Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

‘You just hate Britain, you are anti-British.’

For example, Fela Kuti is unquestionably Nigeria’s most legendary musical icon, yet he was a constant opponent of the Nigerian government and critic of the failings of Nigerian society,

‘But what about [INSERT ANY INJUSTICE HERE]?’

You have not made an insightful observation by distraction.

There are great studies on all of the above subjects, and this book does not negate any of them.

‘You’re obsessed with identity politics.’

Please explain how humans organised into any group identity can have an identity-less politics. Again, if you just don’t want to hear from and engage with people from my identity or the experiences we’ve had as a result of that identity, no worries, put the book down, don’t follow me on Twitter or watch me on YouTube. I am not stalking you, fam.

Again, if you just don’t want to hear from and engage with people from my identity or the experiences we’ve had as a result of that identity, no worries, put the book down, don’t follow me on Twitter or watch me on YouTube. I am not stalking you, fam.

‘You are trying to blame me for what my ancestors did.’

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.

‘Stop making excuses.’

most children eligible for free school meals do not achieve five GCSEs:

‘You just blame the west for all of the world’s problems’

But if you point out the simple and obvious fact that long after the official colonial period Western governments have been perfectly happy to install and support the most gruesome of dictatorial regimes and also overthrow democratically elected presidents as and when it suits them, this will be labelled ‘blaming the west for everything’.

‘I don’t see colour.’

This one does make me laugh and is grounded in the idea that colour itself is a negative, rather than the associations that have been forced upon it.

It’s so

‘It’s not about race.’

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.

I somehow knew instinctively that whiteness, like all systems of power, preferred not to be interrogated.

Yet for all my mother’s radical education and her long-standing political activity she was still white, she could never really ‘get it’.

I love my mum deeply but she is flawed, just like me and just like all humanity, but it is her efforts in spite of these flaws and in spite of a truly horrendous childhood of her own that make her all the more remarkable.

‘Whiteness is a metaphor for power,’ James Baldwin tells us.

South Africans can be found calling rich black people ‘white man’ and they mean this as a compliment, as in ‘now you have money, you are so successful that you are an honorary white man’

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.

As indentured servitude turned to chattel slavery and slavery came to be reserved strictly for people of African heritage, this white privilege became all the more important, as it literally became the difference between still being a human being and becoming a piece of property.

In the Caribbean, my complexion is associated with being middle class, with privilege and wealth and snobbery.

It is very strange; I have been in life-threatening situations a few times in my life and while you assume that fear will consume you, your reactions are often just odd, not out of bravery or heroism but just simply as a reaction to the absurdity of it all.

How ironic would it be if I get shot by the police while making this video?

The officer had been shouting at me to pull up my top and show that I did not have a gun on me; he had obviously assumed that I was a favela drug dealer accompanying my two rich clients somewhere – because why else would an Afro Brazilian be in a car with two rich kids?

I practically had to counsel them for the rest of trip to assuage their guilt.

It wasn’t their fault, but they nonetheless knew that they lived in a society where tens of thousands of poor people – overwhelmingly darker skinned – were murdered every year, thousands of them by police.

During slavery, white and black Americans had lived in the closest proximity imaginable, with black women often wet nursing and raising white children, and of course ‘sexual relations’ and rape were entirely normal. But once black people ceased to be white people’s property, proximity became a problem, so segregation was enforced along with anti-miscegenation laws that made what was common during slavery – sex between the races – a crime after it.

Back in Europe itself, whiteness had long been associated with beauty and divine light and blackness with evil and demons. However, sixteenth century writers and thinkers were still able to recognise that their standards of beauty were only relative, as evidenced in many writers’ works, including Shakespeare’s series of sonnets to a female love interest of his that he repeatedly describes as black, usually referred to by others as the ‘Dark Lady’.

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.

Real-life racism makes you paranoid, even in children it creates the dilemma of not knowing if someone is just being horrible in the ‘normal’ way, as people so often are, or if you are being ‘blacked off’ – as me and my friends call it.

While it’s always dangerous to extrapolate from an isolated experience, this did send me into a philosophical examination of British educational attitudes and practices and I concluded that our schools do indeed, for the most part, kill creativity as writer and internationally renowned educator Ken Robinson asserts,2 and I would argue that they do this by design.

This led me to do some more research and stumble across the ‘perplexing’ case of Finland, where students have no uniforms, are not banded into sets by ability, are not regularly tested or ranked and yet are as high-achieving as any in the world, and the gap between their ‘strongest’ and ‘weakest’ pupils is the smallest.

The study proved beyond any doubt that British teachers assess black pupils’ academic ability as being far lower than their actual academic ability, and underestimate their intelligence twice as much as they do for white children.

In short, the study confirmed that teachers are human beings and that they project their biases and those of our society onto children.

So as always there is much crossover between assumptions based on class indicators and race (race itself being one of the biggest and most obvious class indicators).

The threat posed to some people’s entire sense of identity by an exhibition of human excellence inside a black body is an amount of fear, sideways admiration and contempt for another group of humans that I can’t even imagine being constantly burdened by.

Take the ‘historians’ that claimed that Africans, unlike the rest of humanity, had no history,

In some cases, scholars were more willing to entertain the idea that aliens were responsible for African history than Africans!

Euro-America’s ability to dominate black people has not been read as one more chapter in a long history of human exploitation and domination, but rather as permanent racial superiority and inferiority.

By the end of the dialogue, Linford wound up crying and the mood entirely changed once Greaves realised Linford was actually seriously offended.

showed a fragile and human side of black masculinity that is rarely if ever seen on British television.

It’s fairly clear to all that Linford could snap Jimmy Greaves’ neck in two if he chose to, but instead of raging and becoming ‘the angry black man’ – though there is certainly a place for that – Linford cried, a perfectly valid response to the rage that a person might feel when their spectacular achievements have been overlooked in favour of their genitalia.

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

We talk about white privilege but we rarely talk about the white burden, the burden of being tethered to a false identity, a parasitic self-definition that can only define itself in relation to blacks’ or others’ inferiority.