by Akala
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?
So yes, in one sense we have come a long way since the 1980s. The much maligned ‘political correctness’ has made it far more difficult for bigots to just say as they please without consequence; there are fewer bullets in the post; we have even gotten used to an England football team that is consistently half full of black players and we even have a few black politicians and a Muslim mayor of London.
Yet despite these enormous changes, the essential problems are still with us and we look increasingly set for a re-run of the 1980s in twenty-first century clothes. The national riots of 2011, sparked by the police’s failure to properly engage with the family and community of Mark Duggan after having shot him dead, bear obvious echoes of the past. The media’s decision, in the crucial first forty-eight hours after the incident, to unquestioningly parrot the police’s version of events that Mark had shot at them first showed that the workings of state power and mainstream media have altered very little in the intervening decades.
The horrendous Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, which claimed at least seventy-one lives and was undeniably caused by systematic contempt for the lives of poor people, was perhaps the ultimate and most gruesome tribute to austerity yet seen. The state’s reaction, or total lack of reaction, in the days after the fire versus the overwhelming outpouring of public support was one of the strangest things I have ever seen with my own eyes. The slew of racist abuse and virulent hate that can be found in any thread online discussing the Grenfell victims – who happened to be disproportionately Muslims – and the conceptual linking of the dead families to the terrorists at London Bridge and Manchester in the previous months speaks loudly of how ‘Muslim’ has become a racialised, culturally essentialist category in twenty-first century Britain. At the time of writing, seven months after the fire, most of the surviving families still have not been re-housed, even after the collection of millions of pounds of donations in their names and despite the fact that the local council is known to have £300 million in cash reserves. I lived on the same street as Grenfell for five years, but my building had sprinklers, working fire alarms, extinguishers and a maintenance man who came to check in every few months. Just a little bit of money can be the difference between life and death, even on the same London street.
There are other signs that the political ‘logic’ of the 1980s is returning. 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. 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.11 If tougher sentences alone worked to reduce crime, the USA would surely be crime free by now? With 10 per cent of Britain’s prisons now privatised and many more using prison labour, such seemingly illogical right-wing virtue signalling from the head of London’s police starts to look like ‘vested interests’ and to signal tumultuous times ahead. We all know that black Brits – already seven times more likely to be imprisoned than their white counterparts, and already more harshly treated at every level of the justice system – are going to make up a disproportionate amount of any further increase in Britain’s incarceration state.12 Poor people of all ethnicities will make up most of the rest.
Other recent globe-shifting events in the Anglo-American empire – the recorded execution of Black Americans by the police, including women, children and the elderly; the election as US President of a man openly endorsed by Nazis, the KKK and white supremacist groups and his failure to condemn them even after they murder people; the same man’s condemnation of the peaceful protest of Colin Kaepernick and other athletes; the ethnocentric and racist strains to the Brexit campaign rhetoric; the unjust deportations of Commonwealth migrants; the handling of and reporting on ‘the migrant crisis’ (without reference to Nato’s destruction of Libya, of course) – make it pretty clear to any honest observer that the idea and practice of racism is not going anywhere anytime soon.
I was born into these currents, I did not create or invent them and I make no claims to objectivity. I find the whole idea that we can transcend our experiences; and take a totally unbiased look at the world to be totally ridiculous, yet that’s what many historians and academics claim to do. We are all influenced by what we are exposed to and experience; the best we can hope for is to try and be as fair as possible from within the bias inherent in existence. The personal is the political, and this book is an attempt to give a personal face to the forces that you will often hear me speak of, if you hear me speak at all. This book is about how the British class system interacts with and feeds off a long and complex relationship with empire and white supremacy, and how those social forces can manifest in and shape the life experience of a random child, born to a father racialised as black and a mother racialised as white, in early 1980s England.
Interlude: A Guide to Denial
. . . in a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, for whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races – those who, unlike us, are raced – appear.
