Akala Natives Quotes

I often look at the world and just think fuck it, why bother, but I know that’s how we are supposed to feel, that’s why the corruption is so naked and freely visible – to wear down people who have the conviction that things could be better.

The concept of whiteness goes hand in hand with the concept of white supremacy – hence why the progress against white supremacy that has been made so far feels, to some white people, like an attack on their identity.

That England, a country not properly invaded since 1066 but which has invaded almost every nation on the planet, can have a party named the UK Independence Party win 13 per cent of the national vote in 2015 speaks volumes about collective amnesia and ability to distort the facts.

Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire

Most people, hate poor people more than they hate poverty

The long and short of it is that the master makes himself a slave to his slave by needing that domination to define him.

We judge the street corner hustler or working-class criminal – from East Glasgow to East London – but we see a job as an investment banker, even in firms that launder the profits of drug cartels, fund terrorism, aid the global flow of arms, fuel war, oil spills, land grabs and generally fuck up the planet, as a perfectly legitimate, even aspirational occupation.

Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire – ‘fuck the bloody foreigners’.

I was not born with an opinion of the world but it clearly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me.

So if the ending of apartheid is now universally agreed to be a good thing, and Cuba played such a central role, how is it still possible to have such differing views of Castro and Mandela and of Cuba and South Africa? The short answer is that the mainstream media has been so successful in distorting basic historical facts that many are so blinded by Cold War hangovers that they are entirely incapable of critical thought, but the other answer is rather more Machiavellian. The reality is that apartheid did not die, and thus the reason so many white conservatives now love Mandela is essentially that he let their cronies "get away with it". The hypocritical worship of black freedom fighters once they are no longer seen to pose a danger or are safely dead - Martin Luther King might be the best example of this - is one of the key ways of maintaining a liberal veneer over what in reality is brutal intent.

Thus whiteness has always functioned as a tool of domination, as Charles Mills puts it: ‘Whiteness is a phenomenon unthinkable in a context where white does not equal power at some structural level.

the Castro–Mandela dichotomy exposes the way the mainstream loves to worship a supposedly non-racist country as long as it leaves the accepted class hierarchies in place, but hates a society that has revolutionised some of its class relationships despite its actual material contribution to global anti-racist struggle.

Racism is apparently a card to be played; much like the joker, it’s a very versatile card that can be used in any situation that might require it. Only non-white people ever play this card to excuse their own personal failings - even those of us that are materially successful. Humans racialised as white cannot play the race card - just like they cannot be terrorists - so European national empires colonising almost the entire globe and enacting centuries of unapologetically and openly racist legislation and practices, churning out an impressively large body of proudly racist justificatory literature and cinema and much else has had no impact on shaping human history, it has really just been black and brown people playing cards.

Racist insults leave you feeling dirty because, even at five years old, we already know on some level that, in this society at least, we are indeed lesser citizens with all the baggage of racialised history following us ghost-like about our days. We are conquered people living in the conquerors’ land, and as such we are people without honour. At five years old we are already conscious of the offence caused by our black body turning up in the wrong space, and have begun to internalise the negative ideas about blackness so present in the culture.

In 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate the mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. More recently, even Richard Branson felt compelled to pen an article about Cuba’s extraordinary medical achievements and how the idiotic embargo prevents ordinary Americans from benefiting from Cuba’s medical innovations.

Britain has two competing traditions – one rooted in ideas of freedom, equality and democracy, and another that sees these words as mere rhetoric to be trotted out at will and violated whenever it serves the Machiavellian purposes of power preservation.

