Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

The legacy of ‘scientific’ thinking about race included the human zoos in Paris, London, New York and Brussels, that still existed in some form as late as the 1950s, as well as the banana skins and monkey chants for black football players that I grew up watching.

But the idea that different nationalisms are different in intent and content depending on their historical origins is not a difficult concept to understand. For example the SNP and the BNP whilst both made up of ‘white British’ people could not be more different; whilst there are plenty of bigots in Scotland, Scottish nationalism in our times is rooted in a rejection of English superiority and a refusal to be dictated to by Westminster rather than in the same racist imperial fantasies that nourish so much British nationalism.

The British invasion of the French Caribbean included an invasion of Haiti, which is particularly significant given Haiti’s place in the history of the period; during the 1780s Haiti was by far the most profitable slave colony in the Americas, exporting as much sugar as Brazil, Cuba and Jamaica combined,6 producing half the world’s coffee and generating more revenue than the entire thirteen colonies of what had just become America.

Britain helpfully removed the naval blockade it had previously had in place in the English Channel during the years of war with France to allow French troops, headed up by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, to travel to Haiti and try to put the ‘gilded negroes’ back in their rightful place.

Once the French realised, as predicted at the time by British abolitionist James Stephen (and by the Haitians themselves), that the Haitians could not be re-enslaved, the French plan was to exterminate them all and start over again with newly enslaved people brought from Africa. The war that ensued became an explicitly genocidal one, in which the French troops were instructed to exterminate all of the blacks on the island.

Clearly, whatever the British government’s ‘abolitionist’ convictions, they did not extend to recognising the nationhood of the only state in human history founded by rebel slaves who’d won their freedom.

Brazil and Cuba did not abolish slavery until the 1880s but still received massive inward investment from British companies and merchants, with the government’s knowledge of course.

The times have changed and the extremities of the crimes may be different and a little less direct, but the narrative and Machiavellian mentality have remained much the same. No one refers to the ‘white man’s burden’ any more, as it’s just too crude a phrase, so instead we speak of spreading democracy and human rights and of saving people from dictators, which funnily enough is almost exactly what the original nineteenth-century version of the white man’s burden claimed to be motivated by.

Africa had and has ethnic, cultural, class and imperial rivalries that every scholar of the period acknowledges are the very divisions that colonisers and slave traders played on.

In the British Caribbean, the postcolonial tradition was pioneered by Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, who are still pretty much standard reading for any educated Caribbean adult.

Ethnicity, much like race, can be and has been a lethal division used to justify subhuman treatment by dominant ethnic groups, but just because ethnic tensions share many of the characteristics of ‘race’ does not mean we should conflate the two.

Racism as a word only really came into popular usage during the 1930s, and specifically in relation to the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Nazis and American hatred of other European immigrants.

Ethnocentrism can be overcome, but overt racism or the idea of permanent hierarchical racial difference is a chasm much deeper and more difficult to surmount. Thus German prisoners of war were able to dine with white Americans during the Second World War, but their African-American ‘comrades’ and ‘countrymen’ were not.

Despite the Nazis’ genocidal rampage and their attempts to take over the world and the war with Germany, a German was still preferable to a black person in British and American post-war racial ‘logic’.

They posed the same questions I’d been asked years before, only slightly updated: ‘What are you doing here? This car is registered to Croydon.’ Matter out of place again. Apparently, some officers don’t understand that the literal purpose of a vehicle is to travel.

The sense of hopelessness and fear felt during those formative years is so intense it is hard to even remember the sensation properly. The pressure to accumulate, the understanding that poverty is shameful, the double shame of being black and poor, the constant refrain of materialism coming from every facet of popular culture, the empty fridge, the disconnected electricity, the insecurity of being a tenant with eviction always just a few missed paycheques away, the stress and anger of your parents that trickles down far better than any capital accumulation, the naked injustices that you now know to be reality and the growing belief that one is indeed all of the negative stereotypes that the people with the power say you are.