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract
Before we go any further, I think I need to address the fact that discussions about race in the UK are rather fascinating and often coloured by what I am going to call ‘A Very British Brand of Racism’; polite denial, quiet amusement or outright outrage that one could dare to suggest that the mother of liberty is not a total meritocracy after all, that we too, like so many ‘less civilised’ nations around the world, have a caste system. People who can see so clearly the very real injustices in other nation states, or even perceive how positive aspects of British history have shaped the country’s current reality, somehow become unable to think when the lens of examination is turned inwards. If you have ever attempted to discuss a social ill with a person who is intensely invested in the order of things as they are, you will have no doubt been met by some rather odd and profoundly anti-intellectual responses. 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. Here are a few of the likely ‘counter arguments’ that will be used in an attempt to silence you.
‘If we just stop talking about it [racism] it will go away.’
Well, Morgan Freeman agrees with you,1 you’ll be happy to know, so you have your Blackman validation for ignorance, should you need to deploy it on any ‘race-obsessed’ idiot. But this idea that racism will vanish if we just refuse to discuss it is rather fascinating. Imagine for a moment if scientists and engineers thought in this way. Imagine they said ‘Right, the best way to solve a problem is not to discuss, confront or challenge it, but to leave it alone completely and hope it just works itself out.’ There would have been no political, moral, technological, medical, material or mental progress ever in the fragile history of our species if people hadn’t decided to confront difficult problems with dialogue and then action.
‘Stop playing the race card.’
Racism is apparently a card to be played; much like the joker, it’s a very versatile card that can be used in any situation that might require it. Only non-white people ever play this card to excuse their
own personal failings – even those of us that are materially successful. Humans racialised as white cannot play the race card – just like they cannot be terrorists – so European national empires colonising almost the entire globe and enacting centuries of unapologetically and openly racist legislation and practices, churning out an impressively large body of proudly racist justificatory literature and cinema and much else has had no impact on shaping human history, it has really just been black and brown people playing cards.
‘Why can’t you just get over it? It’s all in the past.’
These two statements often run together. Apparently, history is not there to be learned from, rather it’s a large boulder to be gotten over. It’s fascinating, because in the hundreds of workshops I’ve taught on Shakespeare no one has ever told me to get over his writing because it’s, you know, from the, erm, past. I’m still waiting for people to get over Plato, or Da Vinci or Bertrand Russell, or indeed the entirety of recorded history, but it seems they just won’t. It is especially odd in a nation where much of the population is apparently proud of Britain’s empire that critics of one of its most obvious legacies should be asked to get over it, the very same thing from the past that they are proud of. But anyway, let’s imagine for a second that humanity did indeed ‘get over’ – which in this case means forget – the past. Well, we’d have to learn to walk and talk and cook and hunt and plant crops all over again, we’d have to undo all of human invention and start from . . . when? 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.
‘You have a chip on your shoulder.’
This is one of my personal favourites. No one can quite define what a chip on a shoulder actually is, but we know that young black boys in particular seem to suffer from them. Even when these young black boys grow into materially successful men, you can watch the accompanying chip grow ever larger should they discuss any political issues of racial injustice. Examples of people with enormous shoulder chips include Muhammad Ali and Colin Kaepernick, men who gave up millions of dollars to protest injustice. In this materialistic world, even political opponents of Ali and Kaepernick should, in theory at least, admire their willingness to forgo personal comfort and even risk their lives for something so much bigger than themselves. They could easily have kept quiet and just continued being widely admired multi-millionaires. But hey, their political opponents were pro bombing ‘gooks’ thousands of miles away in one case, and are determined to ignore police brutality, even when police are caught on camera executing twelve-year-olds playing in the park, in the other. So not much hope for logic from them.
‘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. When people say this to me I presume they mean Jamaica, as Scotland is still part of Britain – for now. Bless them. Their view of the so-called third world is so blinkered that they think they’re insulting me when they say this. Yes, Jamaica has many problems with violence and poverty but, as elsewhere on the globe, the problems of Jamaican society predominantly affect those at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
As a member of the diaspora with some money I would be and am (I go back regularly) largely shielded from the worst aspects of Jamaican society – there I am one of the privileged, even in a ‘racial’ sense, as being light-skinned or ‘mixed’ carries with it the assumption of being from the upper-class in the Caribbean. None of my middle-class Jamaican friends experienced anything like the levels of violence and police harassment that I experienced growing up ‘poor’ in the UK. Many of them went to private school, never missed a meal and had parents who drove flash cars – unlike mine. Don’t get me wrong, there are obviously opportunities, privileges and infrastructure that British citizens have access to that much of the world does not, but it is not as simple as many think. I can promise you that wealthy and middle-class Jamaicans – though few in number – have better material conditions of life than the poorest people in the UK. They are not living off food banks and, well, it’s impossible to freeze to death in winter. Aside from that, the country is one of the most naturally beautiful places on the planet, with a strong and proud culture and community. There were many reasons our grandparents chose to migrate, but hatred of their home countries was not one of them.