Why can’t you just get over it? It’s all in the past.’ These two statements often run together. Apparently, history is not there to be learned from, rather it’s a large boulder to be gotten over. It’s fascinating, because in the hundreds of workshops I’ve taught on Shakespeare no one has ever told me to get over his writing because it’s, you know, from the, erm, past. I’m still waiting for people to get over Plato, or Da Vinci or Bertrand Russell, or indeed the entirety of recorded history, but it seems they just won’t. It is especially odd in a nation where much of the population is apparently proud of Britain’s empire that critics of one of its most obvious legacies should be asked to get over it, the very same thing from the past that they are proud of. But anyway, let’s imagine for a second that humanity did indeed ‘get over’ - which in this case means forget - the past. Well, we’d have to learn to walk and talk and cook and hunt and plant crops all over again, we’d have to undo all of human invention and start from . . . when? What period exactly is it we are allowed to start our memory from? Those that tell us to get over the past never seem to specify, but I’m eager to learn. In reality, of course, they just don’t want to have any conversations that they find uncomfortable.

Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

The ability of Britain to invade almost the entire planet and then for a significant portion of the country to proclaim themselves victims of some kind of invasion or colonisation may well not seem directly ‘racial’, but it certainly echoes quite clearly the way white America, with its long-term history of racist pogroms, lynching, slavery and segregation, has somehow emerged believing itself to be the victim of racial discrimination. Britain entered the EU freely, it has voted leave freely, the only blood that was shed around this issue was when a white-supremacist ultra¬ nationalist lunatic assassinated an MP perceived to be too kind to ‘immigrants’ during the campaign - hardly a country under siege like so many of those on the receiving end of Britain’s imperial conquests.

But when a given group is used to having all of the political power, and virtually unlimited privilege to define and name the world, any power sharing, any obligation to hear the opinions of formerly ‘subject races’ - who would have once been called uppity niggers and lynched accordingly - can feel like oppression.

Even at five, I had somehow figured out that there was a group known as ‘white people’ to whom it was now clear my mother belonged and that many of these people would get offended at the mere mention of their whiteness. I somehow knew instinctively that whiteness, like all systems of power, preferred not to be interrogated.

The message is clear: white people’s hurt feelings are conceptually equivalent to black humans’ actual lives.

While Britain has preserved the HMS Victory as a tribute to Nelson, as well as other ships from key periods of British history, not a single slave ship survives.- You have to stand in awe of the intellectual obedience it takes to still cheer for empire after the revelation that the government hid or burned a good portion of the evidence of what that empire actually consisted of, but such is the use to which we put our free thinking.

The government and the education system failed to explain to white Britain that, as the academic Adam Elliot-Cooper puts it, we had not come to Britain, but 'rather that Britain had come to us'. They did not explain that the wealth of Britain, which made the welfare state and other class ameliorations possible, was derived in no small part from the coffee and tobacco, cotton and diamonds, gold and sweat and blood and death of the colonies.

Black Brits emigrated into a society with an already established white underclass and were mostly dumped in areas where that underclass already lived; black Americans and the indigenous peoples were the foundation of the US underclass.

The hypocritical worship of black freedom fighters once they are no longer seen to pose a danger or are safely dead - Martin Luther King might be the best example of this - is one of the keys ways of maintaining a liberal veneer over what in reality is brutal intent.

Is state education designed to encourage more Darwins and Newtons, or to create middle-management civil servants and workers? What tensions are brought into being when a child’s natural proclivity to question everything in their own unique way comes into contact with a one-size-fits-all mode of education?

Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century - who do you think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? - you can imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as ‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence. Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but simply because they are ‘black’, and sometimes because they listened to too much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome. The fact that yellow-on-yellow crime, mixed race-on-mixed race crime or white-on-white violence just sound like joke terms but black on black violence has ‘credibility’ speaks very loudly about the perceived relationship between blackness and depravity in this culture.

As we watched the Neo-Nazis march through Charlottesville chanting ‘The Jews will not replace us’ on their way to defend a statue of a man that fought a war to keep slavery, we are confronted by the lunatic contradictions of white- supremacist identity. While claiming to be supreme, these people clearly do not believe what they are selling, for if Aryans are inherently superior there would be no need at all to worry about Jews or niggers ‘replacing’ them. Surely an innate Aryan supremacy should make them by definition irreplaceable? This constant articulation of supremacy and victimhood has long been a cornerstone of white-supremacist discourse.

