Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

No one asked in public discourse where that association with black people and monkeys came from, because if they did we might have to speak of historical origins, of savage myths and of literal human zoos.

The government and the education system failed to explain to white Britain that, as the academic Adam Elliot-Cooper puts it, we had not come to Britain, but ‘rather that Britain had come to us’. 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. No one explained that our grandparents were not immigrants, that they were literally British citizens –many of them Second World War veterans – with British passports to match, moving from one of Britain’s outposts to the metropole. 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 illu...

You see, while the people in the colonies were being told Britain was their mother, much of white Britain had convinced itself that these undeserving niggers – Asians were niggers too, back then – had just got off their banana boats to come and freeload, to take ‘their’ jobs and steal ‘their’ women.

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’.

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. This is how the UK can have the largest of the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq and yet still have a government that entirely ignored its population on an issue with such globe-shifting implications.

The kinds of racism still engaged in by the wealthy and the powerful – such as the theft of entire regions’ resources under a thinly veiled update of ‘the white man’s burden’ (basically ‘the savages can’t govern themselves’), or profiteering from a racially unjust legal and prison system – are far more egregious and damaging. Yet these forms of racism are given far less attention than racism as simple name-calling.

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. We need not remind ourselves that slavery, apartheid, Jim Crow, a man’s right to rape his wife and the chemical castration of gay people were all ‘legal’ at one stage of very recent history, as was most of what was done by Nazi Germany.

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. Can a nurse whose pay increases are capped at 1 per cent – below the rate of inflation – by politicians who have not capped their own pay, change the fact that he or she is literally getting poorer every passing year, despite doing the same bloody hard work?

‘You are trying to blame me for what my ancestors did.’ This one usually arises when discussing the particularly sensitive area of Britain’s role in the transatlantic traffic in enslaved Africans. ‘I never owned slaves’ or so the strawman logic goes. 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.2 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. People seem rather happy to align themselves with the Dunkirk spirit but rather less interested in even acknowledging the ‘Amritsar spirit’.

I drifted deeper into a half-digested black nationalist politics that had been refracted to me through hip hop and the couple of books that I’d half-read, I radically simplified Garvey’s position and thinking and made no real attempt to understand how different 1990s Britain was from 1920s America (I was a teenager after all). The only injustices I really knew about at that point in my life were those committed by white people; slavery, colonialism and apartheid. I did not yet have any knowledge of the Mongols, fascist Japan or the Abbasids; I did not know that the olive-skinned Romans often considered the people we now think of as white to be savages and had invaded their homes and enslaved them without much of a second thought; I did not know that Spain had been a Muslim country for hundreds of years; or that slavery had been a fairly global institution across cultures, not precluding the horrendous extremities of ‘new world’ slavery, of course. And so, when the Nation of Islam said the white man was the devil and I read about spectacle lynchings and the torture of enslaved Africans, it seemed entirely possible to my fifteen-year-old self that there might be something permanently, uniquely and irredeemably wrong with white people.

Paradoxically as I looked at the centuries of slavery and colonialism, assessed the state of modern Africa and had daily encounters with the intense racial self-hatred of many black people I also wondered if there was something innately wrong with us, if ‘we’ were destined to be history’s losers forever more or if we were just naturally more kind hearted than white people and this kind heartedness translated as weakness in the real world.

Closer to home, Allen also contrasts the management of racial dominance in British-occupied Ireland with racial oppression in Anglo-America; there are many striking parallels between the way the Irish were treated and the way later racialised groups would be.3 --- The idea that the Irish were essentially savages still lingered with us in England until the 1960s, with the infamous ‘No Irish, no blacks, no dogs’ sign being just one example. Yet in the Americas, Irish immigrants became big supporters of black slavery, the confederacy and white supremacy, and ended up as a significant portion of slave owners throughout the Americas – though still far less than the English or Scots. My surname, Daley, is of Irish origin and possibly reflects the origins of the man that owned my grandfather’s great-, great-grandparents. Despite their own very real experience of oppression in Ireland, once in the Americas, particularly during the nineteenth century, the Irish came to understand very well the benefits of learning to be white, and learn quickly they did.

