by Akala
Class has to be kept in mind too, as these segregated friend groups emerge even for black children who are essentially middle class, whose parents are professionals, who go to church on Sundays and never miss a meal. Even those black children, who will never carry a knife and profess their loyalty to their niggas, make social choices about friends very early. I have visited enough African-Caribbean societies at universities to observe the outcome of this pattern, even in the most educated section of the black population. Similarly, I’m sure the gang mentality that forms in poorer non-black communities bears much emotional resemblance to what I am describing here.
By thirteen I was no longer that close to any of my white friends. I had the occasional one who I played football with but none of them could possibly ever be my ‘brothers’ in the way that my black friends were.
As you already know, the ‘rich’ children lived walking distance from me, as did the kid who was selling drugs for his dad at age eleven and the boy whose mum burned his head with an iron when he was a baby because he was crying too loudly – or at least that’s what we were all told about the massive hand-sized burn scar on his head, and knowing his family it seemed entirely plausible, sadly. That boy got expelled on the first day of secondary school, went to prison and was killed by another boy we grew up with before the age of twenty-one. The boy who sold drugs for his own father is now in prison for many years, and not for the first time.
The ‘rich’ kids from my area, my top-group primary school friends, are all doing fine, of course. I barely need to check in with them to know that, but on the odd occasion that I do bump into one of them and ask what they are up to I usually find out that they are now barristers or film directors or working for the UN or something like that. None of them are in prison and none to my knowledge have yet been murdered. There have been a few working-class success stories of course, I am one of them after all, but these are very much the exception to the rule, even in liberal multicultural Camden.
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Then everything changes again.
Between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five I was constantly aware that my fragile masculinity could be challenged at any moment, that a failure to respond correctly could result in my death, or irredeemable embarrassment. I was aware that my A* school grades would not save me from PC Plod digging through my pockets, aware that the school system and the larger society did not really want to see me prosper despite all their liberal claims to the contrary, and I shit myself. I shit myself and I learned to screw up my face instead of smiling, I learned to shout instead of crying and I learned to fight my peers even when I really wanted to hug them.
Then an immense sense of relief descended on me sometime around the age of twenty-five. I know this was not just my experience, I have spoken to so many others who have confirmed that this epiphany is common and murder stats making between eighteen and twenty-two would also seem to bear it out as a real thing. There is no ceremony, nobody congratulates you, you just wake up one day and it’s over. You take a deep breath and you just know you have made it through and things will never quite go back to the way they were before. In a similar way to your self-segregating friend group years earlier, nobody ever says anything, though it is understood by all. The youngers can somehow sense that you are an older now and thus there is no real need to feel threatened by you; no one asks you what you are looking at or what ends you are from any more.
Internally something changes too. You no longer care anyway, there is a shift and things that would have enraged you a year before no longer even register. I was on a train about five years ago and a young boy of maybe eighteen was ‘screw-facing’ me. Perhaps because I was wearing a tracksuit he thought I was his age, maybe he recognised me and was trying to prove a point, who knows? It had been so long since I had experienced this kind of thing that it took me a moment to realise why the young man was so upset and why he was holding his face in such an uncomfortable position. Once it registered that he was trying to screw-face me I couldn’t help it, I just burst out laughing. I saw it dawn on the lad that I was obviously ten years his senior and in no way willing to entertain this foolishness any more, and he looked away, quite visibly embarrassed. Had this been a decade earlier one of us could easily have ended up in hospital.
But this science does not work for everyone, some ‘olders’ never grow out of the hype, some are never lucky enough to be exposed to new and life-changing experiences as I was and some are still so unhappy with themselves that murdering someone over trivialities remains an everyday possibility. Yet for the most part, unless you are involved with actual organised crime, the ‘gang’ bullshit and ends beef will subside past the age of twenty-five; wisdom and the hard lessons of life combine to grow you up. You realise the injustice of it all, you see that class and race conditioned your whole generation and that social mobility is largely a myth. You can see how life panned out for everyone who was expelled or dropped out of school at thirteen and it was never ever well.
