Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

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.

This phenomenon of self-induced stupidity seems to be particularly pronounced and almost laughably predictable when we attempt to discuss Britain’s racist history and reality with many people racialised as white.

What period exactly is it we are allowed to start our memory from? Those that tell us to get over the past never seem to specify, but I’m eager to learn. In reality, of course, they just don’t want to have any conversations that they find uncomfortable.

‘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.

what would have happened if the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the suffragettes, Tom Paine, the Chartists, those that campaigned to end child labour and slavery had all shut up for fear of being called ‘anti-British’?

Well of course, everybody knows that no one alive in Britain today owned an African person, but that does very little to change how significant a role slavery played in Britain’s history.

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.

Apparently me passing on the useful knowledge of how racism and poverty are deliberately reproduced is ‘making excuses’ for poorer children to fail.

For black children in Britain, our bodies commit the sin of reminding people racialised as white of an uncomfortable truth about part of how this nation became wealthy, and that the good old days when white power could roam the earth unchallenged are over.

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. Let alone any sense that we plebs should contemplate participating in the governing of the country.

How have things progressed since the 1970s, and since I was in school? Are black children being treated fairly in British schools these days? Sadly and predictably, the answer is no.

Britain, it seems, is trapped by its own history and the conflict with its own liberal rhetoric. 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?

While the overtly racist regimes have fallen, one only has to spend a little time on the Internet, looking at comments on videos or following social media threads about migrants, police brutality, terrorism or any other potentially racialised issue to see that the idea of race and racial hierarchy is perhaps as strong as it ever was for many millions of people today.

I was staring at the shelf labelled ‘The Classics’, I noticed something strange. Up until now the classics had always meant books written within the ‘Western’ tradition; it did not matter that Africans and Asians had millennia of written literature too.4 Not any more.

96 per cent of UKIP voters voted leave (hardly surprising) • Control over immigration was cited as the second most important reason for voting leave • Of the people who thought multiculturalism was an ill, 81 per cent voted leave • Of the people who thought immigration was an ill, 80 per cent voted leave • Of those who thought feminism was a force for ill, 71 per cent voted leave • Of the thirty areas with the most old people, twenty-seven voted leave • Of the thirty areas with the least university-educated people, twenty-eight voted leave • Of the thirty areas with the most people identifying as English not British, all voted leave

The other funny thing about these doomsday reports of white decline is that while the papers in question would probably baulk at the idea that white people are uniquely racist, this is what their narrative implicitly implies. We so-called ethnic minorities are just expected to live with difference and accept it.

a portion of the people racialised as white fear that, if they become a ‘minority’ (which means seeing whiteness as a defining factor, obviously), others will do to them as they have done to others, the idea of white racial victimhood – at this point at least – is laughable.