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

by Akala

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  US hip hop has fundamentally shaped the attitudes, tastes, language, fashion, political consciousness and general swag of my generation across racial and economic lines, though this affiliation is clearly most pronounced within the black community. However, today is a unique time to be a UK hip hop artist. Since the birth of hip hop and for decades afterwards, UK industry gatekeepers at radio and TV pretty much ignored domestic MCs – with a few notable exceptions – always preferring to support US artists over and above – rather than as well as – local artists. I think this partly has to do with the simple fact that US hip hop was plainly of better musical and lyrical quality, and it must be honestly acknowledged that the classic US hip hop albums are still the benchmark, still ‘the canon’ for anyone entering the field. However, the reasons are also deeper than simple musical quality and stem from the situation of black culture in Britain.

  We as black Brits, recent migrants, floating somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, not quite really Caribbean any more with newer arrivals from Africa itself and certainly not American, but not yet confident enough to speak with our own voice, alienated from the nation in which we were born, found ourselves relegated even in our own tastes to a second-class blackness. We preferred ‘authentic’ Jamaican reggae to the British-Caribbean version, and we preferred ‘authentic’ US hip hop to UK hip hop, unlike the French, who by the 1990s had developed a thriving domestic hip hop scene with scores of successful rappers, producers and directors. Why did something similar not occur in the UK during the 1990s, despite our much closer connection to the US, being both English speakers and having literal cousins in the States? Ironically, part of the reason is French nationalism. A drive to preserve the French language commands that 40 per cent of music on national radio be in French, which gave a platform to French hip hop in a way that was just not there in the UK. The British music industry, particularly in the area of ‘urban’ (read black) music, has mostly been happy to just import whatever the American parent corporations of the major labels are selling.

  Then, in the early 2000s, things started to change dramatically. It really began with a cable TV station called Channel U that would play pretty much any music video it was sent. While this sometimes meant that the quality was laughably bad, that was part of its appeal and the channel nevertheless gave a regular nationwide platform to UK rappers like myself for the first time. Then the Internet happened and MC-based platforms like Fire in the Booth, SBTV and Grime Daily took UK rappers and grime MCs to a national and then global audience, without the filtration system of the music industry. The results of this both domestically and internationally have been astounding. If you look at the reaction videos on YouTube to mine and other UK rappers’ ‘Fire in the Booth’s, you will find scores of Americans ‘reacting’ to the lyrics. I also think that, as in France, nationalism is ironically at play in the UK in that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that part of grime music’s recent success has been underpinned by journalists’ ability to claim it as an authentically ‘British’ form of music, even if the ‘truly British’ status of its dominant practitioners is still in question.

  Why is this important to this chapter? Because for the first time in my life black British musicians and rappers in particular are able to communicate across the pond and indeed to the world without the direct interference of corporate media – YouTube and social media notwithstanding – and without the direct control of the apparatus of the UK music industry. The results of this so far have been very interesting. Through artists like Stormzy and Skepta, through dramas like Topboy reaching a wide audience, through activist collaboration – mainly via Black Lives Matter – and through social media, black Britain has joined the voices stirring culture and politics into the cauldron that is the black Atlantic in a more sustained way than ever before. While the scholars of yesteryear (Hall, Gilroy etc.) and even our parents’ music (lovers rock and rare groove) were arguably of far greater quality than that produced by today’s generation they did not, unfortunately, have the Internet. There have been pioneering successful artists before, like Soul2Soul, and Smiley Culture had a number one rapping in Cockney and Jamaican accents way back in 1985, but none of this led to a sustained slew of household names. Scores of rappers who, if born just a decade earlier, would have been told by some dickhead A&R ‘we don’t know how to market you’ and thus relegated to the dustbin, now have viable solo touring careers, with the biggest ones selling out the nation’s largest arenas.

  That it took the relative consumer freedom of the Internet for this situation to arise is by no means a coincidence. Now that radio has lost a lot of its power, though by no means all, it’s clear that audiences of all ethnic backgrounds want authenticity, talent and rawness. And so Stormzy, Skepta, Kano, JME, Giggs, Wretch, Lady Leshurr, Wiley – in short a whole bunch of black artists from ‘the hood’ – have become the most popular MCs in the country without having to make the corny kind of pop music that an A&R would have told them was necessary to get on the radio back in the day. There has been no need to limit it to one or two ‘urban’ artists at a time, just as there was never a need to limit the amount of skinny-jeaned white guitar bands. Young artists like Dave are now free to make searing critiques of the prime minister, as he did on his song ‘Question Time’, and not have to worry about getting on the radio because he can get millions of views and streams on Spotify and YouTube – his first headline tour sold out in a day. Older artists like Lowkey can make critiques of the War on Terror, get millions of views on YouTube and sell thousands of tickets all without a label or radio play.

  That the two most successful UK MCs – Stormzy and Skepta – are both of West African rather than Caribbean heritage reflects a demographic shift within the black British population away from Caribbeans being the majority and away from the Caribbean-centric cultural orientation that was the norm when I was growing up. It also speaks to a new-found self confidence in British West Africans.