Good people are not racist, only bad people are. This neat binary is a great way of avoiding any real discussion at all. But without the structural violence of unequal treatment before the law and in education, and a history of racial exploitation by states, simple acts of personal prejudice would have significantly less meaning.

State schooling in Britain both today and when I was a child seems stuck in a Victorian-era paradigm, guided by notions of discipline, obedience and deference to ones betters, of becoming a good worker and getting a good job. The idea that we go to school to find our passions, our calling, to learn to be happy, to ‘draw out that which is within’, as the root meaning of the word ‘educate’ commands, is almost entirely absent.

Despite a seemingly pervasive belief that only people of colour ‘play the race card’, it does not take anything as dramatic as a slave revolution or Japanese imperialism to evoke white racial anxieties, something as trivial as the casting of non-white people in films or plays in which a character was ‘supposed’ to be white will do the trick. For example, the casting of Olivier award-winning actress Noma Dumezweni to play the role of Hermione in the debut West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child got bigots so riled up that J. K. Rowling felt the need to respond and give her blessing for a black actress to play the role. A similar but much larger controversy occurred when the character Rue in the film The Hunger Games was played by a black girl, Amandla Stenberg. Even though Rue is described as having brown skin in the original novel, ‘fans’ of the book were shocked and dismayed that the movie version cast a brown girl to play the role, and a Twitter storm of abuse about the ethnic casting of the role ensued. You have to read the responses to truly appreciate how angry and abusive they are.- As blogger Dodai Stewart pointed out at the time: All these . . . people . . . read The Hunger Games. Clearly, they all fell in love with and cared about Rue. Though what they really fell in love with was an image of Rue that they’d created in their minds. A girl that they knew they could love and adore and mourn at the thought of knowing that she’s been brutally killed. And then the casting is revealed (or they go see the movie) and they’re shocked to see that Rue is black. Now . . . this is so much more than, 'Oh, she’s bigger than I thought.’ The reactions are all based on feelings of disgust. These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was ‘some black girl’ all along. So now they’re angry. Wasted tears, wasted emotions. It’s sad to think that had they known that she was black all along, there would have been [no] sorrow or sadness over her death.

The concept of whiteness goes hand in hand with the concept of white supremacy – hence why the progress against white supremacy that has been made so far feels, to some white people, like an attack on their identity. This is obviously not white genocide; in fact if white people were experiencing anything remotely resembling a genocide white nationalists would not throw the term around so lightly. But when a given group is used to having all of the political power, and virtually unlimited privilege to define and name the world, any power sharing, any obligation to hear the opinions of formerly ‘subject races’ – who would have once been called uppity niggers and lynched accordingly – can feel like oppression.

Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire – ‘fuck the bloody foreigners’. Never mind that waves of migration have been a constant in British history and that great many millions of 'white' Britons are themselves descendants of Jewish, Eastern European and Irish migrants of the nineteenth century, nor that even in the post-war 'mass migration' years, Ireland and Europe were the largest source of immigrants. And, of course, let's say nothing about the millions of British emigrants, settlers and colonists abroad - conveniently labeled 'expats'.

What racialised stop and search is about, in London at least, is letting young black boys and men know their place in British society, letting them know who holds the power and showing them that their day can be held up even in a nice ‘liberal’ area like Camden in a way that will never happen to their white friends, if they still have any left by the time they have their first encounter with the police. It is about social engineering and about the conditioning of expectations, about getting black people used to the fact that they are not real and full citizens, so they should learn to not expect the privileges that would usually accrue from such a status. Racialised stop and search is also a legacy of more direct and brutal forms of policing the black body in the UK, from back in the days before political correctness.

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.

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 youth 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?

