by Akala
Oh, and to be fair to me and my other friends, the boys we were contemplating killing had pulled a gun on us in front of children, so we felt initially justified. Retrospectively I can see that I was not mentally well, and neither were most of my friends and peers, but how is that so obvious now despite none of us realising it properly back then?
I make these confessions not to appear tough or to add some ghetto drama to my narrative but simply because they are true and because they’re important. When I look at the countless young black boys – and others – in jail in the UK and throughout the world and say, ‘that could have been me’, I don’t mean it in the figurative ‘we are all black’ or ‘I was poor too once’ sense, I mean it literally could have been me. I made many of the same mistakes, I just never got caught, and that is complete luck and nothing else. When we look at the prison system we cannot fail to notice the backgrounds of the prisoners and the guards, overwhelmingly from poorer families, in contrast to the judges and lawyers; generally from much better off families. It all seems like one big racket.
For people who have never gone hungry, never been deliberately abused by the state or lived in ‘the ends’, the prospect of prison seems so distant that many may believe that only certain kinds of boys go there, only certain types of young men are prone to making these types of mistakes. Do yourself a favour – visit any primary school in any ‘hood’ in the UK, black or otherwise, watch the children’s playfulness, their sensitivity, their willingness to learn and then ask yourself in all seriousness how any of these little spirits will become killers within the next decade. In fact, you could equally visit any of the top private schools and ask how some of those children go on to become the political psychopaths who justify wars with all sorts of profound rhetoric, knowing full well the killing is for profit and for strategic advantage. Rich people crime good, poor people crime bad.
I am not saying that teenagers have no agency, are incapable of making good choices or that all young working-class boys choose to carry knives like I did – clearly the overwhelming majority do not. But I am saying that teenagers, including myself back then, can see clearly that the professed values of the system do not tally with its actions and outcomes. We recognise that willingness to do violence is an almost universally admired male trait from Wall Street to West Hollywood to Whitehall. Crime does pay and young people can see that as clearly in their ends as they can out there in the big wide world. The problem with our crime is just that the scale is too small.
Thus I had become both everything I was ‘supposed’ to be considering the odds – council house, single-parent family, drug-dealing uncles, Caribbean ‘immigrant’ – and everything I was not. I went to mathematics masterclasses and two years later I battered other boys with weapons. I spent time in the black book store and outside of Dalston station debating politics with the Nation of Islam and other black sects that could be found there, I hung out with the middle-class white girls from my school, and on the block in Tottenham and Harlesden where white people did not exist and certainly no one was middle class. I likely had my knife on me in all these locations. My Tottenham friend also played for West Ham with me; my Harlesden friend was a barely reformed roadman whose former street partners had either been killed or were now doing life in prison, and his dad was a genuine gangster. His gangster dad – one of my ‘uncles’ – was a breed of roadman Britain has never admitted to the existence of – the politicised, well-read, suit-wearing, organised black gangster. He could recite dissertations on the Russian Revolution, the troubles in Northern Ireland or Castro’s Cuba, yet he was also as hard as they come. A natural leader with charisma and charm by the bucket load, he is the kind of man that other men follow into war. His crew robbed banks, banned the sale of class A drugs from the estate they controlled, ran a security firm and built a boxing gym for the local children. They also had ties to the guerrilla struggles being waged in Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe in the 1970s. In another life, born into another society, he may well have become a history professor or a military general. How do such supposed contradictions occur?
In the case of my own personal contradictions, I think there are a number of reasons. My own fragile ego played a role; I wanted to be tough, I did not want to be a victim. It was expected – I was six foot by thirteen after all, I could rap and play football, so being a ‘pussy’ was never going to cut it. I was also shit-scared and the fear of getting killed or even being known as a ‘pussy’ was far greater than the fear of doing a little time for carrying a knife. My family was poorer than my friends that lived in the ‘real’ hood and I’d been through a much tougher childhood than some of them in many ways, but I did not live on ‘the block’ so to speak, so I felt a need to prove myself as an outsider in their world. I succeeded, to a degree at least.
Yet the failures and stupid decisions of my own ego do not explain why such conditions exist in the first place in one of the richest cities in the history of the species and in the centre of an empire that considers itself the very birthplace of modern democracy. Do all nations produce teenagers willing to kill each other over virtually nothing? Because I promise you that the vast majority of the stabbings in London are over almost nothing; a wrong look, a perceived disrespect, a silly comment, getting caught in a rival postcode. Describing these young boys as gangs is quite an exaggeration – even the previous Met commissioner observed that most of London’s knife crime has nothing to do with gangs.12 It is no justification of their – nor my – potentially murderous behaviours to say that these young men, young men like I was for a period of time, are desperately crying for help, despite the tough façade.
