Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

Australians and a whole host of other people have far worse sufferings to speak of than black people in Britain.

This passage was in reference to Aboriginal people; the first people of Australia.

that many of these people would get offended at the mere mention of their whiteness. I somehow knew instinctively that whiteness, like all systems of power, preferred not to be interrogated.

She gave me a box of tapes of Malcolm X speeches for my tenth birthday

we were just naturally more kind hearted than white people and this kind heartedness translated as weakness in the real world.

Perceived ‘weakness’

In British-ruled Hong Kong, for example, the Chinese had to carry night passes, were banned from attending certain schools and going to the theatre at certain hours and had to travel in separate rail carriages from ‘Europeans’. The rat-infested Chinese slum ‘below the peak’ of Hong Kong had much in common with other racialised slums across the ‘third world’.15

And now we “tut” at perceived injustice being carried out by China. Pales by comparison.

white students from poorer areas tended to be more underestimated than white students from more expensive postcodes. In short, the study confirmed that teachers are human beings and that they project their biases and those of our society onto children.

But perhaps the most unusual way of setting the boundaries of blackness I have ever encountered has to be in Australia.

This is in reference to many Aboriginal people being able to pass for ‘white’, at least in the eyes of Akala who’s unfamiliar with Australia.

From 1910 to 1970 between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families to be raised either by white families or in children’s homes across the country.

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.

Haiti declared itself independent in 1804. This was the first and only successful slave revolution in human history,

my Scottish family us being black never felt like an issue. In fact, there was a subtle feeling that they disliked the English – including my granddad – far more than anybody brown!

The incident became, for me, the perfect embodiment of Dr King’s statement to the effect that the greatest impediment to racial justice in America was not the open bigot but the indifferent and cowardly white liberal, more concerned with a quiet life than justice.