The picture is nevertheless complicated in Britain – at home, if not in its former empire – and might provide some of the reasons why white people here sometimes find terms like ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege’ either inapplicable to Britain or hard to understand. First, Britain never practised open white supremacy on domestic soil as it did in the colonies, so those of us who hail from the colonies have a different understanding of British racial governance, even if we were born here. Second, the most deprived and violent regions of Britain remain areas that are almost exclusively white, such as the rough parts of Glasgow, Belfast and north-east England, a subject to which we will return later. Can the white people who burned to death in Grenfell Tower along with the ‘ethnics’, or were crushed to death at Hillsborough and then demonised in the press as thieves, or the dead at Aberfan, be said to have had ‘white privilege’? I can totally see why this might at first seem absurd to some people. Especially in relation to Kensington and Chelsea, where the working-class Muslim population in the north of the borough so visible during the Grenfell fire contrasts sharply with another large population of Muslims in the south of the borough who hail from the Gulf states, and are rich enough for the paupers to know not to aim their hatred of Muslims at them as they drive up Kensington High Street in their Louis Vuitton-patterned Lamborghinis.

Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox said in 2016, in the run-up to the EU referendum, that ‘the United Kingdom is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its twentieth-century history.’ Funny, because Britain is in fact one of the few countries in the world that literally did bury a good portion of its twentieth-century history. During the period of decolonisation, the British state embarked upon a systematic process of destroying the evidence of its crimes. Codenamed ‘Operation Legacy’, the state intelligence agencies and the Foreign Office conspired to literally burn, bury at sea or hide vast amounts of documents containing potentially sensitive details of things done in the colonies under British rule.25 Anything that might embarrass the government, that would show religious or racial intolerance or be used ‘unethically’ by a post-independence government was ordered destroyed or hidden. The Foreign Office were forced to admit in court about having hidden documents, then were unforthcoming about the scale of what was hidden, to the point that you’d be a fool to trust anything that is now said. But from what we know, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents were destroyed and over a million hidden, not just starting in the colonial period but dating all the way back to 1662. This operation was only exposed to the public in 2011 as part of a court case between the survivors of British concentration camps in Kenya and the government.

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 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.

We judge the street corner hustler or working-class criminal - from East Glasgow to East London - but we see a job as an investment banker, even in firms that launder the profits of drug cartels, fund terrorism, aid the global flow of arms, fuel war, oil spills, land grabs and generally fuck up the planet, as a perfectly legitimate, even aspirational occupation.

It would be easy for me to ignore these factors and claim myself to be a ‘self-made’ man, but in reality there is no such thing. Countless teachers and community activists gave me the tools for navigating life’s roadmap; football coaches taught me to play and kept me out of trouble. I am not saying that my own hard work, discipline and sacrifice have played no role in my life’s outcomes; that would be absurd. But I am saying that even these characteristics were nourished with help, support and encouragement from others, and that without this support – much of it from volunteers – it’s inconceivable that I would be where I am today.

But of all the men in my life, it is my godfather, ‘Uncle Offs’, the man to whom this book is dedicated, who made the biggest impact on my upbringing. While he was technically just a family friend, he has played a greater role in my life than many parents do in the lives of their own children. He was so close to my parents, and loved me and my siblings so much, that when my mum got cancer he agreed to let us live with him if she died, despite the fact that he had three children of his own and lived on a council estate in Hackney. I often wonder where men like my Uncle Offs fit in to the stereotype of the supposedly ubiquitously absent black father.

But nonetheless, if a poet whose entire career has been spent fighting racism can find himself looking for the ‘white person in charge’, it gives us a sense of the degree to which reality has conditioned our expectations, even in London.

I was born into these currents, I did not create or invent them and I make no claims to objectivity. I find the whole idea that we can transcend our experiences; and take a totally unbiased look at the world to be totally ridiculous, yet that’s what many historians and academics claim to do. We are all influenced by what we are exposed to and experience; the best we can hope for is to try and be as fair as possible from within the bias inherent in existence.

