Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

I was born in the 1980s and I grew up in the clichéd, single-parent working-class family.

The first time I saw someone being stabbed I was twelve, maybe thirteen, the same year I was searched by the police for the first time. I first smoked weed when I was nine and many of my ‘uncles’ – meaning biological uncles as well as family friends – went to prison.

My upbringing was, on the face of it, typical of those of my peers who ended up meeting an early death or have spent much of their adult lives in and out of prison.

I was born in Crawley, West Sussex, but moved to Camden in north-west London before I had formed any concrete memories and I spent my chi...

Camden is home to 130 languages and about as wide a divide between rich and poor as...

A nurse in the hospital promised to give my white mother ‘nigger blood’ when she needed a transfusion after giving birth; yeah, the 1980s was a decade bereft of political correctness.

For black Britain, the decade began with the New Cross fire/massacre of 1981, a suspected racist arson attack at 439 New Cross Road, where Yvonne Ruddock was celebrating her sixteenth birthday party.1 Thirteen of the partygoers burned to death, including the birthday girl,

New Cross led to the largest demonstration by black people in British history; 20,000 marched on parliament on a working weekday and foretold of the harsh realities of the decade to come: ‘Blood a go run, if justice na come’ was the chant. It was to prove prophetic.

These ‘disturbances’ included the infamous Brixton riots of 1981, set off by the sus laws – a resurrection of the 1824 Vagrancy Act, these laws allowed people to be arrested on the mere suspicion that they intended to commit a crime – and their manifestation in Swamp81, a racialised mass stop-and-search police campaign.

I mention these connections only to point out that these people are not abstractions or mere news items, but members of a community, our community.

No one asked in public discourse where that association with black people and monkeys came from, because if they did we might have to speak of historical origins, of savage myths and of literal human zoos. I was not born with an opinion of the world but it clearly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me.

I did not particularly want to spend a portion of a lifetime studying these issues, it was not among my ambitions as a child, but I was compelled upon this path very early, as I stared at Barnsey kicking away that banana skin or when I sat in the dark and the freezing cold simply because my mum did not make enough money.

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 –many of them Second World War veterans – with British passports to match, moving from one of Britain’s outposts to the metropole.

You see, while the people in the colonies were being told Britain was their mother, much of white Britain had convinced itself that these undeserving niggers – Asians were niggers too, back then – had just got off their banana boats to come and freeload, to take ‘their’ jobs and steal ‘their’ women.

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’.

Britain has long been a land of startling paradoxes.

Why, two centuries later, was there such revulsion towards and organisation against apartheid by ‘radical’ groups here, even as ‘our’ government, British corporations and banks supported it?

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.

My father’s and uncles’ bodies are tattooed with scars from fighting the National Front (NF), Teddy Boys and Skinheads; mine is not. We should not underestimate the newly emboldened bigots, though, and racist violence seems to be on the rise again.

This is partly because, despite much seeming and some very real progress, public discourse about racism is still as childish and supine as it ever was.

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. This neat binary ...

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.

But nonetheless, if a poet whose entire career has been spent fighting racism can find himself looking for the ‘white person in charge’, it gives us a sense of the degree to which reality has conditioned our expectations, even in London.

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.

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.

With 10 per cent of Britain’s prisons now privatised and many more using prison labour, such seemingly illogical right-wing virtue signalling from the head of London’s police starts to look like ‘vested interests’ and to signal tumultuous times ahead.

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.

Here are a few of the likely ‘counter arguments’ that will be used in an attempt to silence you. ‘If we just stop talking about it [racism] it will go away.’

Imagine for a moment if scientists and engineers thought in this way.

There would have been no political, moral, technological, medical, material or mental progress ever

‘Stop playing the race card.’

so European national empires colonising almost the entire globe

has really just been black and brown people playing cards.

‘Why can’t you just get over it? It’s all in the past.’

It’s fascinating, because in the hundreds of workshops I’ve taught on Shakespeare no one has ever told me to get over his writing because it’s, you know, from the, erm, past.

I’m still waiting for people to get over Plato, or Da Vinci or Bertrand Russell, or indeed the entirety of recorded history, but it seems they just won’t.

What period exactly is it we are allowed to start our memory from? Those that tell us to get over the past never seem to specify, but I’m eager to learn.

‘You have a chip on your shoulder.’

Examples of people with enormous shoulder chips include Muhammad Ali and Colin Kaepernick, men who gave up millions of dollars to protest injustice.

In this materialistic world, even political opponents of Ali and Kaepernick should, in theory at least, admire their willingness to forgo personal comfort and even risk their lives for something so much bigger than themselves.

‘Why don’t you just go back to where you came from?’

Their assumption is that anyone who is not racialised as white is not really a citizen, echoing the old white-supremacist adage ‘Race and Nation are one’ and the ‘blood and soil’ logic of the Nazis.

‘Well why don’t you just go back to Africa then?’ (Even if you are from the Caribbean)

Bigots here are helpfully suggesting to black people that the unfinished project of political pan-Africanism still awaits us.

‘You should be grateful that you have free speech.’

If artistic free speech and press freedoms exist in the much more politically challenging terrains of Jamaica, Trinidad or Ghana (all three of these former colonies ranked above Britain last year) what is it exactly that we should be so grateful for here in the sixth richest nation on the planet?