Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

The simplistic representation of Caribbean men as inherently bad fathers for example is pretty ironic given that for centuries Caribbean history was shaped by men from Europe sexually exploiting indigenous and African women and leaving their ‘half breed’ children to be raised by black people or to be enslaved.

Jamaica may well be a black-majority country, but of the twenty or so ‘big families’ that are said to control virtually all of the wealth of the island, or at least that portion not owned by foreigners, none are black.

colonially educated

When I look at the countless young black boys – and others – in jail in the UK and throughout the world and say, ‘that could have been me’, I don’t mean it in the figurative ‘we are all black’ or ‘I was poor too once’ sense, I mean it literally could have been me. I made many of the same mistakes, I just never got caught, and that is complete luck and nothing else.

Rich people crime good, poor people crime bad.

The life expectancy difference between Britain’s poorest areas and its richest is almost a decade – your environment literally does define you, despite the few who may transcend it.

Which brings us on to the two most obvious things that connect the teenage killers of London and Glasgow to those of Liverpool and Durham. They are almost always poor and they are almost always men. What is it about masculinity in our society that makes young men from entirely different ethnic backgrounds and geographic regions often react to the challenges of being poor with such territorial displays of violence?

The pressure to accumulate, the understanding that poverty is shameful, the double shame of being black and poor, the constant refrain of materialism coming from every facet of popular culture, the empty fridge, the disconnected electricity, the insecurity of being a tenant with eviction always just a few missed paycheques away, the stress and anger of your parents that trickles down far better than any capital accumulation, the naked injustices that you now know to be reality and the growing belief that one is indeed all of the negative stereotypes that the people with the power say you are.

By twenty-five, even if you don’t read Stuart Hall, if you grew up both black and poor in the UK you will have come to know more about the inner workings of British society, about the dynamics of race, class and empire than a slew of PhDs ever will.

Britain is still – like every nation on earth to some degree – a society where the social class and area you are born into will determine much of your life experiences, chances and outcomes.

Class affects everything – culture, confidence and worldview – and the class system is so entrenched in Britain that even a person’s accent carries with it implications about their social background.

You could criticise my parents for playing me something so brutal at such an age but I think that would be a mistake. The reality is most children in the world do not have the luxury of hiding from the brutalities of systemic injustice and as tough as my upbringing may have been by British standards, there are certainly more children on the planet even now whose lives more closely resemble the lives of a child born in Soweto or Sharpeville than one born in Camden.

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.

Second because, as a global power, Britain’s domestic politics and public opinions affect the whole world, as domestic British politics are in turn affected by global events. My childhood was shaped by the presence of the anti-apartheid struggle in the same way that my young adulthood was shaped by the invasion of Iraq – these things have informed how millions of us view our own society and its place in the world.

Black Caribbean pupils are three times more likely to be excluded from school than white pupils.

Because permanent exclusion from school virtually dictates the future of a person’s life. In the words of Martin Narey, former Director General of HM Prison Service, ‘The 13,000 young people excluded from school each year might as well be given a date by which to join the prison service some time later down the line.’

The sister was of course correct; 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,5 and they are treated more harshly at every stage of the criminal justice system in the UK.

While we are here it’s worth noting that indigenous Australians are in absolute terms even more disproportionately incarcerated than black Americans;7 this is not to negate, contrast or compare, just a statement of fact that should be more known.

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’.

For this reason, 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, and this includes black people.

The fact that yellow-on-yellow crime, mixed race-on-mixed race crime or white-on-white violence just sound like joke terms but black on black violence has ‘credibility’ speaks very loudly about the perceived relationship between blackness and depravity in this culture.

‘Certainly, the dominance of the West already appears just another, surprisingly short-lived phase in the long history of empires and civilizations’ – Pankaj Mishra

Over the past few decades, China has pulled at least 500 million people out of poverty (the Communist propagandists at the World Bank actually put the figure at around 800 million), industrialised at a pace faster than any nation before and today stands at the leading edge of many green technologies, and it has managed to do all of this without invading and colonising half the planet.

Translation: America intends to continue dominating the world, regardless of what the majority of the world’s people want.

I say ‘we’ because I make no pretensions to super humanity and I wrestle every day with my own doubts, weaknesses, egotism and greed. 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.

The twenty-first century could well turn out to be a shit century in which to be a bigot clinging to old assumptions of gender, race and the eternal supremacy of a particular culture or geographic region, or alternatively old hierarchies might well continue to reassert themselves. But the fact that India has achieved this in less than a century of independence from Britain, and at a time when the country still has more desperately poor people than any other, only makes it all the more fascinating to contemplate what the future holds.

In a sense, I think whiteness has functioned quite similarly to divine kingship, paralysing those who are intensely invested, trapping them into a resentment of the reality that they are obviously not superior. For several centuries, people racialised as white were often taught – sometimes by some of the best minds in ‘their’ societies – that they were inherently superior to other human beings, that they could disregard the feelings of their ‘negro’ slaves, their Indian subjects and their vanquished Mandarins without having to fear consequences because their supremacy was in fact eternal, pre-ordained by god or science or culture.

In 2015, David Cameron announced that the UK would be building a £25 million prison in Jamaica to rehouse Jamaican nationals currently in Britain’s prisons. The problems with this were multi-faceted; first, there are more Irish and Polish nationals in Britain’s prisons, so why the focus on Jamaica? Second, there were only 700 Jamaican nationals in the UK’s prisons anyway, so one may also question if the project is worth £25 million of taxpayers’ money in a country that is already the most heavily incarcerated in Western Europe by quite some distance.

That England, a country not properly invaded since 1066 but which has invaded almost every nation on the planet, can have a party named the UK Independence Party win 13 per cent of the national vote in 2015 speaks volumes about collective amnesia and ability to distort the facts.

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.

We so-called ethnic minorities are just expected to live with difference and accept it. I never went to school with any other people who were Caribbean-Scots-English, but it did not kill me. These articles imply that, or at least ask if, white people are incapable of doing what British Indians, Ghanaians and Cypriots have had to do in London, which is to get used to ‘different’ peoples and cultures.

Similar ‘white decline’ demographic time bomb articles have been circling in US and European media for some years now, and this demographic shift is what white extremists are laughably labelling ‘white genocide’. In reality, it is only the threat of a continued reduction in white privilege – a potential sharing of global power and the spread of equality before the law and the institutions of the state to people not racialised as white.

Though the threat from Islamic fascist terrorists is real enough, they are equally willing to kill black and brown people as white people – in fact, the vast majority of people killed by Isis, Boko Haram and Al Shabaab have been in Africa and the Middle East, obviously. Thus there is no reason for white populations to be any more afraid of or more willing to entertain a flat cultural essentialism about almost 1.8 billion Muslims than the rest of us.

The 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.