Yes, you have survived, but it is bittersweet; some of the best minds of your generation have been wasted, the children that grew up with the safety blankets of money and whiteness have gotten twice as far working half as hard, they are still having the same cocaine parties that they were having twenty years ago and they still have not ever been searched by the police once, let alone had their parties raided or been choke-slammed to death. They have just bought a flat in Brixton; they go to one of the new white bars there. They pop up to the new reggae club in Ladbroke Grove, the one that serves Caribbean food but also gets nervous when more than two black guys turn up. They have no idea that the building used to be a multi-storey crack house. By twenty-five, even if you don’t read Stuart Hall, if you grew up both black and poor in the UK you will have come to know more about the inner workings of British society, about the dynamics of race, class and empire than a slew of PhDs ever will. In fact, PhDs and scriptwriters will come to the hood to drain your wisdom for their ethnographic research, as will journalists next time there is a riot. They will have careers, you will get a job. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Once this awakening comes you will even find yourself repeating the same lectures to teenagers that old men used on you, hoping they will not make your mistakes. You will give them all of your worst horror stories; the dead peers, the friends and cousins that will not get out of prison until they are in their fifties and sixties, the football and music careers cut short, my man’s little sister that got killed over her brother’s beef. You insist that things are much better for this generation than they were back in your day, then you remember the polite smile that you used to do when someone you respected gave you this same lecture. You know it’s little use. You continue anyway but you know that the youngers will make their own mistakes by the rules of their own world, just as you did. You tell yourself that if you can just turn one head, get one person to think differently, that all the hot air will be worth it and maybe that’s true. You repeat the lecture again tomorrow.
Then there is me, my doctor friend and my composer and lawyer mates; the exceptions that prove the rule. Trapped between two worlds, we can afford to still live in Brixton or Ladbroke Grove while we watch our communities be removed from under us, but it’s not as if we have enough money to buy the block. We try to not be gentrifiers by fighting for the community in our various ways, yet we can afford to buy extortionate coffee and we quite like a nice wine and, well, quinoa is good for you. We’ve even tried hot yoga a couple of times – oh no, we are officially internationally middle class.
We are too smart and now too successful to be ignored entirely, but we are still outsiders in essence. My friends that work in the city or in hospitals refrain from having political discussions with their white colleagues or bosses, especially about race. When newspapers claimed Mark Duggan shot at the police my now-middle-class black friends knew this was nonsense immediately; they left their workmates to talk, as it’s the only way to stay sane. The riots happen, they understa
nd why, but they grit their teeth and listen to the simple analysis or outright dehumanisation. Rashan Charles gets choked by the police on camera and dies, and someone in the office says, ‘Well, he should have just obeyed, he shouldn’t sell drugs.’ My friends refrain from reminding their colleagues that they saw them snorting coke on their lunch break. My friends visit their cousins in prison, they don’t talk about it to their colleagues; my barrister mate volunteers in his old hood every Sunday teaching English, but at work every week he hears how the police and the judges talk about the poor, about people of colour and about the immigrants. He bites his tongue and does his job.
A terrorist attack happens – meaning the perpetrator is assumed to be Muslim, of course – and my friends of course deplore the attackers and feel total sympathy for the victims, yet hailing from Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, Ghana, Nigeria, Iraq and Jamaica they know, unlike their colleagues, that Britain is not some innocent virgin nation quietly minding her own business that has been placed under siege. They refrain from giving any context out of fear of being seen as terrorist sympathisers, which of course they are not – their grandmothers or children could just as easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get killed by these brainwashed murderers. I know so many people that lost friends after the riots in 2011 and during Brexit; everyone’s real opinions come out in a crisis. I once made good friends with a very successful businessman of my age, we bonded over a mutual love for literature and Jodorowsky’s graphic novels, then one day he made a passing comment to me about his workers who had had the gall to ask for better pay: ‘What would they be doing if I didn’t employ them anyway? Drinking, gambling, committing crimes?’ I could not be bothered to argue that day, and he probably has no idea to this day that this comment is why we are not friends any more – he was born into money, I made what little I have ‘myself’. We may both have been eating at the same restaurant in Venice, but we are not the same.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room; the history of the British class system. Despite all the rhetoric about meritocracy and equality of opportunity, Britain is still – like every nation on earth to some degree – a society where the social class and area you are born into will determine much of your life experiences, chances and outcomes. The quality and type of education you receive, and your likelihood of interaction with police, social workers, prison or other state institutions, will all be influenced by class. If you visit any prison in this – or any – country, the vast majority of its prisoners from any ethnicity you choose will be people from poorer backgrounds, obviously.