Gangsters, i.e. persons involved in actual organised crime, tend to be too busy making money to kill someone for looking at them the wrong way. When they kill, it tends to be via the gun or even at a certain level kidnap and . . . well, you can imagine. The point is that male children in our society are willing to kill each other over very little. We can blame the families alone; claim the cause is single parents and fail to ask why middle-class kids whose parents get divorced rarely end up stabbing people. We can repeat the cliché of ‘your environment does not define you’, but none of us who are lucky enough to have attained a very decent living would choose to go and raise our children in the Easterhouse in Glasgow or Croxteth in Liverpool so clearly we do not believe that bullshit cliché. The life expectancy difference between Britain’s poorest areas and its richest is almost a decade – your environment literally does define you, despite the few who may transcend it.
Which brings us on to the two most obvious things that connect the teenage killers of London and Glasgow to those of Liverpool and Durham. They are almost always poor and they are almost always men. What is it about masculinity in our society that makes young men from entirely different ethnic backgrounds and geographic regions often react to the challenges of being poor with such territorial displays of violence?
Accra in Ghana is obviously much poorer than London and the city faces many issues, yet teenagers stabbing each other over iPhones and postcodes is not one of them. I know for much of Britain it is easier to believe that there is a certain kind of boy that gets involved in all that sort of stuff, that someone like me, an open exponent of education, could not possibly fall prey to such a mentality – if only things were so simple. The sense of hopelessness and fear felt during those formative years is so intense it is hard to even remember the sensation properly. The pressure to accumulate, the understanding that poverty is shameful, the double shame of being black and poor, the constant refrain of materialism coming from every facet of popular culture, the empty fridge, the disconnected electricity, the insecurity of being a tenant with eviction always just a few missed paycheques away, the stress and anger of your parents that trickles down far better than any capital accumulation, the naked injustices that you now know to be reality and the growing belief that one is indeed all of the negative stereotypes that the people with the power say you are.
These are the factors that aided my own ego in turning me from a wannabe Max Planck to a wannabe gangster. I ultimately take responsibility for my own actions, but there is still a story there and being treated like and presumed to be a criminal for years before I ever contemplated actually carrying a knife is part of that story. If I had listened to my mum and gone to private school at seven it’s unlikely that I would have made the same friend groups, been exposed to the same things and have gone through any of the above, yet at my core I would have been exactly the same person, just shaped by a different set of experiences and conditions. Some on the right would like to lambast a person like me as the much-maligned ‘social justice warrior’ or ‘virtue signaller’, but I am actually quite the opposite. It’s precisely because I have been exposed to my own potential for murder, because I know that I am not inherently a good person and that we all change to one degree or another according to our circumstances, that I have such an interest in trying to help create conditions that encourage the best in people. I have been, or at least felt, desperate, and desperate people do desperate things. I’d rather live in a city and a society and a world where less desperation exists: this is as much common-sense self-preservation to me as it is ‘altruism’.
Yet even with all of these pressures I can tell you that the vast majority of my peers did not succumb to the pressures like I did. The other boys I played football with, often from very similar backgrounds, did not understand why me and my friend wanted to be rude boys when we were potentially on the way to becoming Premier League players. I can tell you that if most youts in the hood could genuinely see a legal path to just a decent middle-class living without having to be spoken to and treated like a total idiot for thirty years, 95 per cent would take it. I have no survey to back this up other than hundreds of conversations, years of educational workshops in prisons and just plain common sense. Just recently a friend of mine, himself a former drug dealer turned fully legitimate businessman, went on to one of the most notorious council estates in London and offered a young rapper that lived there a record deal. This young boy is knee deep in street life, yet he took the deal, which came with the express condition that he leaves the street life, in a heartbeat. This is a rapper who in his songs boasts about selling drugs and murder ‘because that’s what sells’ – young black boys understand what the market demands of them quite well – yet even he, like other ‘gangster rappers’ before him, would much prefer to tell stories over music than kill anybody or sell drugs.
The plain reality is that even in a developed, wealthy country like Britain very few people want to spend their lives working for someone else with very little prospect of a serious improvement in their lives or those of their children, so people have to be conditioned to accept this reality. Many of the young kids that get expelled from school and hit the streets refuse to accept this conditioning. There is intelligence in rebellion, they are just channelling it in the wrong direction. My friend and I – the other footballer turned rude boy – were both natural rebels, I just found my path to a more productive rebellion earlier than he did. After he stopped playing football it took him ten more years of the harsh lessons of street life to realise and accept that he was probably better off just getting a job after all.
Though I am individually much better off than my parents ever were, that extreme violence remains only a few wrong turns, misunderstandings or family feuds away. For example, my little brother is essentially middle class, he has never missed a meal and he has been all over the world at sixteen, yet the first victim of a stabbing he knew was his other older brother. So even in his middle class-ness he is not too far removed from the reality of the hood. His brother (my stepbrother) was stabbed in the neck on his way home from school one day. That side of the family lives in Tottenham where the riots of 1985 and 2011 occurred.