  These musical and cultural sea changes have led to a vastly different perception of Britain in the US. When I first visited New York in 2001 I went to stay with my friend’s cousins in the Bronx. I spent time hanging out on the block there and people noticed my obvious hip hop ‘swag’ but would then be thoroughly confused when they heard a British accent. It was not unusual to be asked ‘Yo, are there black people in England?’ or ‘Do you know the Queen?’ Of course the latter question is just silliness, but the former reflects a genuine ignorance; after all, how would an American in 2001 have possibly known that there were over a million black people living in the UK? Certainly they would not have garnered this from the UK’s cultural output. But when I travel to the US these days, New York included, no one asks me such questions any more and people seem aware that there is a hip hop scene, a black population and even ‘hoods’ over here in the UK.

  Even the largest American online hip hop platforms, like The Breakfast Club, Vlad TV and Sway, have recognised this changing trend and have had UK guests on their shows. When I was growing up it seemed that our bigger, cooler American cousins were not even aware we existed, let alone how much we looked up to them; now a transatlantic dialogue facilitated by the web is starting to change the one-way flow of culture and perspective and is producing some interesting currents. Even though we very much admire our black American cousins, we are not punks either, and some signs of natural conflict have started to arise as a result of these transnational black dialogues . . .

  In 2012, I was at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, sat among a huge audience watching Sing Your Song, the documentary about the life of legendary civil rights activist and singer Harry Belafonte. After the documentary had finished, Harry came on stage to rapturous applause and took his seat next to the Labour MP David Lammy, who would interview him post-screening. I don’t recall that much of the interview but I remember Harry’s typically charismatic recounting of near-death experiences during the civil rights struggle, his reflections on married life and much more as you would
expect to come from such a discussion and such a life. However, when the questions passed to the audience something strange occurred that has really stuck with me.

  Harry’s discussion with David had touched on mass incarceration and the structural pathologies America is still enforcing so many decades after the days when Harry stood shoulder to shoulder with Dr King. During the questions, the only other black person I could spot in the audience – it is Hay-on-Wye after all – got up to ask a question. She put it to Harry that black Britons were even more disproportionately incarcerated vis-à-vis their white countrymen and women than black Americans, and asked for his thoughts on that fact. To my shock and disappointment, rather than engage with the sister around a critical examination of transatlantic white supremacy – it was British colonists that set in motion America’s racial governance after all – Harry told her that she was wrong, that no one was as disproportionately locked up as black Americans, and though I can’t recall his exact words he essentially brushed off her point as if it were ridiculous and made no attempt to draw any parallels between the US system of racism and that of the UK, despite their obvious historical connections. I won’t go as far as to say that he suggested that there is no racism in the UK but given the time and place that was certainly how it felt. The sister was of course correct; while black Americans are far more likely to be incarcerated than black Brits because America locks up its population in general at far higher rates than Britain, black Britons are seven to nine times more likely – the data fluctuates – to go to prison than their white co-citizens,5 and they are treated more harshly at every stage of the criminal justice system in the UK.6 While we are here it’s worth noting that indigenous Australians are in absolute terms even more disproportionately incarcerated than black Americans;7 this is not to negate, contrast or compare, just a statement of fact that should be more known.

  Anyway, I was really enraged by Harry’s dismissal and felt an urge to stand up and shout out in support of the sister, and in hindsight I am kind of angry that I did not. Here we had a civil rights legend being applauded by an overwhelmingly white British audience for his truly quite remarkable history of anti-racist activism, a man with credibility and stature, a contemporary and friend of some of the giants of American culture, lacking local knowledge and therefore dismissing a valid concern. I’m sure it was just ignorance on Harry’s part, but I did feel a little like he had put an ‘uppity negro’ back in her place. I could tell from how the sister’s demeanour shrank at Harry’s response that she felt it too. Surely if the audience in question were truly genuine in their anti-racist convictions, they would have been only too thrilled to have a man of Harry’s stature offer strategies for tackling the institutional racism of their own society. As it was, this potential exchange was missed. Of course, I cannot speak for nor generalise about that audience but knowing British politics I can make some educated guesses, and it is fascinating to note that it was one of two black people in the crowd that offered the only question that drew those parallels.

  As I looked around the room, I thought about how much there was to unpack in this one little event that spoke to the contradictions of race and white supremacy in the US and the UK. On the one hand, you have the long tradition of British liberals showering praise on black American activists, from Martin to Ali to Baldwin and even sometimes Malcolm. British media has consistently made great documentaries on the heroes of the civil rights movement, praising their courage and they were even invited into the hallowed halls of the British academy at a time when black British faces were all but absent from them. You see, for much of Britain, America is where racism happens, and Britain is then by definition not racist because, you know, ‘it’s not as racist as America’. This is a totally moot and rather idiotic point, as no two countries have the same history and thus no two countries have the same systems of social control, thus no two countries in essence have the same racisms. While British liberals may praise all the Dr Kings in the world, this does not necessarily stop them from reproducing and/or administering the domestic racial hierarchy effectively.

