Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

I was born in the 1980s, when MPs in parliament could be found arguing that we – non-white Commonwealth citizens – should be sent back to where we came from. Now that where we came from had legally ceased to be part of Britain, our very existence here was seen as the problem. So, after our grandmothers had helped build the National Health Service and our grandfathers had staffed the public transport system, British MPs could openly talk about repatriation – we were no longer needed, excess labour, surplus to requirements, of no further use to capital.

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.

No one explained that our grandparents were not immigrants, that they were literally British citizens

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’.

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

community-oriented moral compass.

I am partly a product of Britain’s injustices, of its history of class and race oppression, but also of its counter-narrative of struggle and the compromises made by those in power born of those struggles. I am a product of the empire, and also of the welfare state.

Most people, it seems to me at least, hate poor people more than they hate poverty.

We judge the street corner hustler or working-class criminal – from East Glasgow to East London – but we see a job as an investment banker, 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.

I am just pointing out that 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 such a thing even exists. We

This ‘if you just pull your socks up’ trope also ignores the reality that many Britons (and people around the globe) are poor and getting poorer through no fault of their own under austerity – the technical term for class robbery.

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.

. . in a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, for whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races – those who, unlike us, are raced – appear. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract

‘Why don’t you just go back to where you came from?’ This one is so unimaginative I hardly know how to respond.

To not want to debate, discuss and deal with an idea that has been so impactful reveals a palpable lack of interest in humanity, or at least certain portions of it.

They now have to contend with one of their empire’s many legacies; a multi-ethnic mother country.

became embarrassed about my mother’s whiteness – no longer wanting her to accompany me to the very black spaces she had played such a role in introducing me to. Part of this was just the normal teenage desire to not want to hang out with your mum, but there was certainly an added racial something too.

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.

When we think of white supremacy and segregation (if we think about them at all), we tend to think of the American south before 1965 or of South Africa before 1990, but virtually all European colonies were ruled by white-supremacist legislation of one form or another, though to massively varying degrees.

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. And the dehumanisation of the racial other made mass killing particularly permissible and thus was central to Western dominance.

The Nazi genocides sprang from a much longer history of articulating white supremacy that had been developed on the plantations of the Americas, practised in colonising the globe and then codified into a respected philosophy during the Enlightenment and the long nineteenth century.

But when a given group is used to having all of the political power, and virtually unlimited privilege to define and name the world, any power sharing, any obligation to hear the opinions of formerly ‘subject races’ – who would have once been called uppity niggers and lynched accordingly – can feel like oppression.

First, Britain never practised open white supremacy on domestic soil as it did in the colonies, so those of us who hail from the colonies have a different understanding of British racial governance, even if we were born here.

This gives us pause for thought about formal education as a whole and the dynamics contained within it: 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. Is state education designed to encourage more Darwins and Newtons, or to create middle-management civil servants and workers? What tensions are brought into being when a child’s natural proclivity to question everything in their own unique way comes into contact with a one-size-fits-all mode of education?

What history I did learn can be seen as little more than aristocratic nationalist propaganda; Henry VIII and his marital dramas; how Britain and America defeated the Nazis – minus the Commonwealth and with a very vague mention of the Soviet contribution; how Britain had basically invented democracy and all that was good and wonderful.

The fact that Britain has almost constantly been at war for the last century, even during the entire ‘post-war’ era, was of course not mentioned even once.

It is not complex; if a fair portion of your teachers or even just a couple of them constantly assume you are way less clever than you actually are simply because you are black, and treat you accordingly, you are going to resent them and it will naturally affect your self-esteem and grades.

In short, the study confirmed that teachers are human beings and that they project their biases and those of our society onto children. The DfE is as aware of these studies and this data as I am – or at least we would hope so – and technically they have a legal duty to eliminate racial bias from within Britain’s education system, but as you will see in a later chapter it is increasingly unlikely that they are going to do so without serious parental, community and teacher pressure.

Let’s just be honest. 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.

First, almost 40 per cent of the men on Earth are from India and China – not to mention the rest of the non-white but not-black world – yet whoever wrote this script seems entirely unconcerned with their lack of presence in Olympic sprint finals. A very clear white nationalist statement is being made, the issue is that white men are not winning, which should apparently be the norm, and to make matters worse it is black men defeating them – as if there is a permanent competition between black and white athletes.