In reaction to these various formative experiences, a noticeable demographic shift can often be seen in boys’ friend groups around the age of thirteen in areas like Camden. Throughout primary school, children seem to pick friends across the economic and racial spectrum and friend groups tend to broadly reflect the diversity of the area. This was my own experience, despite some very strange things occurring as a result of this ‘racial mixing’. One example will suffice; one of my white friends moved away from the area and thus left our school. I kept in touch with him and went to stay at his new house in the sticks. We played football in the mud, rode our bikes, roller-skated and all of that good stuff. When we sat down to have dinner that evening his older brother asked his parents for permission to tell ‘Paki jokes’ at the dinner table, saying, ‘Kingslee doesn’t mind.’ I was about nine, he was fourteen, his parents were at the table and I assumed they would stop him so I smiled uncomfortably. His parents did not stop him, they in fact encouraged him and he sat at dinner gleefully making fun of smelly Pakis and starving Ethiopians – the famine there was still in recent memory – while his parents and my friend laughed along. Needless to say, it was the last time I ever went to stay with him.
So I don’t want to give you a romantic picture, it’s not that children are not conscious of race during their primary school years, far from it – it just seems they are more willing to look past the conditioning and the difficulties when making friends than they will be as teenagers. I have observed this process of ethnic socialisation many times with my younger brother, my nephew and in countless schools that I have visited.
For me personally, because I was among the top academic performers my chosen friends in primary school – as opposed to extended family ‘cousins’ – tended to be the rich white kids. The other children who received free school meals were not generally in the top working groups of course – class differentiation in academia starts early. So by virtue of usually being in the working groups with the ‘rich white kids’ – apart from when I was placed into special needs – they became my friends. They were probably not millionaires, but with two professional parents, two cars, skiing trips during the holidays and a household fizzy-drinks-making machine, they seemed incredibly rich to me at the time. I went to France with one of my rich white friends and his family one summer and I stayed at some of their houses, though I don’t ever remember them staying at mine – looking back now I think I was probably embarrassed that we were poor, because I did invite my poorer mates to stay.
The racially mixed friend group tends to stay intact throughout primary school, but then a mystical process occurs during the first two years of secondary. No one says anything openly but you all know what is happening: your lives are becoming too different and unlike before you are no longer willing to look past these differences. You can no longer relate to one another across lines of race. We are destined for different things and we all know it, so by year nine your friend group becomes exclusively black, with one white boy that loves hip hop and probably has a black girlfriend. I have seen this occur as surely with my sixteen-year-old brother as it did with me. I have also been to enough schools in the area and spoken to enough parents and peers to know this is a common pattern. We all learn our race and our place. Thus I gravitated first to Hackney, where my earliest teenage best friend lived, then to Tottenham for the latter years of secondary and then finally in my later teens to Harlesden. I became a kind of ghetto nomad and because I was from Camden, an area that everyone knew had poor pockets but was not considered a rival hood in the way that any of the above mentioned areas would be, I could get away with it. A Tottenham boy rolling in Hackney or vice versa was in serious danger, as the two areas were in direct beef, and a boy from either of those areas would probably have been greeted with much more suspicion than I was in NW10. My Tottenham friend remained mildly suspicious of my Harlesden friend and his Brixton-based brother even after years of rolling together, and it was certainly at least partly because of that ‘rival hoods’ suspicion.
How much of this self-segregation is caused by the seemingly natural human appetite for tribalism, and how much is due to the social p
rocesses that shape a shared identity? I would argue that through school and the different treatment and assumptions of teachers, encounters with police, and portrayals of ethnic groups in print and TV, by thirteen we have learned the meanings and implications of our racial identities quite well and have bonded over common experiences and perceptions. For black children, encounters with the state and its agents, outright interpersonal racism and much else teach you a sense of shared blackness and by thirteen this black identity is usually solidified. Ironically, this sense of shared blackness creates two completely contradictory behaviours. First it creates a fierce loyalty to your ‘man dem’, a sense that you are taking on the world together, and so you become willing to die to defend your friends – your ‘niggas’ – as if you were at war. In fact, if your friend was not willing to risk his life for you you’d very much doubt his friendship. Yet this very shared blackening also begets fear and thus aggressiveness towards other young black boys who are not familiar. You internalise both a sense of black unity and common struggle and at the same time a sense of self-hatred, a belief that other young black boys are a danger to you, and both possibilities wrestle one another constantly. When you see another group of unfamiliar young black men, everybody is tense, you don’t know yet whether you will give them the black nod or the ‘screw face’ – literally where you screw up your face to try and look scary – whether you’ll holla ‘wa gwan blood’ or ‘where you from cuz?’. The difference could be life changing for all of you.