Is state education designed to encourage more Darwins and Newtons, or to create middle-management civil servants and workers? What tensions are brought into being when a child’s natural proclivity to question everything in their own unique way comes into contact with a one-size-fits-all mode of education?

This 'if you pull your socks up' trope also ignores the reality that many Britons (and people around the globe) are poor and getting poorer through no fault of their own under austerity - the technical term for class robbery. Can a nurse whose pay increases are capped at 1 per cent - below the rate of inflation - by politicians who have not capped their own pay, change the fact that he or she is literally getting poorer every passing year, despite doing the same bloody hard work?

so much bigger than themselves. They could easily have kept quiet and just continued being widely admired multi-millionaires. But hey, their political opponents were pro bombing ‘gooks’ thousands of miles away in one case, and are determined to ignore police brutality, even when police are caught on camera executing twelve-year-olds playing in the park, in the other. So not much hope for logic from them.

So, after our grandmothers had helped build the National Health Service and our grandfathers had staffed the public transport system, British MPs could openly talk about repatriation – we were no longer needed, excess labour, surplus to requirements, of no further use to capital. The entire management of ‘race’ – the media propaganda, the overstaffed mental institutions, the severe unemployment, the massively disproportionate

State schooling in Britain both today and when I was a child seems stuck in a Victorian-era paradigm, guided by notions of discipline, obedience and deference to ones betters, of becoming a good worker and getting a good job. The idea that we go to school to find our passions, our calling, to learn to be happy, to ‘draw out that which is within’, as the root meaning of the word ‘educate’ commands, is almost entirely absent. Let alone any sense that we plebs should contemplate participating in the governing of the country.

Take the ‘historians’ that claimed that Africans, unlike the rest of humanity, had no history, and thus when they found evidence of this supposedly absent history from ‘pre-colonial’ Africa – from the ruins of great Zimbabwe, to the manuscripts of Timbuktu, to the sublime metal art of Ile Ife and Benin – set about trying to look for a non-African source for these works. In some cases, scholars were more willing to entertain the idea that aliens were responsible for African history than Africans!

left school without knowing what capitalism was, much less a mortgage, interest rates, central banking, fiat currency or quantitative easing. The word imperialism had never been used in the classroom, much less ‘class struggle’. What history I did learn can be seen as little more than aristocratic nationalist propaganda; Henry VIII and his marital dramas; how Britain and America defeated the Nazis – minus the Commonwealth and with a very vague mention of the Soviet contribution; how Britain had basically invented democracy and all that was good and wonderful.

Haiti declared itself independent in 1804. This was the first and only successful slave revolution in human history, and only the second colony in the Americas to be free of European rule. Haiti abolished slavery immediately upon independence – thirty years before Britain would do so in its Caribbean possessions – and became the first state in the world to outlaw racism in its constitution, despite everything done in the name and practice of white supremacy on the island over the preceding centuries.

Despite my granddad spending a lifetime complaining about the immigrants and darkies, he took his military pension and retired to Thailand and saw no contradiction. In typical expat style, he did not learn the language, did not integrate and did not particularly respect the culture; he lived in his enclave with other ‘expats’ from Australia and America and moaned about the Thais in their own country instead. After my granddad’s death, my white gran went native and got re-married to a Thai man, much to the

We can glean some insight by contrasting how these same organs of the press and political institutions have chosen to remember or depict another man and country of whom Mandela was a great admirer; Castro and Cuba. Somehow these belated anti-apartheid types have either forgotten or do not know that the only non-African nation to send its troops to actually fight the apartheid regime was Cuba.

