Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

Can Britain ever behave in the world like the democracy it claims to be, or is such a thing entirely impossible?

the Kenyans tortured in the 1950s were legally British citizens but naturally there will be no poppies or tears for them. The implications are clear – some ancestors deserve to be remembered and venerated and others do not. Those that kill for Britain are glorious, those killed by Britain are unpeople.

Ethnocentrism, bigotry and even a type of ‘proto-racism’ have existed for millennia, but race and racism as we think of them are very new.

We will almost certainly always have a degree of ethnocentrism in human societies but to conflate this with racism proper is lazy and dangerous. Ethnocentrism can be overcome,

I was late for class that day and did not bother to explain why to the teachers because I simply assumed – or feared – that my rich white professors would refuse to believe that the police just stopped people for no reason, and would end up looking at me with suspicion.

It was about matter that finds itself out of place. Dirt.

I know that I am not inherently a good person and that we all change to one degree or another according to our circumstances, that I have such an interest in trying to help create conditions that encourage the best in people.

I’d rather live in a city and a society and a world where less desperation exists: this is as much common-sense self-preservation to me as it is ‘altruism’.

The quality and type of education you receive, and your likelihood of interaction with police, social workers, prison or other state institutions, will all be influenced by class.

We live in a country with a particularly vicious class system when compared with other similarly developed Western European countries,

In marked contrast to the wars we can always afford you will frequently hear the same people talk about not having the money for any number of things that affect the lives of poor people, such as adequate fire safety, decent pay for nurses and teachers and winter fuel for the elderly: this is classism.

When masses of the public protest government injustice, such as millions protesting against an unjust war, it’s obvious that the police are there to protect the state, not ‘the people’.

The defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale made it possible for me to be here today.’ Nelson Mandela, 26 July 1991,

No corporation was forced to pay reparations to the victims of murders and other abuses carried out under apartheid to benefit them.

These facts are recognised by such ‘Communist propaganda outlets’ as the World Health Organization and all of the national governments that Cuba helps. To anybody that actually cares about global justice, human life and human rights, Cuban medical internationalism is without a doubt one of the greatest humanitarian enterprises of the twenty-first century.

Make no mistake about it; in 1945, even after using their colonial troops to defeat the Nazis, both Britain and France had every intention of holding onto their white-supremacist empires.

we live in a world where literal card-carrying Nazis getting punched in the face or being refused platforms to speak garners more liberal outrage than twelve-year-old Tamir Rice being executed on camera by the police while playing alone in the park.

many self-proclaimed, selectively reading, MLK-quoting liberals will choose to support or at least ignore injustice rather than rock the boat when in positions of power.

whereas being entered for foundation means the highest possible mark is a C. They found that, at the same level of previous academic attainment, for every three white British pupils entered for higher tier only two black ‘Caribbean’ pupils were entered.

Scotland, that Glasgow is often more violent than London and that twenty million plus Russians alone died in the ‘white on white violence’ of the Second World War.

these young black men, like the world at large, value white life over black life.

We may want to remember that after returning from his first trip to Africa, Richard Pryor announced that he would never call another black man a nigger again so long as he lived.

Now that radio has lost a lot of its power, though by no means all, it’s clear that audiences of all ethnic backgrounds want authenticity, talent and rawness.

while black Americans are far more likely to be incarcerated than black Brits because America locks up its population in general at far higher rates than Britain, black Britons are seven to nine times more likely – the data fluctuates – to go to prison than their white co-citizens,

You see, for much of Britain, America is where racism happens,

most people in Britain, if they know anything about racial injustice at all, are likely to be far more well aware of American issues and history than those on their doorstep,

He also suggested Hollywood was hiring black British actors not because of their talent or the quality but because ‘they cheaper than us, man’.

Bloody Foreigners?

Daniel Kaluuya had to sue the Metropolitan Police in 2013 for dragging him off of a bus, putting him face down with their boots in his neck and then taking him to the station and strip-searching him because he ‘fit the description of a reported criminal’.

Could it be that the black British acting exodus is partly reflective of the limited range of opportunities for diverse roles for black talent?

It really should be unsurprising that wealthy black American artists and writers who travel to Europe for work and are surrounded there by well off, probably well educated, likely liberal-minded white Europeans who are fans of theirs would not experience the sharp end of European racism.

upon encountering American police I have literally seen them breathe a sigh of relief when they hear my British accent and realise that I am not one of ‘their’ negroes.

Black Brits emigrated into a society with an already established white underclass and were mostly dumped in areas where that underclass already lived; black Americans and the indigenous peoples were the foundation of the US underclass.

Yes, black Brits emigrated from the Commonwealth ‘freely’, but their free migration cannot be divorced from the neocolonial economics and deliberate underdevelopment in which the British state is implicated.

the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century –

Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

Now that Europe is no longer the centre of gravity in world politics or economics, and now that the biggest Western power is pivoting to Asia – no prizes for guessing where that means the US is pivoting away from – how will Western Europeans react to dropping to ‘third place’ behind Asia and the USA in economic and military terms?

believe to some extent we are living through another crisis of whiteness,

In either case, their views are not supported by the data at all. The idea that ‘economic anxiety’ was the key driver of Trump’s election simply melts into thin air when we recognise that the poorest Americans – black and indigenous – did not support Trump in any great capacity.

the election of a reality TV star that makes spelling mistakes on his Twitter and retweets the likes of Britain First puts white supremacy so obviously and nakedly in the spotlight that people are simply forced to confront it.

It’s easy for people in Europe to look to America as ‘the racist country’, especially at the moment, but how will people in Europe react if and when their nations undergo similar demographic changes to those that the US has?

and claim racial fear-mongering was not a central factor if we wish, but I sincerely doubt that if Farage had used a queue of scantily clad Russian models running across the border that the ‘breaking point’ line would have hit home in quite the same way.

But even the threat of Muslim terrorists starts to look far less daunting when viewed against the long and very recent history of violence in Europe such as the British in Ireland, the IRA, ETA, GRAPO, post-Franco right wing militias in Spain and during Italy’s Years of Lead,

the ‘decline of the West’ lot are correct that the Europe they imagine is indeed doomed, because it never really existed in the first place.