Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - The Sunday Times Bestseller

by Akala

  It was her black mentors that had told her that I would be received and dealt with in this society as a black boy. My ‘light skin’ would not save me, this was not Jamaica or South Africa, I was not ‘high coloured’ here (colourism notwithstanding) but a black boy born of a white womb. Like so much else within racial theory, a biological fiction but a social and political reality. Out of principle and out of a recognition of this reality, I chose to identify with the black side of my heritage, not because black people are paragons of moral excellence who can do no wrong but simply because white supremacy is an unjust, idiotic and ultimately genocidal idea and because blackness can accommodate difference far more easily than whiteness can – because their historical and ontological origins are entirely different. I would be taught all about whiteness, I would know well its gravity and its weight, I would be taught to worship slave traders and imperialists and lionise philosophers and politicians who believed me to be less than human. This would all be mainstream, but if I wanted to learn anything about my other heritage or indeed the anti-establishment traditions of ‘white’ people, first my mum, and then I, would have to seek it out.

  My mum had me and my siblings enrolled in the local pan-African Saturday school. At first the school was not sure, as we would be the first ‘mixed’ kids to attend. Other black parents fought for us and told the school that it was no use complaining about ‘confused mixed-race youts’ (a cliché in the black community, the tragic mulatto) if, on the occasion that a white woman did actually want her children to learn about their black heritage, the community refused to help. I’m pretty sure that had it been my dad trying to enrol me there would have been no issue. That said, I don’t want to make it more serious than it was; we joined the school without much fuss in the end and had an incredible time there. A few other ‘mixed’ children even joined the school after us. The school was located in a few Portakabins in the south of Camden; despite the black community’s best efforts to provide extracurricular education for their children and to keep them out of trouble, none of these institutions ever seemed to be close to as well funded as Britain’s prisons were. Our school was called the Winnie Mandela School, out of solidarity with the struggle then being waged against apartheid in South Africa and to display the pan-African political orientation of our community. My mum still has a copy of an old black and white newsletter from the school with my picture on it and a quote from me saying ‘we do better work here’ – I was roughly seven at the time, yet I perceived the difference between my community school and mainstream schooling quite clearly.

  Now race had made itself known to us, my mum did not hold back – she had me and my siblings watch films about the civil rights struggle, slavery and apartheid. She gave me a box of tapes of Malcolm X speeches for my tenth birthday and we watched Muhammad Ali documentaries together. In short, my mum did everything she could to make sure I ‘knew myself’ and to make sure that I would not become one of ‘those’ mixed-race kids, and in this endeavour she found ample support from the Black British pan-Africanist community.

  Yet for all my mother’s radical education and her long-standing political activity she was still white, she could never really ‘get it’. She could never reach her black son in the way that other black people – even black women – could, and we both became painfully aware of this and mad at the world and perhaps each other as a result. As I grew into a young man, our conversations became tinged with racial difference and I became embarrassed about my mother’s whiteness – no longer wanting her to accompany me to the very black spaces she had played such a role in introducing me to. Part of this was just the normal teenage desire to not want to hang out with your mum, but there was certainly an added racial something too.

  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.

  I saw the pain and uncertainty on my mother’s face as I became a teenager and then a black man, her fears for and of my body; the six-foot-tall body, the scowling brown face that had once been a naive, smiling, sweet little five-year-old who didn’t yet know that his mother was not a ‘sister’, but the oppressor. I saw my mum wish for the return of that boy that she had lost in the eyes of the teenager staring uncompromisingly and unfairly back at her, accusing her skin of all the crimes that the ‘white race’ had committed. When my mum tried to discipline me, it now felt like it was my white mum trying to discipline me as a ‘black youth’, like the bigoted teachers and the racist police and what felt like the whole world. I knew she had my back and she loved me and so it was different, but it didn’t always feel different.

  But wasn’t it partly my mum’s fault that I came to be this way? Wasn’t she the one that gave me Malcolm X tapes for my birthday? Was Malcolm’s assessment not a fair representation of his life and times in Jim Crow America? Wasn’t it the case that my mum was raising black children in Britain at a time when black children could burn to death in their homes and the families of the dead would receive hate mail rather than sympathy, or grandmothers could be paralysed by police bullets and black people could still emerge from those tragedies as the criminals in public discourse?