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

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. This racialised fragility is what caused the racist mob attacks in Britain in 1919 and 1958, the fire bombings of the 1980s and the now-famous case of Stephen Lawrence.

The decimation of indigenous Americans and the theft of their land, combined with the literal working to death of millions of Africans and access to New World metals, are no small part in the history of Western development, however much committed ideologues may try to pretend otherwise.

Racism gave slave owners the justification for an unprecedented experiment in the denial of liberty and forced servitude and thus racism, far from being marginal or just a side effect, has been absolutely central to developing Euro-American prosperity.

Once the French realised, as predicted at the time by British abolitionist James Stephen (and by the Haitians themselves), that the Haitians could not be re-enslaved, the French plan was to exterminate them all and start over again with newly enslaved people brought from Africa. The war that ensued became an explicitly genocidal one, in which the French troops were instructed to exterminate all of the blacks on the island.9 This extermination attempt included the massacre of families and surrendered soldiers, the elderly and the sick, but the French also excelled themselves in the range of human barbarities they introduced with this war.

Under threat of re-invasion, the French extorted a debt from Haiti in 1825 of 91 million gold francs for the loss of their ‘property’ – i.e. the Haitians themselves. It took up until 1947 to pay this ‘debt’, and in fact Haiti had to borrow the money to pay the debt from French banks.

the legacy of that colour-based, slave-era privilege still afflicts every former slave colony to this day.

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.

Think of it like this; there are today British citizens – perhaps millions of us – who, however fringe we may be considered in mainstream politics, are genuinely horrified at our government’s foreign policy, its arms dealing and war-mongering, and there are also a few rogue MPs who constantly vote against the British war machine – but does any of that mean that the British ruling class generally take anti-war humanitarianism at all seriously?

This is how they can support terrorists in Libya while claiming to save Libyans with humanitarian bombs, and then let people fleeing from Libya drown in the sea while the Foreign Secretary makes jokes about clearing away the dead bodies to a laughing audience; or how they can sell arms to the Saudis for them to kill Yemeni civilians at the exact same time that they are waging war in Syria under the rubric of humanitarianism.

It is also estimated that one in every ten European slave ships to dock in West Africa experienced either a ship-board revolt or an attack from land.

First, Britons were submitted to generations of deliberate imperialist, militarist propaganda in all areas of culture, from education to the cinema, theatre and music halls and in the production of huge imperial exhibitions at Wembley and elsewhere.

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.

You have to stand in awe of the intellectual obedience it takes to still cheer for empire after the revelation that the government hid or burned a good portion of the evidence of what that empire actually consisted of, but such is the use to which we put our free thinking.

But the final reason we don’t have a greater critical dialogue about the empire is plain old racism: many would not care even if they knew the history well.

How pro-imperialist would they feel for example if, instead of Britain forcing opium on the Chinese Empire, it had been the other way round? What would their response be if, when the British government had tried to ban the importation of opium, the Chinese had sent a powerful military expedition to ravage the British coastline, bombard British ports, and slaughter British soldiers and civilians?

But rather, is it possible to critically and honestly reflect on Britain’s history in an attempt to build a more ethical future?

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. If we truly cared for peace, would we not remember the victims of British tyranny every 11 November too?

speak about the British Empire so much not just because I live here and have been shaped by it – not that any historical interest needs explaining – but because its legacies are so clear and visible and because unlike the Spanish, Portuguese, German or Japanese Empires it still sort of exists, albeit in attenuated form as second fiddle to the American Empire, despite what our free press likes to pretend. Our ruling class and much of the citizenry seem to believe that it is still ‘our’ divine right to police the world and to hell with what the rest of the planet thinks.

Despite my granddad spending a lifetime complaining about the immigrants and darkies, he took his military pension and retired to Thailand and saw no contradiction. In typical expat style, he did not learn the language, did not integrate and did not particularly respect the culture; he lived in his enclave with other ‘expats’ from Australia and America and moaned about the Thais in their own country instead.