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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.
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’.
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.
Most people, it seems to me at least, hate poor people more than they hate poverty.
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.
Also, as the writer Gary Younge once explained, 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.
I have never before or since heard this particular racial epithet repeated among the predictable slew of clichés that peppered my childhood; coon, wog, darkie, coloured, nigger (obviously nigger) and even occasionally Paki – racists are notoriously imprecise with their insults.
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.
No one in my classes was given any understanding at all of why their classroom contained people whose parents hailed from all over the world; when the British Empire did come up it was as this plucky railway-building and sugar-exporting exercise devoid of any human victims. The fact that Britain has almost constantly been at war for the last century, even during the entire ‘post-war’ era, was of course not mentioned even once.
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.3
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.
If we want to fix the racial and economic disparities in the criminal justice system or at least reduce them, combat teenage gang violence, produce better educated children and create a generally better society, then the work starts in the primary school, not in the prison.
So, despite Britain spending almost two centuries as the dominant transatlantic slave trader, with all the torture, rape and mass murder that entailed, despite Britain refusing to back abolition when other European powers had paved the way, despite Britain spending the 1790s warring to keep slavery intact all over the Caribbean, despite Britain trying to crush the only successful slave revolution in human history and then helping their French enemies attempt to do the same, despite Britain refusing to even recognise the first Caribbean state to abolish slavery, despite all of this, some
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But the ‘Wilberforce did it all’ idea also springs from two other ideological founts, one the aforementioned classic white saviour trope and the other a seemingly human need for simple solutions to complex problems, for great men instead of the convoluted mess that is human history – in short, a need for heroes.
The destruction of historical memory is not limited to documents – while Britain has preserved the HMS Victory as a tribute to Nelson, as well as other ships from key periods of British history, not a single slave ship survives.
What they have to be asked is how they would respond if other states had done to Britain what the British state has done to other countries.
What if, instead of seizing Hong Kong, the Chinese had seized Liverpool and used Merseyside as a bridgehead from which to dominate Britain for nearly a hundred years? What if further British resistance provoked another attack that led to the Chinese occupying London, looting and burning down Buckingham Palace and dictating humiliating peace terms? What if today there was an Imperial Museum in Beijing that still put on display the fruits of the Chinese pillage of Britain? None of this is fanciful because it is exactly what the British state did to China in the nineteenth century.28
The implications are clear – some ancestors deserve to be remembered and venerated and others do not. Those that kill for Britain are glorious, those killed by Britain are unpeople.
What is most fascinating about British intellectual discourse is that we can see brutality ever so clearly when it wears Japanese or German or Islamic clothes, but when it comes to looking in the mirror at the empire on which the sun never set – the eighteenth-century’s premier slave trader, the mother country of the Commonwealth and one of the pioneer countries in developing and then putting into practice the Enlightenment philosophy of white supremacy – so many suddenly become blind, deaf and dumb, unable to see murder as murder.
Reggae music has become a globally popular culture and though some engagement with it is rather gimmicky reggae is generally seen quite rightly as an anti-establishment, pro-people cultural force.
It is often said that travel is the best education.
It’s also important to note that while London feels incredibly dangerous for teenagers it remains, in reality, a far safer city than media hysteria would have you believe, and the vast majority of murders in the city are committed by adults, not teenagers.
Despite the fact that Britain already has by far the highest number of prisoners per head of population in Western Europe10 – 50 per cent more than Germany, 30–40 per cent more than France – and by far the highest number of child lifers, with no comparable crime rates to match, here we have the chief of the Met calling for ‘tougher sentences’.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room; the history of the British class system. Despite all the rhetoric about meritocracy and equality of opportunity, Britain is still – like every nation on earth to some degree – a society where the social class and area you are born into will determine much of your life experiences, chances and outcomes.
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.
What is happening to the police is that a nineteenth-century institution is being dragged into the twenty-first century. Despite all the later mythology of Dixon, the police never were the police of the whole people but a mechanism set up to protect the affluent from what the Victorians described as the dangerous classes.13
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.
we live in a world where literal card-carrying Nazis getting punched in the face or being refused platforms to speak garners more liberal outrage than twelve-year-old Tamir Rice being executed on camera by the police while playing alone in the park.
wish I had known back then that British-ruled Hong Kong was governed by some of the same kind of racist apartheid laws as South Africa and other colonies.
The message is clear: white people’s hurt feelings are conceptually equivalent to black humans’ actual lives.
Losing the argument was clearly too much for her to bear and her response was so profoundly racist, even by her standards, that it still shocks me to this day. She blurted out: ‘The Ku Klux Klan also stopped crime by killing black people.’ Now I know you are probably reading this in disbelief, but I’ll repeat it for clarity and so you can be sure it’s not an extended typo. ‘The Ku Klux Klan also stopped crime by killing black people.’ Now imagine standing in front of students whom you are supposed to teach, in one of the most multicultural areas in the world, and saying that killing black
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The incident became, for me, the perfect embodiment of Dr King’s statement to the effect that the greatest impediment to racial justice in America was not the open bigot but the indifferent and cowardly white liberal, more concerned with a quiet life than justice.
In the words of Martin Narey, former Director General of HM Prison Service, ‘The 13,000 young people excluded from school each year might as well be given a date by which to join the prison service some time later down the line.’
The clear message of the literature is that, to a significant extent, the exclusion gap is caused by largely unwitting, but systematic, racial discrimination in the application of disciplinary and exclusions policies. Many cite this as evidence of Institutional Racism.
Naturally the British media and law enforcement took ample opportunity to racialise the gangster minority as a general black problem in a way they never did with the drug overdoses and sexual assaults that remain a common issue throughout the UK rave and festival culture.
You see, for much of Britain, America is where racism happens, and Britain is then by definition not racist because, you know, ‘it’s not as racist as America’.
None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white.
Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but simply because they are ‘black’, and sometimes because they listened to too much rap, grime or dancehall.
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.
Over the past few decades, China has pulled at least 500 million people out of poverty (the Communist propagandists at the World Bank actually put the figure at around 800 million), industrialised at a pace faster than any nation before and today stands at the leading edge of many green technologies, and it has managed to do all of this without invading and colonising half the planet.
My suspicion is that a lifetime of being treated like immigrants in their own country generally makes black Brits quite sensitive to anti-immigrant rhetoric.
That England, a country not properly invaded since 1066 but which has invaded almost every nation on the planet, can have a party named the UK Independence Party win 13 per cent of the national vote in 2015 speaks volumes about collective amnesia and ability to distort the facts.
The ability of Britain to invade almost the entire planet and then for a significant portion of the country to proclaim themselves victims of some kind of invasion or colonisation may well not seem directly ‘racial’, but it certainly echoes quite clearly the way white America, with its long-term history of racist pogroms, lynching, slavery and segregation, has somehow emerged believing itself to be the victim of racial discrimination.