In marked contrast to the wars we can always afford you will frequently hear the same people talk about not having the money for any number of things that affect the lives of poor people, such as adequate fire safety, decent pay for nurses and teachers and winter fuel for the elderly: this is classism.

It’s not that life in post-industrial Britain is materially awful by global standards, clearly it is not and clearly things are quite substantially better than they were a century ago, but it seems to me that the drudgery of it all encourages many teenagers to just give up on their dreams and accept ‘their place’. This remaking of humans to fit social norms is of course what education is about, from ‘tribal’ initiation systems to state schools.

Despite all the pretence about serving the people, and some of the genuinely good and difficult work police have to do, such as dealing with rape victims and missing children, the police are primarily enforcers for the state and for the state of things as they are. When this is understood you can make sense of ‘illogical’ police activities like spying on justice campaigners or environmental activists as if they were the Mafia, to the extent of going undercover and marrying members of activist groups.

To be black, poor and politicised in Britain is to see the ugliest side of the police and indeed of Britain itself; it is to see behind the curtain and not be fooled by the circus, and to feel crazy because so many others cannot see what is so clear to you.

Decades after the supposed war against fascism, the British and American governments and the capital they served could be found supporting a regime whose ideas were rooted in the same kind of genocidal racial ‘logic’ as the Nazis.

Statues of Mandela now stand outside of the Southbank Centre and even in Parliament Square – along with two of the architects of apartheid, Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts. How is this possible, you might legitimately ask. How can people that love the makers of apartheid also love the breakers of it? Surely something must be amiss here?

Somehow these belated anti-apartheid types have either forgotten or do not know that the only non-African nation to send its troops to actually fight the apartheid regime was Cuba. Not only that, but Cuba provided medical aid and military training to the ANC in exile. Cuba’s role in helping to bring an end to formal apartheid in Africa was decisive and Mandela, until the end of his long life, never forgot it. He once wrote that ‘the Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom and justice unparalleled for its principled and selfless character.’

To understand, we must visit the history of how apartheid actually ended, because like all achievements of black freedom before it, the fall of apartheid seems to be remembered as a gift from newly enlightened white rulers and liberal campaigners putting pressure on odious regimes. This could not be further from the actual truth.

Up until 1987, the apartheid regime made repeated encroachments into Angola and armed a brutal and unscrupulous proxy leader named Jonas Savimbi of UNITA, to try to overthrow the Angolan government. However, at the crucial battle of Cuito Cuanavale, referred to by Mandela in the epigraph of this chapter, the Cubans, Angolans and SWAPO defeated the apartheid forces. The negotiations after this defeat led directly to the independence of Namibia, the unbanning of the ANC and the fall of (political) apartheid.

So if the ending of apartheid is now universally agreed to be a good thing, and Cuba played such a central role, how is it still possible to have such differing views of Castro and Mandela and of Cuba and South Africa?

The hypocritical worship of black freedom fighters once they are no longer seen to pose a danger or are safely dead – Martin Luther King might be the best example of this – is one of the keys ways of maintaining a liberal veneer over what in reality is brutal intent.

Sadly, this is not the case. Yes, formal, legalised, unapologetic, political white supremacy has been defeated in South Africa, and that is a cause for celebration for any human that believes even vaguely in justice. Nonetheless, the aforementioned economic relationships have not seriously been altered in all the years since Mandela was released from prison, and this is a direct legacy of compromises that were made in those initial handover negotiations.

This was not justice or the end of apartheid, but rather its morphing from a system that was unapologetically racial to one that is now unapologetically economic and by inference, given South Africa’s history, still racial.

But it’s also important because the Castro–Mandela dichotomy exposes the way the mainstream loves to worship a supposedly non-racist country as long as it leaves the accepted class hierarchies in place, but hates a society that has revolutionised some of its class relationships despite its actual material contribution to global anti-racist struggle.

Despite some doubts about overt displays of white supremacy, even after the carnage of the First World War British, American and French elites felt confident enough to reject out of hand Japan’s suggestion that a clause recognising racial equality be inserted into the treaty of Versaille.

