Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

I was born in the 1980s, before mixed-race children had become an acceptable fashion accessory. 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.

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

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 context of why we were invited here in the first place. It was not so that we, en masse, could access the best of what British society had to offer, because that was not even on offer to the majority of the white population at the time. We were invited here to do the menial work that needed doing in the years immediately following the Second World War, and even in that very limited capacity, all post-war governments – including Attlee’s spirit of 45 lot – were deeply concerned about the long-term effects of letting brown-skinned British citizens into the country.

Nobody told white Britain that, over there in the colonies, Caribbeans and Asians were being told that Britain was their mother country, that it was the home of peace and justice and prosperity and that they would be welcomed with open arms by their loving motherland. Similarly, no one told my grandparents and others over there in the colonies that most white Britons were actually poor, or that the UK had a history of brutal labour exploitation and class conflict at home. You see, out there in the colonies, whiteness implies aristocracy, whiteness is aspirational, and as the only white people my grandparents knew of in Jamaica were the ruling classes, this association was entirely rational. My uncle could not contain his shock when ‘me come a England and me cyan believe say white man a sweep street’; the illusion was ruined the moment his four-year-old self got off the boat in the 1950s and saw poor white people. How preposterous – what is this place?

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 is a great way of avoiding any real discussion at all. But without the structural violence of unequal treatment before the law and in education, and a history of racial exploitation by states, simple acts of personal prejudice would have significantly less meaning. In short, we are trained to recognise the kinds of racism that tend to be engaged in by poorer people.

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 not even necessarily passing judgment on those who are employed in that system, as I’m complicit in it to a degree because of my consumption, 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.

There are other signs that the political ‘logic’ of the 1980s is returning. Despite the fact that Britain imprisons its population at double the rate the Germans do and 30–40 per cent higher than the French, we have a Metropolitan Police chief calling for tougher sentences for ‘teenage thugs’ and for a return of mass stop and search. Britain’s prison population has already grown 82 per cent in three decades with 50 per cent more women in prison than in the 1990s, and there is no corresponding rise in serious crime to explain any of this.

I was born into these currents, I did not create or invent them and I make no claims to objectivity. I find the whole idea that we can transcend our experiences; and take a totally unbiased look at the world to be totally ridiculous, yet that’s what many historians and academics claim to do. 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.

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

Only non-white people ever play this card to excuse their own personal failings – even those of us that are materially successful. Humans racialised as white cannot play the race card

Apparently, history is not there to be learned from, rather it’s a large boulder to be gotten over. 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.

It is especially odd in a nation where much of the population is apparently proud of Britain’s empire that critics of one of its most obvious legacies should be asked to get over it, the very same thing from the past that they are proud of.

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

‘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.

Remember the tens of thousands of white parents – often stigmatised single mothers – from poor areas of the UK who were coerced by the state into sending their children to Australia right up until the 1970s? These children were frequently victims of sexual abuse, hard labour and even flogging. We would call this child trafficking if it had been done by a non-Western state.1 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised for the programme in 2010,

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.

The concept of whiteness goes hand in hand with the concept of white supremacy – hence why the progress against white supremacy that has been made so far feels, to some white people, like an attack on their identity. This is obviously not white genocide; in fact if white people were experiencing anything remotely resembling a genocide white nationalists would not throw the term around so lightly. 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.

Many of the most celebrated intellectual icons of the last few centuries, from Jefferson, Roosevelt and Wilson to Lincoln, Kant, Hume, Churchill, Hugo, Hegel and many more otherwise intelligent and in some cases very brilliant people, openly espoused their belief in innate white supremacy, so it is rather odd that we are so squeamish about the phrase now. Even stranger that we are trained to think of white supremacy as the invention of some supposedly obscure hooded lunatics in the American South. This belies reality, first in that the KKK at their height had many millions of members, and second because, as shown above, white supremacy was a mainstream and openly espoused legal, political and moral imperative until the latter half of the twentieth century, so hardly ancient or remote history.

The practice of legally privileging all people racialised as white literally came about so ruling groups could buy the racial loyalty of poor whites, not to entirely eradicate their poverty.

Other newspapers, including some of the broadsheets, ran their own stories about ‘Linford’s Lunchbox’, and it became a sort of cultural cliché.

Linford made his feelings about the distasteful nature and poor timing of the comments pretty clear, which only damaged his already rocky relationship with the British media. Linford’s concerns were generally brushed off or dismissed as him being oversensitive,

Linford Christie again made it quite clear that he felt the media had treated him unfairly and overlooked his achievements in favour of an obsession with his ‘Lunchbox’. This Sport in Question episode then descended into a row that will be – and has been – written about for decades because of what it said about race, sexuality, culture and British politics. Patrick Collins defended the press and accused Linford of ‘seizing’ on some negative comments and making generalisations about the media, despite Linford pointing out that even the broadsheets had carried the ‘Lunchbox’ story in the wake of his Olympic gold. Jimmy Greaves told Linford he should wear something more appropriate if he was so offended, and let him know that ‘he has never offended me with it [his penis], I can tell you’ and that ‘a lot of women are fascinated by it’.

As Carrington points out, unlike Linford’s Lunchbox, Bruno’s ‘Uncle Tom’ breakdown went largely uncommented on by the mainstream media, perhaps because the British press at the time would not have had the political vocabulary and knowledge of history to even deal with the significance of the event. To deal with it would have meant many white journalists asking why their favourite son, a black heavyweight champion and presumably a multi-millionaire, still felt somewhat like a failure because he did not have the love of his own people. Frank was admitting with this breakdown that the money and the admiration of white Britain was not enough; that he knew in fact that it was not genuine and that he craved to be loved by black people in the way that other athletes and public figures had been. Tone deaf British journalists who have kept themselves functionally ignorant of Britain’s racial history simply could not grapple with all of this.

