Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

by Akala

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.