Even if we look at the differences between the racial regimes of the continental United States, where European settlers were the majority, and the Caribbean, where people of European heritage were a minority, we still see whiteness functioning as a fulcrum of power. In the USA, especially after slavery was ‘abolished’, there was a tendency toward the ‘one drop’ rule, which defined a person containing any vestige of ‘black blood’ as a negro and thus subject to Jim Crow discrimination. In the Caribbean plantations, there was a greater likelihood of ‘whites’ recognising their mixed-race offspring and even using these offspring as a buffer class in the plantation system. These different systems of race management have legacies that are with us until this very day; in the USA I am without a doubt a black person, yet the same light-brown skin that makes me a black person in America or even Britain, with all the stereotypes and issues that come with ‘blackness’, makes me a person of ‘high colour’ in the Caribbean. In the Caribbean, my complexion is associated with being middle class, with privilege and wealth and snobbery. Very few people of my complexion live in Jamaica’s ghettoes for example, which is part of what made Bob Marley’s story so unusual.

Despite pretending to be permanent, fixed and scientific, racial classifications have always been bent to the perceived needs or wills of ruling groups. 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.7 At various points in history, Hindus, Arabs and even the Japanese could find themselves defined as honorary whites; racial theory was never as precise as we may assume it to have been today, it was always amenable to utility.

In all of the former slave colonies of the Americas where whiteness was pioneered as a tool of social control, it pretty much worked a treat. For all the centuries slavery went on – with just a few notable exceptions like the Polish in Haiti, John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and the multi-ethnic working-class rebellion that almost took over New York in 174112 – no matter how deplorable the conditions for poor whites may have been, they rarely joined the side of the enslaved in the scores, perhaps hundreds of rebellions against slavery throughout those years. Indeed, free blacks and mulattoes, often property owners and sometimes even slave owners themselves, were far more likely to join and even lead slave rebellions out of racial nationalism alone.

Ironically at least during slavery a black person’s status as property sometimes acted as a barrier to killing them or damaging them beyond repair (though I do stress, only sometimes). 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.

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. And the dehumanisation of the racial other made mass killing particularly permissible and thus was central to Western dominance. 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.

The practice of what came to be known as genocide apparently seemed perfectly acceptable, even admirable to mainstream Western political figures – including Winston Churchill – when its victims were a ‘lower-grade race’.16 The Nazi genocides sprang from a much longer history of articulating white supremacy that had been developed on the plantations of the Americas, practised in colonising the globe and then codified into a respected philosophy during the Enlightenment and the long nineteenth century.

state education designed to encourage more Darwins and Newtons, or to create middle-management civil servants and workers?

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.

The word imperialism had never been used in the classroom, much less ‘class struggle’. 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.

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.

I am not sure that children being taught that their state is essentially benevolent, if a little rough round the edges, is the best way to breed adults who actually respect the limited freedoms their ancestors have attained.

In some cases, scholars were more willing to entertain the idea that aliens were responsible for African history than Africans! This ‘intellectual’ trend was pioneered by those who took the conditions of enslaved people – that is people physically prevented from attaining an education – and decided that their perceptions of the intellectual aptitude of slaves represented the permanent and genetically pre-determined state of all black people.

Despite what white supremacists claim, going to such extents as they have to prevent black excellence is really a rather huge compliment.

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. Slavery

‘I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.’ ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ Winston Churchill

The ability for collective, selective amnesia in the service of easing a nation’s cognitive dissonance is nowhere better exemplified than in the manner that much of Britain has chosen to remember transatlantic slavery in particular, and the British Empire more generally.

The British Governor of Jamaica sent weapons and assistance to the French mission in Haiti; like Addington, he understood that the preservation of slavery and white supremacy, even that of their French rivals, was preferable to empowering abolitionist-minded rebel negroes.

Upon abolition in Britain’s own colonies, it was the slave owners who were given compensation to the tune of £20 million, roughly £17 billion in today’s money,12 the largest public bailout until the aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The formerly enslaved were given nothing; in fact, they were expected to remain slaves for five more years under a system euphemistically entitled ‘apprenticeship’ and of course East Indian ‘coolies’ continued to be scattered across the Caribbean to labour as ‘indentured servants’ well after the abolition of slavery.