‘Well why don’t you just go back to Africa then?’ (Even if you are from the Caribbean)
Similar to the last one, those that say this believe in the idea of racial credit; they believe that all black people, regardless of class, nationality, political inclination or personal achievements, share racial credit for the shortcomings of the African continent’s post-independence leadership. Conversely, they also believe that all those racialised as white, no matter how mediocre they may be in terms of personal intelligence and actual achievements, share some racial credit for the works of Russell, Da Vinci and Tesla, and for the prosperity of the modern ‘West’ – even if they have personally played no role in creating this prosperity. Most interestingly, millions of European-Americans whose great-grandparents migrated to America only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Germany, Italy, Russia and Ireland say this same thing to black Americans, whose ancestors arrived in the USA much earlier – not to mention the indigenous.
Again though, this is not an insult. I have travelled across much of the continent and I may well decide to move back to where my father’s parents came from or to that country called ‘Africa’, but it will be because that’s what I choose, not because some fools think that’s where I belong. However unfair this statement is though, there is a degree of realism to it in that as long as African and Caribbean states are politically, economically and militarily weak, lingering ideas of black inferiority will still have an aura of credence, even for many liberals. Bigots here are helpfully suggesting to black people that the unfinished project of political pan-Africanism still awaits us.
‘You should be grateful that you have free speech.’
There are a few interesting things implied by this one. First, the idea that ‘free speech’ is uniquely British – never mind that Britain shares with so many other states a long history of suppressing criticism at home and in its colonies – and therefore something I would not have if I lived elsewhere. Second, the implication that the degree to which Britain has free speech was a gift from enlightened leaders rather than a hard-won right. The Chartists might disagree, but much of Britain seems depressingly committed to forgetting its own radical history. Third, the idea that one should be grateful that your government does not kill, torture or imprison you for your criticisms is an extremely low bar of expectation coming from people who are apparently proud of their nation’s democratic credentials.
Intriguingly, Jamaica regularly ranks in the top ten for press freedom globally, ranking eighth in 2017 for example, sandwiched in between Switzerland and Belgium, while Britain has slipped twelve places to fortieth in global rankings over the past five years. As you can see, Britain has been quite substantially behind its former colony in this respect for quite some time, despite Jamaica facing much graver political challenges. Furthermore, almost all of Jamaica’s most prominent music artists have spent a good portion of their careers cussing the Jamaican government and, while general police brutality is a serious problem in Jamaica, the kidnap and torture of critical artists by the state have been virtually unheard of over the past three decades. If artistic free speech and press freedoms exist in the much more politically challenging terrains of Jamaica, Trinidad or Ghana (all three of these former colonies ranked above Britain last year) what is it exactly that we should be so grateful for here in
the sixth richest nation on the planet?
‘You just hate Britain, you are anti-British.’
This one is related to many of the others in that it implies that those of us that critique Britain’s historic and current injustices are not real citizens of the country. Again, if we compare this with how critical artists are treated and viewed in some other nations the idiocy of the ‘anti’ label becomes apparent. For example, Fela Kuti is unquestionably Nigeria’s most legendary musical icon, yet he was a constant opponent of the Nigerian government and critic of the failings of Nigerian society, to the point that the army killed his mother, yet still they could not shut him up. His sons continue that critical tradition today. Do Nigerians in general consider him anti-Nigerian and a hater of the country because of this? No, in fact quite the reverse – he is the country’s greatest musical hero. The situation is much the same with Jamaica’s Reggae musicians, who have had to struggle against poverty, endemic class snobbery and the Jamaican state’s persecution of their predominant religion – Rasta – to become some of the most important and respected voices in Jamaican society and indeed the entire world of music.