by the time this teacher was telling me that Wilberforce had set Africans free I already had some knowledge of the rebel slaves known as ‘Maroons’ across the Caribbean, and of the Haitian Revolution, so I had some idea that the enslaved had not just sat around waiting for Wilberforce, or anyone else for that matter, to come and save them. While it’s certainly true that Britain had a popular abolitionist movement to a far greater degree than the other major slaveholding powers in Europe at the time, and this is in its own way interesting and remarkable, generations of Brits have been brought up to believe what amount to little more than fairy tales with regard to the abolition of slavery. If you learn only three things during your education in Britain about transatlantic slavery they will be: 1. Wilberforce set Africans free 2. Britain was the first country to abolish slavery (and it did so primarily for moral reasons) 3. Africans sold their own people. The first two of these statements are total nonsense, the third is a serious oversimplification. What does it say about this society that, after two centuries of being one of the most successful human traffickers in history, the only historical figure to emerge from this entire episode as a household name is a parliamentary abolitionist? Even though the names of many of these human traffickers surround us on the streets and buildings bearing their names, stare back at us through the opulence of their country estates still standing as monuments to king sugar, and live on in the institutions and infrastructure built partly from their profits – insurance, modern banking, railways – none of their names have entered the national memory to anything like the degree that Wilberforce has. In fact, I sincerely doubt that most Brits could name a single soul involved with transatlantic slavery other than Wilberforce himself. The ability for collective, selective amnesia in the service of easing a nation’s cognitive dissonance is nowhere better exemplified than in the manner that much of Britain has chosen to remember transatlantic slavery in particular, and the British Empire more generally

Racist insults leave you feeling dirty because, even at five years old, we already know on some level that, in this society at least, we are indeed lesser citizens with all the baggage of racialised history following us ghost-like about our days. We are conquered people living in the conquerors’ land, and as such we are people without honour.

State schooling in Britain both today and when I was a child seems stuck in a Victorian-era paradigm, guided by notions of discipline, obedience and deference to ones betters, of becoming a good worker and getting a good job. The idea that we go to school to find our passions, our calling, to learn to be happy, to ‘draw out that which is within’, as the root meaning of the word ‘educate’ commands, is almost entirely absent. Let alone any sense that we plebs should contemplate participating in the governing of the country.

You see, while the people in the colonies were being told Britain was their mother, much of white Britain had convinced itself that these undeserving niggers - Asians were niggers too, back then - had just got off their banana boats to come and freeload, to take 'their' jobs and steal ‘their’ women. Never mind that Britain has a German royal family, a Norman ruling elite, a Greek patron saint, a Roman/Middle Eastern religion, Indian food as its national cuisine, an Arabic/Indian numeral system, a Latin alphabet and an identity predicated on a multi-ethnic, globe-spanning empire- ‘fuck the bloody foreigners'. Never mind that waves of migration have been a constant in British history and that great many millions of ‘white' Britons are themselves descendants of Jewish, Eastern European and Irish migrants of the nineteenth century, nor that even in the post-war 'mass migration' years, Ireland and Europe were the largest source of immigrants. And, of course, let's say nothing about the millions of British emigrants, settlers and colonists abroad - conveniently labelled 'expats'.

Of course, a few successful black people also do very little to alter the race– class dynamics of the UK and can even help to cement it. These successes can and will be used – even sometimes by the ‘middle class’ respectable black people themselves – to beat other poor people that ‘didn’t make it’ over the head. They can be used to pretend that the system is just and there are enough seats at the table – ‘if you just work hard and pull your socks up you can be like me’ – rather than simply being honest about the way things actually work. Most people, it seems to me at least, hate poor people more than they hate poverty.

Nelson Mandela was already a name synonymous with freedom and wisdom, justice and principle, by the time I took my first steps. However, it was not until over a decade later, when in my late teens I started to do a little reading and research of my own, that I even heard mention of Cuba's contribution to anti-apartheid. This obvious omission, along with the simplistic narratives that surrounded Mandela and Castro, was a valuable lesson to me about how the powerful craft history and news media to their own ends.

The officer's question already let me know that in his eyes I was dirt; that is, matter out of place.