First, Britons were submitted to generations of deliberate imperialist, militarist propaganda in all areas of culture, from education to the cinema, theatre and music halls and in the production of huge imperial exhibitions at Wembley and elsewhere.24 The myopia this propaganda still produces was aptly captured when Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox said in 2016, in the run-up to the EU referendum, that ‘the United Kingdom is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its twentieth-century history.’ Funny, because Britain is in fact one of the few countries in the world that literally did bury a good portion of its twentieth-century history.

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

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.26 You have to stand in awe of the intellectual obedience it takes to still cheer for empire after the revelation that the government hid or burned a good portion of the evidence of what that empire actually consisted of, but such is the use to which we put our

Thus the propaganda continues. Most people are still not at all aware of what has been done in their name, such as the deliberate starving to death of millions of people in India, the imprisonment and mass torture of British-Kenyans in concentration camps in the 1950s, the removal of the population of Diego Garcia for a US army base, widespread use of torture and a swathe of secret wars that have seen the British military active for almost all of the last 100 years, including the supposed ‘post-war’ period.

I’ll bet that he and others like him will be wearing their poppy every 11 November; that is, they will be ‘working themselves up into a state of high moral indignation’ about dead people when those dead people are truly British – the Kenyans tortured in the 1950s were legally British citizens but naturally there will be no poppies or tears for them. 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. If we truly cared for peace, would we not remember the victims of British tyranny every 11 November too?

Despite my granddad spending a lifetime complaining about the immigrants and darkies, he took his military pension and retired to Thailand and saw no contradiction. In typical expat style, he did not learn the language, did not integrate and did not particularly respect the culture; he lived in his enclave with other ‘expats’ from Australia and America and moaned about the Thais in their own country instead.

Class affects everything – culture, confidence and worldview – and the class system is so entrenched in Britain that even a person’s accent carries with it implications about their social background.

There is something about that age – about the combination of puberty and all its sexual confusion and competition, about being old enough to start noticing how fucked up the world is and how many holes there are in your shoes, with the dawning of the reality that your dreams will not come true, that you will most likely be just as unhappy as your parents and that fifty years of dead-end work awaits you – that kills most working-class kids’ confidence.

in general, they are actually correct. 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.

Marx and his intellectual descendants may well prove to have been wrong about socialism and how society will evolve – we’ll see – but much of their analysis of the way capitalism works is so clearly and plainly accurate that if it was given to any working-class child at school they would immediately be able to make total sense of much of the ‘Marxist nonsense’, as it’s so often called.

The governments of Britain and the US, who had styled themselves as the world’s policemen and who had invaded numerous countries on apparently ‘humanitarian’ grounds,

Westminster, Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill had played crucial roles in constructing apartheid in the first place, despite the number of black South Africans that had fought on the British side in the Boer War and would fight for them again during the Second World War – the war to end fascism, remember. It is inconceivable that if the race roles in South Africa had been reversed Britain and the US would have supported a black government committing such outrages on its white population.

When Castro died, even a journalist at the Guardian ran with the headline ‘Forget Fidel Castro’s policies, what matters is that he was a dictator’. But that very same journalist told us that we should ‘stop calling Tony Blair a war criminal’ and informed us that ‘the Left should be proud of his record’.

When we do look at some of the regimes that our government(s) have armed and/or otherwise done business with, we see some of the greatest human rights abusers of the post -1945 world – Pol Pot in Cambodia, General Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, Nigeria during Biafra, Israel and the horrendous Saudi war being waged in Yemen right now.

Conservative and even ‘respectable’ liberal opinion has chosen to adopt Mandela as a hero and Castro as a villain because of, in my opinion, a number of factors, plain old intellectual obedience being one of them.

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.

If whiteness is used to legitimise slavery, genocide and colonialism, is it really a surprise that at least a minority of people victimised in this way would turn around and argue that white people were inherently evil?

power and prosperity can blind us all

Black Brits emigrated into a society with an already established white underclass and were mostly dumped in areas where that underclass already lived; black Americans and the indigenous peoples were the foundation of the US underclass.

Yes, black Brits emigrated from the Commonwealth ‘freely’, but their free migration cannot be divorced from the neocolonial economics and deliberate underdevelopment in which the British state is implicated.