  Did my mum not enrol me in pan-African Saturday school and take me to the Hackney Empire to watch Black Heroes in the Hall of Fame? Wasn’t it inevitable that this resentment would come? Weren’t the facts of white people’s crimes against Africa and its descendants more than enough cause for hate? A great many white people hated us and they had no historical reasons or motivations for doing so, just the blind prejudice against our skin. We are only human, why should we not hate in return?

  In reality, black rage has never really morphed into the hatred of white people that white paranoia would like to believe it has, not even in the former slave states of the Americas. Not because black humans have some genetically inbuilt inability to be bigots – see for example the waves of xenophobic attacks against African migrants in South Africa in recent years – but because the brutality of the oppressor determined to hang on to privilege and power is always greater in any context than the resentment produced by resistance to oppression. Thus, my mother was largely embraced by the ‘black community’ and it was from them that she learned everything that she would need to arm her black children with for them to be able to survive and even thrive in this society. Though I’m sure some may have found her to be ‘that annoying white lady’, this was rarely if ever made clear in overt acts of prejudice.

  Race had intervened in our relationship and for a long time it threatened to combine with the stresses of bein
g poor and the more mundane familial resentments to wreck it, but we survived and even after many, many struggles, flourished. If racial difference opened a chasm between us that we could not bridge, it has also served as a common test of strength. To avoid confusion, my mum was far from perfect – she’s human after all, and our childhood was in many other respects extremely difficult. My mum battled with mental health issues and our childhood home, despite all of its politics and pan-Africanism was also one of stress and anger compounded by poverty. My parents were damaged teenagers that had found one another and split up before I was born, and to say my father was not a great boyfriend to my mother would be somewhat of an understatement. My mother and stepfather’s breakup was truly traumatic and left an emotional wreckage that it felt like we never recovered from as a family. During my mother’s battle with cancer my sister and I, aged twelve and ten, had to assume all of the responsibilities of the household – cooking, cleaning, shopping and nursing our mother through chemotherapy, with very little external help. When she recovered my mum’s attempts to re-assert parental control over her now essentially adult children played no small part in her clashes with us, particularly with my older sister to the point where she had to move out and live with our grandmother and then in a hostel. I would not want to give the reader a five-year-old’s picture much less one of a white saviour. I love my mum deeply but she is flawed, just like me and just like all humanity, but it is her efforts in spite of these flaws and in spite of a truly horrendous childhood of her own that make her all the more remarkable. Seeing the personal transformation she has undergone in later life has been truly inspiring.

  By the time I realised my mum was white she already knew only too well. She had already been called ‘nigger lover’ enough times herself, she had watched my dad fight the National Front and assorted bigots almost daily, and her own father had disowned her for ‘getting with a nigger’. When she was pregnant with my older brother, people told her the baby would be a grey monstrosity and so she should get rid of it. This may sound stupid today but she was terrified; she had not seen any mixed children before and she genuinely didn’t know what to think. People my mum had grown up with walked straight past her in the street when she pushed our prams; others refused to believe we were ‘really’ her children. My mum knew very well how deeply embedded anti-blackness was in the culture of the time.

  All of my friends learned the meanings of race fairly early, and as far as introductions to racialisation go, my story is not exceptional or even particularly brutal by comparison. One of my best friends, a Sheffield-born, Jamaican-origin classical composer and entrepreneur, was introduced to the meaning of whiteness when his nursery teacher removed him and the only other two non-white children from the class and made them stand in the corner when it was time to give out the daily milk – the teacher was terrified that the undeserving ‘immigrants’ would benefit and was keen to preserve the unearned advantages that should properly accrue to white children, all things being well. She did this every day for a week until my friend lost his temper with the teacher in question and told her ‘You want me to be down there’ – he pointed to the ground – ‘but I am going to be up there’ – he pointed to the sky. His CV now stands as testimony to his five-year-old self’s proclamation.

  My own father was assaulted and called nigger by the police and by the people supposed to educate him more times than he would care to remember. If you want to hear some real childhood horror stories talk to black people brought up in the care system, as my father was for a portion of his childhood. It does not matter how many of these stories black and Asian people in the UK can muster, how consistently we tell the world these experiences are fairly ‘normal’, the reaction of white society to such revelations is more often than not one of (perhaps feigned?) shock. How could noble England sully itself with widespread racist abuse of mere children? Surely this grade of behaviour is for less green pastures?