What’s most funny is that my composer friend confuses and confounds the racial stereotypes of everybody. He is very traditionally ‘well spoken’ - even posh - and a classical composer. He is also one of the best-dressed men going and manages to pull off 'out there’ fashions that most brothers would never try, such as tweed suits and ponchos. Black people sometimes hear the accent, see the clothes and assume 'he wants to be white’, because they have sadly internalised the idea that there are only certain types of authentic ways to be black. I’ve seen their shock too, when they realise how ‘black’ his politics are despite the suits, the piano and the RP. He actually knows far more about African history and culture than the vast majority of dashiki-wearing Afrocentrists. White people often make the same mistake and say the strangest of things to him, again thinking that he is not one of ‘those’ black people - you know, the ones that respect and love themselves.

Are we really trying to encourage and normalise black academic excellence in the UK? Or would we prefer the extra cost of imprisonment and crime that comes further down the line after neglect, just so one can still feel superior?

The fact that the question is even asked, the fact that black excellence in a particular field needs ‘explaining’, tells its own story. I can’t recall any documentaries trying to discover an organisational gene left over from fascism that explains why Germany and Italy have consistently been Europe’s best performing football teams. Spain’s brief spell as the best team in the world, with a generation of players born in the years immediately after Franco’s death, would seem to confirm my fascism-meets-football thesis, right? Clearly this would be a ridiculous investigation - or who knows maybe I am on to something - but the question would never be asked because German, Italian and Spanish brilliance don’t really need explaining, or at least not in such negative ways. When I was young, I vividly remember watching a BBC doc called Dreaming of Ajax which investigated why one Dutch club, Ajax Amsterdam, was able to produce better football players than the whole of England. It was a fantastic documentary that looked with great admiration at the obviously superior coaching systems of Ajax, which became so visible in their home-grown players’ performances. But it did not look for some mystery Dutch gene left over from some horrendous episode in European history. Nor did white dominance in tennis or golf - until Tiger and the Williams sisters, anyway - need to be explained by their ancestors having so much practice whipping people for so long, and ending up with strong shoulders and great technique as a result!

As long as whiteness is a metaphor for power, blackness must of course function as a metaphor for powerlessness, and as long as money whitens, poverty must blacken.

Prior to colonialism, black Africans seem to have found their blackness perfectly beautiful and normal, unsurprisingly. But also, by making whiteness the colour of oppression, the colour that defined a person’s right to own other human beings, to rape and kill and steal with impunity, white supremacists had paradoxically opened up the way for blackness to become the colour of freedom, of revolution and of humanity. This is why it’s absurd to compare black nationalism and white nationalism; not because black people are inherently moral, but because the projects of the two nationalisms were entirely different. This difference is why the black nationalist Muhammad Ali could still risk his life, give up the prime years of his career and lose millions of dollars in solidarity with the non-black, non-American people of Vietnam. It’s also why Ali could show as much sympathy as he did to the white people of Ireland in their quarrels with Britain, despite him saying, somewhat rhetorically, that 'The white man is the devil’.

I think he would be very proud of the continuing legacy of Britain in those places around the world, and particularly I think he would be amazed at India, the world’s largest democracy - a stark contrast, of course, with other less fortunate countries that haven’t had the benefit of British rule. If I can say this on the record - why not? It’s true, it’s true.’ - Boris Johnson of Winston Churchill, on whom he has just finished writing a book ‘I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.’ ‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ - Winston Churchill

