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

by Akala

  For those of us that are Caribbean, we grew up with cousins in New York sending us the latest DJ Clue or Red Alert mix tape, or VCRs (remember those?) of the latest stage shows where US rappers and Jamaican dancehall artists had performed on the same bills, usually somewhere in Brooklyn. We experienced black American culture not as a foreign presence but as an extension of ourselves; our overseas family who were articulating to the world what we felt we were going through too.

  While there are huge differences in the experiences of black Britain and black America, we focused on the similarities and solidarities. We watched LA react to the Rodney King verdict and we remembered Brixton or Handsworth in 1985; we transposed Cliff Huxtable into an old West Indian granddad and we knew that Kool Herc, Biggie’s mother, Pete Rock and KRS-One were from ‘yard’ too. We know Colin Powell is also of Jamaican origin, but we don’t claim him.

  The black bookstores that could once be found in every major area of African-Caribbean settlement in Britain were filled with volumes of scholarship from as many black Americans as Caribbeans or West Africans, just as our record stores gave prominence to Jamaican music but you could certainly find any soul, RnB or hip hop you would need at Red Records in Brixton, Body Groove in Tottenham or Honest John’s in Ladbroke Grove. Thanks to gentrification and changing technology, two of these three iconic stores are now gone. The legendary Blacker Dread record shop in Brixton, that for so long serviced the UK’s premier sound systems and the public alike with their 7s and 12s of the latest music from Jamaica, has similarly vanished.

  The next time I remember stepping on stage I was ten and I rapped ‘Slam’ by the Queens hip hop group Onyx and ‘Sound Boy Killing’ by Jamaican dancehall artist Mega Banton to my, definitely confused, classmates and teachers at an end of year talent contest. This performance symbolised the syncretism of my generation; British-born to British-born parents, we started to identify with the US as much as the Caribbean. As a result of this decline in exclusively Caribbean, predominantly Jamaican influence, we produced new worldviews, attitudes and art, or at least a new negotiation between the ‘roots, reggae and rasta’ of our parents and the new dancehall, hip hop and RnB coming from the ghettoes of Jamaica and the states.

  During my teenage years, local UK variants of MC-based cultures also rose to prominence via an extensive network of ‘pirate’ (illegal) radio stations and club nights. UK garage brought a Jamaican sound system aesthetic and set up to an originally American genre, mirroring the fusion that gave birth to hip hop. There was also the uniquely UK-based hybrid ‘jungle’, which fused Jamaican reggae and dancehall with the Amen break – the same drum break that is the basis of much legendary hip hop – and UK rave music. I loved jungle for the rawness of the baselines, the speed and intensity of the drums and the incredible use of samples that gave it a totally unique sound, a sound laced with the grit of Bristol and London’s council estates echoing the indelible, irreversible influence of Caribbean ex-pats on British music. Jungle was a stamp on the face of safe and respectable British music and it was that grit that attracted the rude boys and gangsters from every hood to come to jungle raves. Guys did not dress up, they came to a jungle dance as if they’d come straight off the block; guns were brandished and shots were fired, but as jungle started to cross over it morphed into a safer, softer variant of itself that seemed to me quite consciously designed to appeal to a whiter, more middle-class audience and to keep the rude boys away. I think it worked on both counts. Naturally the British media and law enforcement took ample opportunity to racialise the gangster minority as a general black problem in a way they never did with the drug overdoses and sexual assaults that remain a common issue throughout the UK rave and festival culture.

  Garage raves had some of the same problems with violence as jungle did despite the fact that the atmosphere was totally different. Garage blended soulful and smooth samples with a much slower, much more danceable beat than jungle and consequently garage raves were far better dressed and had a significantly greater female presence. I went to more garage raves than I could possibly count, long before I was supposed to; at fifteen years old I was at the now-legendary Pure Silk New Year’s Eve 1999 rave at Wembley conference centre, with 10,000 other revellers. It was £50 a ticket, back then! Garage was big money, street dudes cleaned a lot of cash, and young black entrepreneurs, DJs and MCs became hood rich long before the mainstream had taken any notice. Me and my homies made unforgettable memories.

  I MC’d over jungle and garage on my father’s sound system between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. I still love dancehall, and Bounty Killer remains one of my top ten lyricists in any genre, but none of these genres or scenes would influence me quite like hip hop did. My dad and stepdad had acquainted me with NWA, Public Enemy and Big Daddy Kane but I was too young when they were at their peak to really experience them in all their glory. Being born in 1983 meant I was just seven when Public Enemy’s legendary album Fear of a Black Planet was released, but my parents played it so much I memorised almost all of the words.

