Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

The 1980s was also the decade of Thatcherite–Reaganite ascendency. The ‘golden age of capitalism’ had ended in 1973, and the 80s saw the start of the rollback of the post-war welfare state, increased sell-off of public assets and the embrace of an individualistic ‘self-made’ logic by the very generation that had become wealthy with the support of free universities and cheap council houses, and had literally been kept alive by the newly constructed National Health Service.

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.

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’.

In a barely disguised move in the 1968 and 1971 immigration acts ‘grandfather clauses’ were placed into the legislation, which allowed the white citizens of the Commonwealth to continue to keep their freedom of movement without having to use explicitly racial language.

Racism and anti-racism, complete contempt for the poor and Christian charity, home to the world’s top universities and a strong disdain for learning, the pioneer of ‘Anglo-globalisation’ whose citizens constantly bemoan other peoples right to move freely without a hint of irony – Britain has long been a land of startling paradoxes.

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.

In short, we are trained to recognise the kinds of racism that tend to be engaged in by poorer people. Thus even the most pro-empire of historians would probably admit that some football hooligan calling a Premier League player a ‘black cunt’ is a bad thing, even while they spend their entire academic careers explaining away, downplaying and essentially cheering for the mass-murdering white-supremacist piracy of the British Empire, which starved millions to death in India, enslaved and tortured millions more in countless locations and often used its power to crush, not enhance, popular democracy and economic development in its non-white colonies, especially when doing so suited larger aims.

It seems Britain’s most honest racists emphasise the spiritual connection they feel for their American cousins quite well. Yet in reality, the hanging of black people was never a particular phenomenon in domestic Britain; ironically, the vast majority of people hung in British history were white, and they were often poor people hung by the state for not respecting rich people’s property.

Some of my happiest childhood memories were formed in the public library that was almost on the corner of our street, a facility that played no small part in inculcating in me an almost irrational love of books. I already own more books than I could ever read, yet I often still go to bookshops just to look at, browse and smell the pages of a freshly printed one – sadly nerdy, I know.

Countless teachers and community activists gave me the tools for navigating life’s roadmap; football coaches taught me to play and kept me out of trouble. I am not saying that my own hard work, discipline and sacrifice have played no role in my life’s outcomes; that would be absurd. But I am saying that even these characteristics were nourished with help, support and encouragement from others, and that without this support – much of it from volunteers – it’s inconceivable that I would be where I am today.

I am a product of the empire, and also of the welfare state.

My good friend, a retired Premier League footballer from the notorious Stonebridge estate, was officially banned from the ‘front line’ by all the drug dealers in ‘the ends’ when he was growing up. They saw his potential, his chance for a life different to their own, and these ‘bad’ people – I am not denying that they were indeed hardened criminals – protected him and me.

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.

The horrendous Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, which claimed at least seventy-one lives and was undeniably caused by systematic contempt for the lives of poor people, was perhaps the ultimate and most gruesome tribute to austerity yet seen.

Conversely, they also believe that all those racialised as white, no matter how mediocre they may be in terms of personal intelligence and actual achievements, share some racial credit for the works of Russell, Da Vinci and Tesla, and for the prosperity of the modern ‘West’ – even if they have personally played no role in creating this prosperity.

Third, the idea that one should be grateful that your government does not kill, torture or imprison you for your criticisms is an extremely low bar of expectation coming from people who are apparently proud of their nation’s democratic credentials.

Intriguingly, Jamaica regularly ranks in the top ten for press freedom globally, ranking eighth in 2017 for example, sandwiched in between Switzerland and Belgium, while Britain has slipped twelve places to fortieth in global rankings over the past five years.

However, one of the main reasons me and my siblings were able to navigate life growing up was because we were made to understand very early that poorer children and poorer black children in particular would have to work twice as hard to get half as far. Apparently me passing on the useful knowledge of how racism and poverty are deliberately reproduced is ‘making excuses’ for poorer children to fail.

We have to give the lad – or more probably his parents – ten out of ten for originality when it comes to racial abuse, for I have never before or since heard this particular racial epithet repeated among the predictable slew of clichés that peppered my childhood;

The saddest part in the test comes when, after having identified the black doll as ugly and bad, the black children are asked which doll looks most like them, and you see the children hesitate as it dawns on them what that means. Children become race conscious very early despite what even well-meaning parents may want to believe.

Looking back now I feel shame for the other boy’s parents – what kind of parent teaches their five-year-old child to think and act this way? The reproduction of such anti-human racist ideas is, to my mind at least, child abuse, but as racism is so endemic we tend not to see it that way.

Theodore W. Allen’s meticulous study The Invention of the White Race, which took over a decade to produce, observes that in the first two generations of census data in the Virginia colonies there were no humans defined as white; the people we now think of as white were at that point still predominantly defined by other factors, such as the region of Europe from which they came. He argues that the ancestors of 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.

To understand just how flexible the boundaries of whiteness have been, even in America, we can look at the case of just one state. In the early twentieth century, Virginians made the first change in their definition of ‘mulatto’ in 125 years. From the Act of 1785 to 1910, a mulatto, or ‘coloured’ person, was someone who had a quarter or more negro blood. In 1910, that category expanded to include anyone with one sixteenth or more negro blood, and many people previously classified as white became legally coloured.