And here we come to the old adage, the third slavery fact we learned in school and offered to us again by Geldof and so many others: 'Africans sold their own people’. There are a number of obvious problems with the ‘Africans sold their own people’ cliche, but that still does not seem to have stopped people offering it as an ‘argument’. First and foremost, does the fact that Britain had ‘African’ accomplices rid it of any and all wrongdoing? According to many, it does. Second, there was no continental ‘African’ identity before industrial technology, the Scramble for Africa, the redrawing of borders and the modern pan-Africanist movement created it in the twentieth century, and that African identity is still fraught with contradictions and conflicts. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Africa was not a paradise where all humans sat together around the campfire in their loincloths singing ‘Kumbaya’ in one huge - but obviously primitive - black kingdom covering the entire continent and littered with quaint looking mud huts, any more than all of Europe or Asia was one big happy family. Africa had and has ethnic, cultural, class and imperial rivalries that every scholar of the period acknowledges are the very divisions that colonisers and slave traders played on. In fact, as the award-winning historian Sylviane A. Diouf notes, in none of the slave narratives that have survived do the formerly enslaved talk about being sold by other ‘Africans’, or by ‘their own people’ and only Sancho - who lived in England - even mentions the ‘blackness’ of those that sold him. The victims of the transatlantic traffic did not think that they were being sold out by their ‘black brothers and sisters’ any more than the Irish thought that their ‘white brothers and sisters’ from England were deliberately starving them to death during the famine.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

To be black, poor and politicised in Britain is to see the ugliest side of the police and indeed of Britain itself; it is to see behind the curtain and not be fooled by the circus, and to feel crazy because so many others cannot see what is so clear to you. When my safety was threatened when I was growing up the last thing I would have done would be to call the police, it would not even have crossed my mind. The police brutalised pretty much every black Caribbean man of my father’s age that I know, with impunity. Cynthia Jarret died when they raided her home, they shot Cherry Groce and despite all of the suspicious deaths in custody and even in cases where inquest juries have returned a verdict of unlawful killing, the police are never punished. I know some people reading this will find it very hard to believe that police used to just grab black men off the street and beat them for no reason, but I suggest that if you are one of those people you just talk to some black people over the age of fifty about their experiences, or if you need white confirmation, talk to some Irish people of that age, as they were often treated relatively similarly back then.

Apartheid used racism to justify stealing enormous tracts of land by force and treating a huge black workforce like they were subhuman, with no real rights, no freedoms to travel in their own country and no real recourse to the law with respect to the abuses of their oppressors. Needless to say, this exploited black labour force, along with the fantastic mineral wealth of southern Africa, produced uncountable fortunes for transnational corporations, and some of the highest living standards in the world for most white South Africans. Given a basic understanding of apartheid’s economic underpinnings, it would not be unreasonable to ask whether that economic relationship between black and white, between large transnational corporations and black labour, has changed since 1994. If apartheid was primarily an economic system, surely to claim as we do that apartheid has ended there must then, by inference, be something resembling economic justice occurring over there in southern Africa?

We live in a world where literal card-carrying Nazis getting punched in the face or being refused platforms to speak garners more liberal outrage than twelve-year-old Tamir Rice being executed on camera by the police while playing alone in the park.

It won’t matter how many empirical studies you can provide, including the DfES’s own report, or studies that have looked at every school in the UK or decades of academics and leading experts in the field showing empirically and measurably that anti-black racism is still a serious systemic issue adversely affecting outcomes for black students; many will do intellectual backflips to conclude something else is the cause, even when the black person talking to them is already successful and educated and therefore has nothing to 'make excuses’ about. Naturally, it’s far easier to believe that there is just something wrong with black people than really accept the scale of the mundane injustice of everyday black life in Britain; decades of unfair expulsions, potential wasted and dreams derailed.

Real-life racism makes you paranoid, even in children it creates the dilemma of not knowing if someone is just being horrible in the ‘normal’ way, as people so often are, or if you are being ‘blacked off’ - as me and my friends call it.

It is often said that travel is the best education. These two trips, both undertaken before I was eleven, had managed to teach me much about the stupidity and fluidity of race, about how my own racial identity changed from place to place and how the people in the hills and gullies of St Ann’s or the islands of the Outer Hebrides can be more enlightened and welcoming than some of us from the educated bright lights of the big cities.