It is one of history’s great ironies that the most extreme incarnation of white supremacy, the Nazis, did more to undermine white dominance, damage Western prestige and make space for ‘third world’ freedom struggles than any other force in the previous three centuries.

Only when I see the free-speech purists campaigning for the right of a Salafist who thinks 9/11 was wonderful to speak at America or Britain’s top universities will I perhaps believe in their sincerity.

This realisation that major parts of recent political events could quickly be forgotten or indeed totally ignored if they did not fit the script helped encourage me to always seek multiple sources for a given story or situation, and compelled me to always distrust or at least question what I was being told and why I was being told it.

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. The message from these journalists and those that pedalled this narrative is clear: it’s fine for working class white kids to fail relations to the white middle-classes – but they should never fall behind the darkies.

It is also compelling that African and Caribbean music – that is music made in a black context primarily for black consumption – does not use the word nigger, and even the most ‘gangsta’ of Jamaican dancehall artists can be found offering profound political analysis of Jamaica’s class dynamics and the corruption of its elites, something that has been almost entirely absent from ‘mainstream’ hip hop over the past twenty years.

They are more likely to know of the Alabama church bombing than of New Cross, more likely to know the name Rodney King than Cynthia Jarret, more likely to know Jesse Jackson than Bernie Grant.

For example, just nine days before he died, Malcolm X visited Smethwick in the West Midlands, where there had been a history of racial segregation and where a Conservative MP had run the election slogan ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’.

For example, a Gallup poll of 2014 asked 66,000 people from sixty-five countries which nation they thought was the greatest threat to world peace, and a quarter thought the United States, with just 6 per cent saying China. This trend is echoed in earlier polls.

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.

In a sense, I think whiteness has functioned quite similarly to divine kingship, paralysing those who are intensely invested, trapping them into a resentment of the reality that they are obviously not superior.

When major shocks to this system did come, people racialised as white were often unable to process what was occurring. During the Haitian Revolution, for example, the white French came up with all kinds of fantastical theories about the rebels being white people in black face rather than accept the obvious fact that their former slaves had risen against them, as human beings are likely to.

The film and play examples may seem trivial, and it’s easy for most sane people to denounce such idiocy, but the racial reactions to Reconstruction, civil rights, decolonisation and the rise of Japan were anything but trivial and I sincerely doubt that the reactions to the return of China and what that means for world affairs will be trivial either.

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!

It is notable that white-supremacist groups cheered the election of Obama in 2008, as they hoped and believed that the racist backlash would support their agendas; they were not mistaken.

There are multiple studies, including a Gallup one involving a huge sample of 125,000 Americans, that simply dispel the myth that economic hardship was the determinant for Trump’s election. A factor, sure; the factor, no way. The determining factor was whiteness, and as Coates explains, ‘to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world.’

But as I was watched the Trump inauguration on a TV screen in Addis Ababa, it all looked so satirical that I could not help but see the signs of an empire in decline. The question, then, is how painful might the fall be?

We’ve heard it said repeatedly that leaving the EU will allow Britain to stop neglecting the Commonwealth, but those of us that actually come from Commonwealth countries tend to shudder when we hear this. Why? Well, apart from the imperial history you read earlier, it’s because what have we seen to reflect this new-found love for the Commonwealth in recent years? ‘Immigrants go home’ vans trawling the streets of Tower Hamlets; I wonder who they were looking for?

Perhaps the worst part about this whole debacle is that by now it should be abundantly clear to all that Brexit will pave the way for an even more extreme version of the Thatcherite sell-off of UK assets and services, and the domination of the UK economy by US and transnational capital.

This lilywhite Europe where everyone knew their place, things were peaceful and everyone got along simply melts into thin air against the historical record of land clearances, the violence of nation-state formations, religious purges, anti-Jewish pogroms, the Hapsburgs, Napoleon, a couple of world wars and the inquisition.