Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

The government and the education system failed to explain to white Britain that, as the academic Adam Elliot-Cooper puts it, we had not come to Britain, but ‘rather that Britain had come to us’. They did not explain that the wealth of Britain, which made the welfare state and other class ameliorations possible, was derived in no small part from the coffee and tobacco, cotton and diamonds, gold and sweat and blood and death of the colonies.

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.4

And, of course, let’s say nothing about the millions of British emigrants, settlers and colonists abroad – ...

to continue to keep their freedom of movement without

(Though the British struggle against apartheid in Britain was not without its own racial tensions, ironically.7) 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.

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.

Most people, it seems to me at least, hate poor people more than they hate poverty. This is classic, the old pull yourself up by the bootstraps trope. It ignores that people are not inherently good or bad, and that even ‘bad’ decisions are made in a context. For example, my aforementioned gangster uncles universally encouraged me to stay in school, paid me pocket money for reciting the theory of evolution to them as a child and even threatened to give me a bloody good hiding if I tried to be like them – i.e. a criminal. My good friend, a retired Premier League footballer from the notorious Stonebridge estate, was officially banned from the ‘front line’ by all the drug dealers in ‘the ends’ when he was growing up. They saw his potential, his chance for a life different to their own, and these ‘bad’ people – I am not denying that they were indeed hardened criminals – protected him and me.

even in firms that launder the profits of drug cartels, fund terrorism, aid the global flow of arms, fuel war, oil spills, land grabs and generally fuck up the planet, as a perfectly legitimate, even aspirational occupation.

the handling of and reporting on ‘the migrant crisis’ (without reference to Nato’s destruction of Libya, of course)

We are all influenced by what we are exposed to and experience; the best we can hope for is to try and be as fair as possible from within the bias inherent in existence.

2 Also, as the writer Gary Younge once explained, people in Britain naturally take pride in positive national events they had no direct role in – ‘we won the world cup’, ‘we won the war’ – yet many seem less willing to confront the more negative aspects of our history.

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, a multi-racial rebellion against British governor William Berkely.

State schooling in Britain both today and when I was a child seems stuck in a Victorian-era paradigm, guided by notions of discipline, obedience and deference to ones betters, of becoming a good worker and getting a good job.

The idea that we go to school to find our passions, our calling, to learn to be happy, to ‘draw out that which is within’, as the root meaning of the word ‘educate’ commands, is almost entirely absent.

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 long and short of it is that the master makes himself a slave to his slave by needing that domination to define him.

It would have been great had Denise Lewis or Colin Jackson asked the commentator why he felt white people could not be inspired by Usain Bolt’s achievements the way that generations of writers who are not white men have been inspired by Shakespeare, Dickens, Steinbeck and Herbert.

It wasn’t free trade or open markets, but military rule, forced servitude, national monopolies and absolutely no semblance of democracy that helped modern Europe and America to develop.

So, despite Britain spending almost two centuries as the dominant transatlantic slave trader, with all the torture, rape and mass murder that entailed, despite Britain refusing to back abolition when other European powers had paved the way, despite Britain spending the 1790s warring to keep slavery intact all over the Caribbean, despite Britain trying to crush the only successful slave revolution in human history and then helping their French enemies attempt to do the same, despite Britain refusing to even recognise the first Caribbean state to abolish slavery, despite all of this, some ‘historians’, teachers and assorted 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.

one the aforementioned classic white saviour trope and the other a seemingly human need for simple solutions to complex problems, for great men instead of the convoluted mess that is human history – in short, a need for heroes.

Britain is in fact one of the few countries in the world that literally did bury a good portion of its twentieth-century history. During the period of decolonisation, the British state embarked upon a systematic process of destroying the evidence of its crimes. Codenamed ‘Operation Legacy’, the state intelligence agencies and the Foreign Office conspired to literally burn, bury at sea or hide vast amounts of documents containing potentially sensitive details of things done in the colonies under British rule.25 Anything that might embarrass the government, that would show religious or racial intolerance or be used ‘unethically’ by a post-independence government was ordered destroyed or hidden.

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?

