend their blackness when Australia had literally physically stolen their grandparents and tried to erase every aspect of their black identity. There is little doubt that today blackfellas in Australia, even the nearly white-looking ones, are treated and viewed more harshly than a relatively well-off black British visitor such as myself is,

in reality most of the enslaved in the empires of the Islamic world came to be black, and though lighter-skinned and even ‘white’ people were enslaved by the Ottoman, Abbasid, Fatamid and Moroccan empires, black slaves were particularly devalued,

That wasn't in the Black Panther description.

It must also be said that in the Greco-Roman world and in early Islamic societies, black people can be seen occupying all kinds of social and professional roles, and the Ancient Greeks – Aristotle, Herodotus, Diodorus etc. – seemed to think that the Ancient Egyptians, who they saw with their own eyes, were black people.

Europeans did not find entirely backward or savage cultures that they were universally revolted by; in fact, some observers compared African towns and cities of the period with those of Europe, and explicitly thought their African business partners to be civilized and cultured.

Black slavery in the Americas, then, was by no means inevitable. Indeed, the first Spanish governor of Hispaniola, a man named Ovando, requested that his king outlaw the enslavement of blacks, as they were apparently too troublesome and caused white indentured servants and the natives to rebel,

Once slavery in the Americas was exclusively reserved for humans of African origin, black skin became a signal of merchandise rather than humanity, property rather than personhood and thus anti-blackness became one of the bedrocks of the emergent capitalist economies of western Europe and North America. The

Cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee – the primary commodities of their days – were produced by human commodities with black skin, under what Sven Beckert rightly calls ‘war capitalism’.

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.

journalists, media and fans would have to acknowledge that white supremacy is an obviously anti-human idea,

the idea that different nationalisms are different in intent and content depending on their historical origins is not a difficult concept to understand. For example the SNP and the BNP whilst both made up of ‘white British’ people could not be more different;

‘this man stopped slavery.’ She managed to pull her eyes away from the picture and turned them in my direction, her gaze instructing me to be thankful. She expected me to share in her joy, but I was just thoroughly confused. ‘What, all by himself, miss?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you mean he helped?’

While it’s certainly true that Britain had a popular abolitionist movement to a far greater degree than the other major slaveholding powers in Europe at the time, and this is in its own way interesting and remarkable, generations of Brits have been brought up to believe what amount to little more than fairy tales with regard to the abolition of slavery.

Even though the names of many of these human traffickers surround us on the streets and buildings bearing their names, stare back at us through the opulence of their country estates still standing as monuments to king sugar, and live on in the institutions and infrastructure built partly from their profits – insurance, modern banking, railways – none of their names have entered the national memory to anything like the degree that Wilberforce has.

In the conclusion to his 900-page tome The Atlantic Slave Trade, the historian Hugh Thomas fails to even mention slave resistance as a factor in abolition at all,

Britain quite simply was not the first nation to abolish transatlantic slavery; Denmark did so in 1792 and France briefly abolished slavery during the height of the French revolution in 1794.

The British government’s response was to send its armies to the Caribbean to invade French-held islands and to try and reinstall slavery everywhere the French had abolished it.

This mass campaign for re-enslavement in the Caribbean was undertaken by none other than Prime Minister William Pitt, the very same man who would encourage Wilberforce to front the abolitionist campaign in parliament just a few years later.

the Haitians in fact went one step further than merely outlawing racism and declared that the ‘whites’ – in reality Polish and some Germans – that had fought with the revolution were now officially black; honorary blacks, if you will.

nationalists are asking us all to believe the self-serving fairy tale that suddenly, in 1807 – just three years after Haitian independence – guided by William Wilberforce alone, Britain abolished slavery because it was ‘the right thing to do’. What a pile of twaddle.

No one refers to the ‘white man’s burden’ any more, as it’s just too crude a phrase, so instead we speak of spreading democracy and human rights and of saving people from dictators,

The victims of the transatlantic traffic did not think that they were being sold out by their ‘black brothers and sisters’ any more than the Irish thought that their ‘white brothers and sisters’ from England were deliberately starving them to death during the famine.

it’s always fascinated me that people, even many in the black diaspora, seem willing to believe that ‘Africans’ – undifferentiated by class, region or ethnicity – just allowed their family members to be taken away, or worse, that they were all collaborators.

It is notable that there were not any major rebellions against transportation to penal colonies, let alone a revolution in the UK, during all the years that Britons were being shipped against their will to Australia and elsewhere.

The Foreign Office were forced to admit in court about having hidden documents, then were unforthcoming about the scale of what was hidden, to the point that you’d be a fool to trust anything that is now said.

what we know, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents were destroyed and over a million hidden, not just starting in the colonial period but dating all the way back to 1662. This operation was only exposed to the public in 2011

while Britain has preserved the HMS Victory as a tribute to Nelson, as well as other ships from key periods of British history, not a single slave ship survives.

Liberal apologists for empire are nothing but glorified cheerleaders for the current powers and status quo,

Most people are still not at all aware of what has been done in their name, such as the deliberate starving to death of millions of people in India, the imprisonment and mass torture of British-Kenyans in concentration camps in the 1950s,

the historian Richard Gott has been able to fill an entire mammoth tome with just these episodes of rebellion and tell the story of the empire in reverse, through the eyes of its resistors.