  For this reason, most people in Britain, if they know anything about racial injustice at all, are likely to be far more well aware of American issues and history than those on their doorstep, and this includes black people. They are more likely to know of the Alabama church bombing than of New Cross, more likely to know the name Rodney King than Cynthia Jarret, more likely to know Jesse Jackson than Bernie Grant.

  It’s a shame that Harry was ignorant of the facts, but to me his reluctance to even engage with Britain’s racism seems to reflect a larger trend of some successful and well-off black Americans, who conclude based on their privileged experience alone that Europe is some kind of racial paradise. The most famous of these would be other greats like James Baldwin and Richard Wright, who understandably fled to Paris to escape US racism, and the most recent was Samuel L. Jackson, who went on Hot 97 radio in New York in 2016 and ranted about black British actors taking ‘American’ jobs, during which he suggested that black Brits essentially don’t know what racism is because ‘over there they been interracial dating for a hundred years’. He also suggested Hollywood was hiring black British actors not because of their talent or the quality but because ‘they cheaper than us, man’.

  There is no need for me to explain why Samuel clearly knows nothing about black British history – and obviously does not care to – but it is curious that he did not seem to have had a problem with Denzel Washington playing Steve Biko, Danny Glover and Sidney Poitier playing Nelson Mandela, Jill Scott playing a South African, Don Cheadle playing a Rwandan or Forest Whitaker playing Idi Amin. Daniel Kaluuya, the ‘black British’ actor Samuel was complaining about, was born to Ugandan parents and played a fictional black American in the film Get Out. Forest Whitaker played probably the most famous real-life Ugandan, but for Samuel this went unnoticed. Ironically, Daniel Kaluuya had to sue the Metropolitan Police in 2013 for dragging him off of a bus, putting him face down with their boots in his neck and then taking him to the station and strip-searching him because he ‘fit the description of a reported criminal’.8 Daniel was already a fairly successful, award-winning actor at the time this happened, having appeared in the hit teen drama Skins. It is utterly inconceivable that a famous white British actor would be treated this way, obviously, so Samuel’s comments just reek of American exceptionalism in blackface. According to uncle Samuel, black Americans are apparently qualified to play Africans, Caribbeans or any other black person on the globe, but lord forbid any mere non-American should play a US role – Samuel also had an issue with David Oyelowo playing Martin Luther King. Black South Africans could equally suggest that black Americans don’t ‘really’ understand racism, poverty and violence and therefore Denzel is not qualified to play Steve Biko, because things were ‘not as bad’ in America as they were in apartheid South Africa, but this would of course be just as idiotic.

  Most strangely for an actor of his undeniable quality, Samuel seems to have totally forgotten that acting is literally pretending to be someone you are not; I am sure he has never lived on another planet nor been part of an intergalactic expedition, yet he took up his role in the Star Wars franchise without a second thought. The idea that black people and white people ‘interracial dating’ is evidence of the absence of racism reveals a surprisingly juvenile understanding of how racism works for a man of Samuel’s age and brilliance; in Brazil, interracial ‘dating’ goes back centuries, yet only a total fool could possibly suggest that this has brought Brazil even close to overcoming its racism, in fact it is frequently invoked to avoid dealing with it at all.

  Samuel’s rant was really not that far off your stereotypical ‘white bigot’ complaining about foreigners ‘coming over here and taking our jobs’, and it’s really odd that he had not bothered to ask himself why so many black British actors are going to America in the first place. Other than the obvious existence of Hollywood, it’s worth looking at the kinds of opportun
ities available for black British actors domestically. What kind of roles was Idris Elba playing before he went to the states and became Stringer Bell? Could it be that the black British acting exodus is partly reflective of the limited range of opportunities for diverse roles for black talent? And a lack of black directors and writers like Jordan Peele, who made Get Out? Or other institutional challenges that you would have thought a black American of Samuel’s age would have been able to relate to? He was totally uninterested in these questions, sadly. On the other side of this nationalist nonsense, black British actress Cush Jumbo claimed that black Brits were getting these roles in Hollywood because ‘we are better than the Americans’: Denzel, Viola and Samuel himself are obvious proof that this is not true, and nor should we be in some paranoid and stupid competition with black Americans.

  Another black American great, Maya Angelou, told the Guardian in February 2012 that ‘black Britons don’t have the same spirit as black Americans.’9 In all fairness to mama Maya, it was a comment in an article about her – extremely favourable – views on Barack Obama, so who knows how exactly she intended it, but the inference seemed totally clear to me; black Americans are somehow better, braver, stronger, more ‘spiritual’. A ‘spiritual’ comparison between black Britain and America is a ridiculous and ahistorical one; black Americans have four centuries of shared history on American soil, black Brits for the most part migrated from multiple countries across the British Commonwealth and beyond in various periods throughout the past seventy years, and thus the fact that we have managed to meld any sort of coherent black struggle at all given our diverse origins and differing histories is actually remarkable. But if we expand the scope to the ‘spirit’ of the black people of the British Commonwealth/Empire, we start to find figures like Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley and Kwame Nkrumah and some of the largest slave rebellions in human history – so no lack of spirit at all then.