Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

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...