  In the mid 1990s, when I started to get hairs on my chest and I got my first job, I struck out and found my ‘own’ hip hop. I was thirteen years old, working for £20 per day on Saturdays at a local DIY store, and any week that my family did not need the money I’d be off to the West End to the nerdy record stores that stocked hard-to-get US imports, or up to our bootlegger in Tottenham, and I’d spend my entire £20 on CDs. I had two ‘bootleggers’ (a person that copies and sells black market CDs), both of them black Americans, one from Roxbury in Boston and the other from Brownsville in New York, two of America’s most notorious ghettoes. The stories they told us of ‘the hood’ back home only added authenticity to the purchases. It’s probably hard for people under twenty to remember now what a precious commodity a CD was, but I felt absolutely no qualms about forgoing a few meals so that I could get the latest US rap release. I had no other access to the music; these records were not played on the radio, not even by the hip hop specialists, and there was no Internet, there was only the import CD shop and the bootlegger.

  As my age group searched for new meanings and identities, American rap provided a soundtrack for what seemed like a reality we shared with our black American cousins: we lived in public housing, some of our uncles and fathers went to prison, we were relatively poor, we knew people who had been shot and stabbed – and likely those doing the shooting and stabbing too – just as we knew members of our community who had been killed and brutalised by the police and never gotten a hint of justice. At its best, our identification with black American culture helped give us the political strength and insights around which to organise, in the same way that my gangster uncles had come of age politically by reading Huey Newton and watching Muhammad Ali interviews. It instilled in us a new vocabulary and new ways of understanding race and class and inculcated a sense of shared blackness, a sense that we were not alone in facing the challenges coming our way. But our over-identification with black American culture was also not without its challenges and problems. We struggled to find our own voice based on our own realities and many of us MCs even rapped in fake American accents, as I did until I was thirteen. One day, as I showed my older sister my new bars, tinged with Staten Island slang and drawl, she told me off for being fake and made me try rapping in my own voice. I had become so enthralled with US hip hop that I found it difficult to even conceive of spitting in my own accent, despite the fact that the London Posse and others had been doing so on a national scale for years already. I felt that a British accent was not authentic enough, perhaps even not ‘black’ enough to be real hip hop. Luckily, I got over this crisis within a week and have never rapped as if I were American since.

  Many of us have also chosen to adopt some of the destructive consequences of the black American experience; the best two examples I can think of are the attempt to create ‘Bloods and Crips’ style gangs in London and the uncritical adoption of the word ‘nigga’. Gangs have a number of sociologi
cal, economic, cultural and interpersonal sources, they do not arise in a vacuum, and the Bloods and the Crips emerged directly in the wake of and fall out from black American attempts at mass political self-organisation during the 1960s. While there are certainly some economic and political similarities between Compton and Brixton, and there was certainly fall out from black British attempts to self-organise in the 1980s, the adoption of ‘colours’ in South London in the mid-2000s was as much an imitation of US corporate rap culture as it was the result of any directly collapsing political movements and deindustrialisation. Of course, London’s gangs, despite all media exaggerations, have come nowhere near the levels of violence of those in USA – or of those in Northern Ireland for that matter – but the fact that we chose to identify with west coast American gangs rather than London’s own centuries-long gang history or even the infamous Shower Posse of Kingston and New York that had a presence in London during the 1990s speaks volumes about how influential black American culture had become.

  I make no secret of the fact I used to use the word ‘nigger’ in my music every other sentence, and indeed the only song of mine to get played on mainstream radio had the tagline ‘Shakespeare with a nigger twist’. However, by my second album I had all but given up using the word for a number of reasons. First, it made me extremely uncomfortable to have crowds of young white people scream ‘nigger’ back at me, so that just was not going to work. Second, one of my elders gave me a bloody good talking to about its use – shout out to Uncle Toyin – but lastly, I just decided it was fake and destructive for us to call each other ‘nigger’ and pretend it was a term of endearment. While they are our extended family, we are not black Americans, we are Caribbean and African ex-pats living in UK and I concluded, based on my studies of history, that while racism was everywhere, nowhere was the attempt to create this nigger – a figment of the white imagination – more intense, brutal and long lasting than in the USA.

  I came to feel that even in the American context the use of the ‘n word’ had become rather gimmicky, shorn of all original meaning and divorced from the context of its birth. The nigger; a fictional subhuman creation of the white racist imagination; a fiction that could justify actual humans being worked like beasts of burden, redlined,1 segregated, executed by law enforcement, experimented on by medical science,2 exhibited in zoos, bombed by their own government,3 having their towns torched by terrorists and having to fight for almost a century to earn the right to shit in the same toilets as white people. All of that vanishes from view with the way nigger is now used in hip hop.

  Now the nigger is presented as an autonomous black creation, a self-styled ghetto godfather rather than as the echo of white-supremacist perversion and relative black powerlessness that it is.4 Young black boys and men know this to be true despite what we may tell ourselves; no truly self-loving people celebrate their own death, especially not for the entertainment of the primary beneficiaries of that death. I often work in prisons where, as you can imagine, a large section of those I work with are young black men. Some of the work we do is around creative writing and the young men write raps invariably filled with boasts about how many niggers they will shank and shoot. I don’t judge them, how could I? I used to carry knives and I even used to rap quite like that even though I knew better, I simply ask them what they would think if I rapped about killing honkies. I remind them that my white family are poor, that we come from Scotland, that Glasgow is often more violent than London and that twenty million plus Russians alone died in the ‘white on white violence’ of the Second World War.