For example, in colonial Spanish America mixed people could buy a certificate of ‘whiteness’6 and at a certain point under very specific circumstances in eighteenth century Georgia, when the frontier ‘needed protecting’ from Native Americans and the Spanish, even a black person could become white.

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.

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.

While it’s absolutely obvious that white people have no monopoly on ethnic hatreds or dominating and brutalising other human beings, in my personal opinion – and I do believe it’s somewhat grounded in the evidence – the idea of race and white supremacy pioneered in eighteenth-century Europe, combined with newly formed nation states and industrial technology, took the human capacity for and practice of barbarity to levels rarely if ever before seen in history.

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.

The Second World War is often seen as the peak of this brutality in world history, and what the Nazis did as an aberration. But however much some try to divorce Nazi Germany from this earlier history, the reality is they were very much inspired by American race laws when crafting laws to govern ‘the Jews’, as well as drawing on the much wider and longer pan-Euro-American dialogue about race and eugenics.

Only once Japan showed that ‘Asiatics’ could beat or at least equal white people at their own game did mainstream Western thought seriously start to entertain what the few radical critics of imperialism had long been saying; that imperial expansion could not go on unchecked and that white people were not, in fact, supreme – even in the capacity for cruelty.

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.

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.

The picture is nevertheless complicated in Britain – at home, if not in its former empire – and might provide some of the reasons why white people here sometimes find terms like ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege’ either inapplicable to Britain or hard to understand. First, Britain never practised open white supremacy on domestic soil as it did in the colonies, so those of us who hail from the colonies have a different understanding of British racial governance, even if we were born here. Second, the most deprived and violent regions of Britain remain areas that are almost exclusively white, such as the rough parts of Glasgow, Belfast and north-east England, a subject to which we will return later.

Class affects everything, even racism, but in complex ways, and a phrase like ‘white privilege’ is not an absolute but a trend, a verifiable factor in human history produced by the philosophy and practice of institutionalised white supremacy.

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.

State schooling in Britain both today and when I was a child seems stuck in a Victorian-era paradigm, guided by notions of discipline, obedience and deference to ones betters, of becoming a good worker and getting a good job. The idea that we go to school to find our passions, our calling, to learn to be happy, to ‘draw out that which is within’, as the root meaning of the word ‘educate’ commands, is almost entirely absent.

What history I did learn can be seen as little more than aristocratic nationalist propaganda; Henry VIII and his marital dramas; how Britain and America defeated the Nazis – minus the Commonwealth and with a very vague mention of the Soviet contribution; how Britain had basically invented democracy and all that was good and wonderful.

I am aware that it’s cliché to look to the Nordic countries as ideal models and I’m sure their systems have their own deficiencies, but my experiences teaching in Scandinavia still shocked me. I saw children waltz into school to loud house music blaring from the school speakers, I went into classrooms where no one calls their teachers ‘Miss’ or ‘Sir’, and yet this lack of formality does not seem to be affecting the quality of their educational outcomes.

Are we really trying to encourage and normalise black academic excellence in the UK? Or would we prefer the extra cost of imprisonment and crime that comes further down the line after neglect, just so one can still feel superior?

In the days and weeks after Linford’s historic victory, the press was not focused on his contribution to British sport but instead full of stories about ‘Linford’s Lunchbox’, a less than subtle euphemism for his apparently huge penis. Presumably Linford had the exact same penis for his entire career and did not get a transplant on the night of 31 July 1992, so why had the press chosen this moment, the moment of the greatest glory in an athlete’s career, to objectify Linford in such a way?

There are a number of obvious problems and lapses in basic logic within this statement. First, almost 40 per cent of the men on Earth are from India and China – not to mention the rest of the non-white but not-black world – yet whoever wrote this script seems entirely unconcerned with their lack of presence in Olympic sprint finals. A very clear white nationalist statement is being made, the issue is that white men are not winning, which should apparently be the norm, and to make matters worse it is black men defeating them – as if there is a permanent competition between black and white athletes.

The fact that the question is even asked, the fact that black excellence in a particular field needs ‘explaining’, tells its own story. I can’t recall any documentaries trying to discover an organisational gene left over from fascism that explains why Germany and Italy have consistently been Europe’s best performing football teams. Spain’s brief spell as the best team in the world, with a generation of players born in the years immediately after Franco’s death, would seem to confirm my fascism-meets-football thesis, right?

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.

For Jack Johnson’s success to lead to the search for a great white hope is, frankly, rather pathetic; for Jesse Owens to be able to spoil the worldview of an entire nation is, again, pretty sad. Dangerous as racism is, it also makes victims out of white people – like those of my school teachers that felt threatened by a child’s intelligence.

What I want to look at here is the construction of blackness in the racist imagination and the specific form of historical prejudice meted out to people on the grounds of having black skin or being defined as black.

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.

Cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee – the primary commodities of their days – were produced by human commodities with black skin, under what Sven Beckert rightly calls ‘war capitalism’.8 It wasn’t free trade or open markets, but military rule, forced servitude, national monopolies and absolutely no semblance of democracy that helped modern Europe and America to develop.

However, even as late as the mid-eighteenth century, it was still rare for a European observer, even those heavily involved with slavery on the African coast, to assert that black people were not human.

The turning point towards a ‘scientific’ and systematic racism came when writers like Edward Long, a British-Jamaican slave owner, started to justify the plantation regime on the grounds that black people were not just inferior but that they were not even human.