We live in a country with a particularly vicious class system when compared with other similarly developed Western European countries, and the results of this can be seen when we look at our huge prison population, terrible child poverty rates, the thousands of old people who freeze to death every year because they cannot afford to heat their homes, the millions of people living off food banks, the crisis of homelessness and the return of such Victorian diseases as rickets in the poorest parts of the country. These things are all the results of political decisions taken, decisions informed by the perceived class interests and worldviews of our rulers and their rulers. You will never as long as you live hear the British politicians saying that we cannot bomb some far off, probably oil-rich country because we don’t have the money, and of course the history of British class conflict is inseparable from British imperialism as Britain was literally able to expel its class tensions onto the people of Australia, America and Southern Africa. Had Britain’s elites not had transportation as a safety valve, who knows, some of the genocidal violence inflicted on the Australian Aboriginal population may have been aimed at them. As the most accomplished British imperialist Cecil Rhodes aptly put it ‘if you wish to avoid civil war you must become an imperialist’. In marked contrast to the wars we can always afford you will frequently hear the same people talk about not having the money for any number of things that affect the lives of poor people, such as adequate fire safety, decent pay for nurses and teachers and winter fuel for the elderly: this is classism. The state makes choices about the interests in which collective resources will be spent. Poor people have no real voice in British politics, but we do have an unelected second chamber of ‘lords’ influencing policy. None of this is conducive to having a truly democratic society and we may not be able to substantially change it, but it is important that we at least understand what’s going on. Class affects everything – culture, confidence and worldview – and the class system is so entrenched in Britain that even a person’s accent carries with it implications about their social background.
Whether or not teenagers always have the language to articulate these things, I think an understanding of class starts to dawn on young people sometime around thirteen. In children from poorer backgrounds, there is a change in confidence, an unwillingness to speak, a fear of being embarrassed and, for the boys especially, a turn towards aggression that often begins to manifest around this age. Having lived it myself and having visited well over a hundred secondary schools across the UK, I can say that this immense change for the worse is near universal. There is something about that age – about the combination of puberty and all its sexual confusion and competition, about being old enough to start noticing how fucked up the world is and how many holes there are in your shoes, with the dawning of the reality that your dreams will not come true, that you will most likely be just as unhappy as your parents and that fifty years of dead-end work awaits you – that kills most working-class kids’ confidence.
‘Why should I learn Pythagoras, sir? I’m never gonna use it, am I?’ ‘Why should I care about Shakespeare? He’s for posh people.’ I tell teenagers they are wrong when they tell me these things, but in reality I am telling them a lie in the hope that one or two of them will be foolish enough to believe me and that those foolish ones might become the poor kid that ‘makes it’. But, in general, they are actually correct. It’s not that life in post-industrial Britain is materially awful by global standards, clearly it is not and clearly things are quite substantially better than they were a century ago, but it seems to me that the drudgery of it all encourages many teenagers to just give up on their dreams and accept ‘their place’. This remaking of humans to fit social norms is of course what education is about, from ‘tribal’ initiation systems to state schools.
With regards to policing, Sir John Woodcock, then HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary, said back in 1992:
What is happening to the police is that a nineteenth-century institution is being dragged into the twenty-first century. Despite all the later mythology of Dixon, the police never were the police of the whole people but a mechanism set up to protect the affluent from what the Victorians described as the dangerous classes.13
So despite all the lovely comforting stuff we are told, senior police understand very well that the primary function of policing is to protect property. Despite all the pretence about serving the people, and some of the genuinely good and difficult work police have to do, such as dealing with rape victims and missing children, the police are primarily enforcers for the state and for the state of things as they are. When this is understood you can make sense of ‘illogical’ police activities like spying on justice campaigners or environmental activists as if they were the Mafia, to the extent of going undercover and marrying members of activist groups. If you delude yourself into thinking the police’s primary function is to serve the people none of this makes any sense.14 When masses of the public protest government injustice, such as millions protesting against an unjust war, it’s obvious that the police are there to protect the state, not ‘the people’.
When viewed in the historical context that governments themselves evolved as governments for the wealthy, explicitly excluding the poor, and that it took literally centuries of struggle for people who were not ‘propertied’ to have the right to vote and therefore any say in political affairs, all of this makes perfect and simple sense. Marx and his int
ellectual descendants may well prove to have been wrong about socialism and how society will evolve – we’ll see – but much of their analysis of the way capitalism works is so clearly and plainly accurate that if it was given to any working-class child at school they would immediately be able to make total sense of much of the ‘Marxist nonsense’, as it’s so often called. (Interesting that despite being two of the fathers of racism the works of Voltaire and Kant for example do not evoke such odium as Marx among mainstream intelligentsia; naturally African and Asian scholars can be all but ignored.)
As such, in a racialised society it’s only natural that working-class people in general and black people in particular would come to dislike the police. This is both politically logical and an obvious recognition of reality, even for more successful black people that ‘make it’. Who are the only members of British society who have openly and repeatedly gotten away with unlawfully killing our families and friends? Who, after having grossly failed them, decided to spy on the Lawrence family instead of bringing them the justice they deserved? Who expect us to believe that Smiley Culture really stabbed himself while making a cup of tea during a drugs raid? Surely, even if that was true, someone should be in prison for negligence? Who attacked the miners at Orgreave? Who lied after Hillsborough? The job of the police is to protect the state and working-class people obviously do not control the state in any meaningful sense.