  In reality, of course, both my Scottish/English and Jamaican families had their own internal histories of abuse, and many of my parents’ experiences would be mirrored in ‘white’ communities right across the country, albeit without the added racial baggage. Remember the tens of thousands of white parents – often stigmatised single mothers – from poor areas of the UK who were coerced by the state into sending their children to Australia right up until the 1970s? These children were frequently victims of sexual abuse, hard labour and even flogging. We would call this child trafficking if it had been done by a non-Western state.1 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised for the programme in 2010, as did Australian PM Kevin Rudd the year before, though naturally the widespread abuse of black children in the care system, prisons, police cells and mental asylums of this country occurring at the exact same time will have to wait for some more years before it is officially recognised and atoned for, if ever.

  By affirming my blackness my mum and, more importantly, the black community around us were not only giving me strength and a sense of self, they were preparing me for combat, for the lived experience of blackness in the UK that they knew would find me as surely as night follows day. The police harassment, the confrontations with teachers, the violence and frustration of my soon-to-be teenage peer group, the perils of avoiding the prison that I was likely destined for. That was all to come. My real awakening to race began that random day in 1988, when I realised, or rather learned, that my mum was white. Tellingly, I never had a similar moment with my father or any of the men in my life where I realised suddenly that they were black and I was not, which speaks to the way in which whiteness and blackness have been defined and understood in Britain.

  However, it was not until over a decade later that I started to really think about what whiteness actually means. Like most people, I had just accepted that white people were actually white without much further thought. Only in my late teens did I start questioning what whiteness is, and how Celts, Saxons, Corsicans and Nordic people had come to be defined as ‘white’. Had people of European heritage always seen themselves as white and doled out political and economic privileges upon that basis? Had racism always existed? Was Europe always economically and militarily the most dominant region of the world? Had slavery always been an institution run by white people that black people were the exclusive victims of? So what is whiteness?

  ‘Whiteness is a metaphor for power,’ James Baldwin tells us. ‘Money whitens,’ say the Brazilians. South Africans can be found calling rich black people ‘white man’ and they mean this as a compliment, as in ‘now you have money, you are so successful that you are an honorary white man’ – the very definition of prosperity, even in an African country. Or, as Frantz Fanon tells us, ‘you are rich because you are white, because you are white you are rich.’

  It is often assumed that race can only be understood through the eyes of people of colour; however, this idea assumes white people to be the normal ‘raceless’ group, which of course could not be further from the truth. Led by seminal African-American thinkers such as W. E. B. Dubois and James Baldwin, scholars, thinkers and anti-racist activists have gradually turned the anthropological lens the other way. Even discussing whiteness can be uncomfortable for people who have taken their white identity for granted, who think of themselves as unaffected by all that race stuff, but there is now a good body of work on the history of ‘whiteness’ that we ignore at our peril.

  So, if whiteness really is a metaphor for power, how is that power actually exercised? Theodore W. Allen’s meticulous study The Invention of the White Race, which took over a decade to produce, observes that in the first two generations of census data in the Virginia colonies there were no humans defined as white; the people we now think of as white were at that point still predominantly defined by other factors, such as the region of Europe from which they came. He argues that the ancestors of European Americans started to be defined as ‘white’ in response to labour solidarity between African- and European-American bondservants, especially after Bac
on’s Rebellion of 1696, a multi-racial rebellion against British governor William Berkely. European ruling elites began doling out privileges, like the right to bear arms or certain privileged positions within the plantation economy, based on skin colour, or rather on ‘whiteness’ such as the Virginia slave codes of 1705 that made it illegal to whip a white Christian slave naked or for a black person to employ or own a white person. The act also fined white women for having bastard children with negroes or mulattoes, made racial intermarriage punishable by imprisonment and made it legal for a master to kill his slave.2 As indentured servitude turned to chattel slavery and slavery came to be reserved strictly for people of African heritage, this white privilege became all the more important, as it literally became the difference between still being a human being and becoming a piece of property.

  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

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  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.4