The confrontation of the issue in Glasgow has revolved not just around stop and search, but around treating this kind of violence – i.e. teenage violence that is largely unconnected to proper organised crime – as a public health issue, and acting accordingly. A blitz of stop and search was used to give the public health policies time to kick in after which stop and search was scaled back, but it was ultimately understood that stop and search alone could not possibly be a serious long term solution.

contrasts sharply with the approach towards ‘teenage thugs’ advocated by the Met Commissioner Cressida Dick as recently as 2017.9 Dick also emphasised the racial demographic of the teenage thugs in London as being ‘black’ and ‘Asian’. Again, this is in marked contrast to the rest of the country, where knife crime persists but the ‘whiteness’ of the perpetrators or victims is never mentioned.

fact, you could equally visit any of the top private schools and ask how some of those children go on to become the political psychopaths who justify wars with all sorts of profound rhetoric, knowing full well the killing is for profit and for strategic advantage. Rich people crime good, poor people crime bad.

These things are all the results of political decisions taken, decisions informed by the perceived class interests and worldviews of our rulers and their rulers. You will never as long as you live hear the British politicians saying that we cannot bomb some far off, probably oil-rich country because we don’t have the money,

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.

Poor people have no real voice in British politics, but we do have an unelected second chamber of ‘lords’ influencing policy.

While Margaret Thatcher claimed to be against apartheid ‘on principle’ she consistently opposed sanctions against the regime. Westminster, Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill had played crucial roles in constructing apartheid in the first place, despite the number of black South Africans that had fought on the British side in the Boer War and would fight for them again during the Second World War – the war to end fascism, remember.

journalist at the Guardian ran with the headline ‘Forget Fidel Castro’s policies, what matters is that he was a dictator’. But that very same journalist told us that we should ‘stop calling Tony Blair a war criminal’ and informed us that ‘the Left should be proud of his record’.

Recent World Health Organization data put Cuba’s health indicators, such as life expectancy and infant mortality, in line with the US and Canada. In addition, Cuba has offered free – that is, the cost is borne by the Cuban people – medical scholarships to thousands of students from across the world on the condition that they return and serve the poor in their own countries. As of 2014, over 23,000 students from eighty-three countries had graduated from the ELAM campus (Cuba’s international medical school) since 2005. Cuban healthcare workers are often among the first responders in major global crises such as the Ebola outbreak in 2014 or the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005.13

Despite some doubts about overt displays of white supremacy, even after the carnage of the First World War British, American and French elites felt confident enough to reject out of hand Japan’s suggestion that a clause recognising racial equality be inserted into the treaty of Versaille.

white people with a tradition of actual violent terrorism. The message is clear: white people’s hurt feelings are conceptually equivalent to black humans’ actual lives.

Furthermore ‘working class’ here is being defined only as those on free school meals, which does not include 86 per cent of the white population.7 Students from poorer backgrounds who receive free school meals do much less well in exams than students who do not; this holds true for every ethnic group in Britain. Girls also do better than boys; again, this holds true for every ethnic group.

You see, for much of Britain, America is where racism happens, and Britain is then by definition not racist because, you know, ‘it’s not as racist as America’.

Given that 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 – who do you think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? – you can imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as ‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white.

I often look at the world and just think fuck it, why bother, but I know that’s how we are supposed to feel, that’s why the corruption is so naked and freely visible – to wear down people who have the conviction that things could be better.

must admit I was still surprised by his election. I expected Clinton to win and continue the mundane, run-of-the-mill, ‘democratic’ white supremacy and classism where unjust deportations, millions of citizens lacking healthcare, chronic homelessness, bombing random brown countries, cheering for the torture and execution of foreign heads of state without even a sham trial,

mass incarceration and the disproportionate execution by police of unarmed black civilians continue to be American norms.

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.

The ability of Britain to invade almost the entire planet and then for a significant portion of the country to proclaim themselves victims of some kind of invasion or colonisation may well not seem directly ‘racial’, but it certainly echoes quite clearly the way white America, with its long-term history of racist pogroms, lynching, slavery and segregation, has somehow emerged believing itself to be the victim of racial discrimination.17

Surely an innate Aryan supremacy should make them by definition irreplaceable?

answers to these questions, and the shape of the world children born now will inhabit, will be determined not just by politicians and billionaires, but by millions of supposedly ordinary people like you and me who choose whether or not to engage with difficult issues, to try and grasp history, to find their place in it, and who choose whether to act or to do nothing when faced with the mundane and mammoth conflicts of everyday life.