  Despite all of this and without exception, all of the young black boys I have put this question to have one of two reactions; they either laugh out loud at the absurdity of rapping about killing honkies or they tell me that it would be racist for me – a man of mixed heritage that used to rap about niggers – to rap about killing honkies. They can never explain a logical reason as to why that is the case but the inference is clear; these young black men, like the world at large, value white life over black life. Though I do recognise the argument is slightly flawed in that even though I am technically ‘mixed race’ I am racialised as black and thus it would still be perceived as a black man rapping about killing white people, it has nonetheless been a revealing experiment.

  I must confess, though, that I am quite the hypocrite on this issue – and much else of course. I still love so-called gangsta rap though I recognise the oddity of a black icon boasting about killing other ‘niggers’ for the entertainment of little Hank in Milwaukee; niggerish-ness can be a multi-billion-dollar commodity as long as it makes no mention of its relationship to whiteness. It’s not that I wish the word to be deleted nor even that I wish people would stop saying it; as I mentioned, much of my favourite music ever is ‘gangsta rap’ and I accept that for a whole host of reasons violence is a fundamental part of human entertainment, from Shakespearean tragedies to Korean revenge cinema to mixed martial arts – all of which I also enjoy. It’s rather that I wish there was a greater range of voices making their way into mainstream popular culture – as has started to happen again a little with the likes of J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar – and that I hope out of respect for the ancestors and the struggles they fought that the context and pain attached to that word is not drowned in a sea of pool parties and post-racial fantasy.

  It is also compelling that African and Caribbean music – that is music made in a black context primarily for black consumption – does not use the word nigger, and even the most ‘gangsta’ of Jamaican dancehall artists can be found offering profound political analysis of Jamaica’s class dynamics and the corruption of its elites, something that has been almost entirely absent from ‘mainstream’ hip hop over the past twenty years. It’s equally interesting to ask why reggae music has made such obvious inroads right across Africa over and above US hip hop, despite not having anywhere near the same level of corporate backing. What would the effect be on black musical production if black Africans had the same disposable incomes as white Americans? How does the self-perception of black people in majority black societies affect their worldviews and cultural tastes, if at all?

  We may want to remember that after returning from his first trip to Africa, Richard Pryor announced that he would never call another black man a nigger again so long as he lived. Travelling around the continent, he marvelled at the fact that there were ‘no niggers there’ and added that in his time there, ‘I have not said it [the word], I have not even thought it.’ While uttered in the guise of comedy, this might be one of the most profound reflections on the black condition ever offered. Pryor understood instantly that the metaphysical category of the nigger could not possibly have the same meaning in Africa as it did in America.

  While the physical legacies of white supremacy in Africa are clear enough, from the skin bleaching to the colonial borders to the languages of government, or from the segregation that is still so apparent in the former settler colonies, the state of spiritual and cultural crisis that Pryor denotes with the appellation ‘nigger’ simply does not seem to exist in the same way for Africans. Perhaps it’s just diaspora romanticism, but I felt that same feeling when I first set foot on the continent. It’s a quality that cannot be explained unless you have experienced both states. People who have experienced niggerisation or lifelong racism often walk as if they are apologising for their existence; it was only when I saw black people that did not walk that way that this became clear to me.

  To a degree, I also feel this same unquantifiable phenomenon in the Caribbean; there is a cultural and spiritual freedom that people have growing up in a place that they feel belongs to them and they belong to, however severe the material challenges in that place may be. It’s worth mentioning that Pryor was among the pioneers of the artistic use of the word, which he used in his comedy to shock at a time when everyone was aware of the dehumanisation implied by the word ‘nigger’. Yet here he was realising what racism had done to the black American soul, how it had
made nigger an acceptable denotation of actual human beings and just how destructive that was.

  A friend of mine once told me a story that exemplified the importance of the way we use words and the images and ideas we attach to them. He comes from Brixton though he is of Nigerian, specifically Yoruba, heritage, he has been to prison and all that jazz, and one day he was on the block with the youngers when the following ensued.

  He was lecturing the youngsters about traditional Yoruba values, values he admitted to having violated by being on ‘the roads’ and going to prison. He asked the group of young men he was talking to – also of Yoruba origin – to imagine themselves as ‘black youts’ and tell him what associations went with being a ‘black yout’. He then asked them to see themselves as ‘Yoruba men’ and asked them what associations went with that identity. The images they associated with each identity were diametrically opposed. When he asked them if they could see ‘Yoruba men’ going to prison for selling crack or stabbing each other they said no; when he asked if they could see a black yout doing those things they all answered yes. Obviously Yoruba men are perfectly capable of any number of behaviours in reality, but the automatic associations are nonetheless interesting. If ‘black yout’ can carry such connotations for black youth themselves, how much more severe would the word ‘nigger’ be? And how much worse might the perceptions of people that are not black youth themselves be?

  My friend is not a social scientist, smart as he is he barely finished school, but this exercise was a masterstroke and I often wonder if the youngers in question have continued to ponder the profound insight they stumbled upon that day.