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.

So when news anchors ask about race, why not turn the anthropological lens around? Let’s ask white people about whiteness on occasion and not allow the dominant identity to remain invisible, thus retaining its mystical power.

For most of history, the people doing the enslaving came from similar(ish) regions of the world to those being enslaved. The very word slave comes from Slav, meaning Slavic, because so many ‘white’ Eastern Europeans were enslaved by other ‘Europeans’ and even sold to Muslims by them for centuries.

While Muslim jurists, unlike their Christian counterparts, continually upheld the idea of racial equality in theory, in reality most of the enslaved in the empires of the Islamic world came to be black, and though lighter-skinned and even ‘white’ people were enslaved by the Ottoman, Abbasid, Fatamid and Moroccan empires, black slaves were particularly devalued, costing less, given the lowest jobs and in general prevented from attaining more sought-after roles as ‘easily’ as their lighter skinned counterparts.

Once slavery in the Americas was exclusively reserved for humans of African origin, black skin became a signal of merchandise rather than humanity, property rather than personhood and thus anti-blackness became one of the bedrocks of the emergent capitalist economies of western Europe and North America.

Prior to colonialism, black Africans seem to have found their blackness perfectly beautiful and normal, unsurprisingly.16 But also, by making whiteness the colour of oppression, the colour that defined a person’s right to own other human beings, to rape and kill and steal with impunity, white supremacists had paradoxically opened up the way for blackness to become the colour of freedom, of revolution and of humanity.17 This is why it’s absurd to compare black nationalism and white nationalism; not because black people are inherently moral, but because the projects of the two nationalisms were entirely different.

But the idea that different nationalisms are different in intent and content depending on their historical origins is not a difficult concept to understand.

If you learn only three things during your education in Britain about transatlantic slavery they will be: 1. Wilberforce set Africans free 2. Britain was the first country to abolish slavery (and it did so primarily for moral reasons) 3. Africans sold their own people. The first two of these statements are total nonsense, the third is a serious oversimplification.

Furthermore, ‘abolitionist’ Britain stood by as France and then the US repeatedly punished Haiti for winning its freedom and its abolition of slavery. 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.

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.25 Anything that might embarrass the government, that would show religious or racial intolerance or be used ‘unethically’ by a post-independence government was ordered destroyed or hidden.

despite still having serious problems with violence against women Jamaica is also one of only three countries on Earth where your boss is more likely to be a woman than a man, and as mentioned earlier in 2017 the country ranked eighth in the world for press freedom, thirty-two places above the UK.

I was late for class that day and did not bother to explain why to the teachers because I simply assumed – or feared – that my rich white professors would refuse to believe that the police just stopped people for no reason, and would end up looking at me with suspicion.

My trauma surgeon friend had the humiliation of the police calling the hospital where he works when they pulled him over, because they just could not get their head round the idea that a young, athletic-looking black man driving a Mercedes could be a doctor and not a drug dealer.

She pulled one of the questioning officers aside and immediately his whole demeanour started to change. While his colleague ran my licence, he asked me what I thought they should do, and if I had a better suggestion of how to police gangs in London. The change in attitude of the officers, once they realised I was ‘someone important’ rather than just another potential gang member, was stark. Perhaps if police just approached the public in general with that level of respect things would be different.

The confrontation of the issue in Glasgow has revolved not just around stop and search, but around treating this kind of violence – i.e. teenage violence that is largely unconnected to proper organised crime – as a public health issue, and acting accordingly. A blitz of stop and search was used to give the public health policies time to kick in after which stop and search was scaled back, but it was ultimately understood that stop and search alone could not possibly be a serious long term solution.

The point is that male children in our society are willing to kill each other over very little. We can blame the families alone; claim the cause is single parents and fail to ask why middle-class kids whose parents get divorced rarely end up stabbing people.

Had Britain’s elites not had transportation as a safety valve, who knows, some of the genocidal violence inflicted on the Australian Aboriginal population may have been aimed at them. As the most accomplished British imperialist Cecil Rhodes aptly put it ‘if you wish to avoid civil war you must become an imperialist’.

Both the Warwick study and the Bristol one examined in Chapter Three looked at every state school in the UK,

Refers to GCSEs only so does it cover Scotland?

It’s interesting that all of the articles in question choose to focus on race rather than the British class system as a whole, as it’s a matter of fact that the gap between white working-class boys and other ethnic groups in the same social class is far smaller than the gap between poor white boys and the white middle class.

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.

This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome. 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.

There is an even more sinister suggestion coming from these ‘why don’t black people protest black-on-black crime?’ journalists; the idea that all black people are implicated in the actions of all others, that if a single black human kills another anywhere at any time on the planet then the rest of us lose our right to protest systemic state injustice, or any racist wrong done to us for that matter.

It’s notable that while black-American political scholarship has been grounded in critiquing race and white supremacy, continental African scholars and activists – who obviously understand the legacies of colonialism and white supremacy just as well as anyone – have chosen, as is proper, to also focus their critiques on the failures, greed, corruption and murder of Africa’s own ruling elites.

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.

I believe to some extent we are living through another crisis of whiteness, perhaps the final one, and that this crisis is tied up with several other complicated political and historic threads, such as the looming ecological disaster, domestic class conflict, Islamic fascism, the pivot to Asia and, if the Marxist scholars are correct, the very end of capitalism itself, though I am aware that capitalism’s inevitable end has been predicted ever since its beginning!