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| Akala in 2014 |
Here is a section of the Wikipedia entry for Akala:
"Kingslee James McLean Daley (born 1 December 1983),[1] known professionally as Akala, is a British rapper, writer and activist from Kentish Town, London. In 2006, he was voted the Best Hip Hop Act at the MOBO Awards[2] and has been included on the annual Powerlist of the 100 most influential Black British people in the UK, most recently making the 2021 edition.[3][4]"
Make no mistake - Natives is a vital book for understanding our society and our history. David Olusoga (see my blogpost link here: Rob Donovan - Author: FRUITS OF THE MARAZION QUAKER LIBRARY (8) - DAVID OLUSOGA (2020) 'BLACK AND BRITISH - A SHORT, ESSENTIAL HISTORY') wrote in the Guardian: 'Part biography, part polemic, this powerful, wide-ranging study picks apart the British myth of meritocracy'. The Independent noted that Akala's 'Natives' was 'A potent combination of autobiography and political history which holds up a mirror to contemporary Britain.
Akala explains that the purpose of his book is to examine how the seemingly impersonal forces of race and class have impacted and continue to shape our lives, and 'how easily I could now be telling you a very different but much more common story of cyclical violence, prison and part-time, insecure and low-paying work'.
In Chapter 1, Akala provides a devastating analysis of Britain in the 1980s, the decade of his birth. We were and are a racist society and he lays the historical reasons bare. Such racism cannot be understood without grasping the power of class. In short, 'whiteness', to quote James Baldwin, 'is a metaphor for power'. Those who have exercised power in the world have been and still largely are white. Blackness is bad; whiteness is good. This was why, in spite of all the sufferings of poor people in Britain, there was a 'Keep Britain White' campaign that sections of the working class supported. Akala's maternal granddad was an uneducated, alcoholic, working class soldier who had been tortured in battle who could still say 'well at least I am not a nigger.' These are ideas that Akala teases out quite brilliantly with scholarly support. Akala's father was black Jamaican, his mother was white Scottish; the full picture is more complex and nuanced but the essence of Akala's personal history is that he was a Camden boy who grew up in poverty and into a black identity and way of life which could have cost him his life. He carried a knife. Good fortune favoured him. It did not for many of his extended family members and 'cousins'.
Chapter 3 - 'Special Needs?' takes you into the realities of the racism in the primary school system that Akala encountered. He was shunted into a Special Needs class to spare his teacher her discomfort at having to cope with a bright and independent boy who didn't realize that such qualities were not proper for his blackness. His mum, ever supportive, was told by his black teachers at the all-important Saturday school where his real learning was encouraged, that something was wrong - Akala was becoming withdrawn and misbehaving. Mum demanded her son be returned to the mainstream in his state school. Eventually, one male teacher helped restore his self-esteem and attitude to school - but there were more encounters with racist teachers to come. Akala concludes:
'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... Despite the fact that I got almost straight As, at no point in my formal schooling was I ever taught to think in terms of class or race, even though those two concepts have obviously shaped the world and my reality so profoundly - though in full fairness I did not take sociology as a GCSE option'.
I feel drawn to Akala's concerns. Such matters as this - the link between racism and education - shaped my working life as a teacher and department head of history over seven years in a London social-priority, multiracial comprehensive serving Harlesden and Willesden in its Brent catchment area during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Here is a link to a piece I wrote in 1984 about these years after I had left this school. Below is a photo taken of my form 1X1 and me at the end of the school year in 1978. I remained their form tutor for the next five years. Reading Akala, I now understand why a number of the lads who had clearly enjoyed my enthusiasm at the beginning became distant once they became fully self-identified as black in their adolescence.
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| Me and my form - 1X1 - (they were nearly all twelve/thirteen years old by July 1978 when this picture was taken) |
This blogpost is intended to serve as a taster for this magnificent book so let me give you the chapter headings from Chapter 4 to the end:
Chapter 4 Linford's lunchbox
Chapter 4 Linford's lunchbox
Chapter 5 Empire and Slavery in the British Memory
Chapter 6 Scotland and Jamaica
Chapter 7 Police, Peers and Teenage Years
Chapter 8 Why Do White People Love Mandela?/Why Do Conservatives Hate Castro?
Chapter 9 The Ku Klux Klan Stopped Crime by Killing Black People
Chapter 10 Britain and America
Chapter 11 The Decline of Whiteness, the Decline of Race? (Or the End of Capitalism?)
In addition, here are some of my summaries with quotations from these pages to give you a sense of his analysis:
Racism is bad for the mental well being of racists.
"Dangerous as racism is, it also makes victims out of white people - like those of my school teachers that felt threatened by a child's intelligence... I know some black and brown folk reading this will think I have gone crazy, but hear me out... " (p.105)
Poverty and powerlessness go hand in hand with blackness.
"That even black people can seriously internalise anti-black sentiment can be seen in the massive trend for skin bleaching across black communities... As long as whiteness is a metaphor for power, blackness must of course be a metaphor for powerlessness, and as long as money whitens, poverty must blacken." (p.111)
Most Brits seem incapable of accepting that their history has included racist murder.
"What is most fascinating about British intellectual discourse is that we can see brutality ever so clearly when it wears Japanese or German or Islamic clothes, but when it comes to looking in the mirror at (Britain and its Empire) - the eighteenth-century's premier slave trader, the mother country of the Commonwealth and one of the pioneer countries in developing and then putting into practice the Enlightenment philosophy of white supremacy - so many people become blind, deaf and dumb, unable to see murder as murder." (p.149)
Black understanding of the racist nature of stop and search is sidelined and ignored by the police and media.
"Racialised stop and search is not really about fighting crime... 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." (p.178)
Compared with other similarly developed West European countries, Britain has 'a particularly vicious class system'.
"(No comparable country) has 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." (p.201)
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| Published in 2018 - and very much the book for this decade too |
Why, in Britain and elsewhere in the West, is Nelson Mandela so venerated - and Fidel Castro so hated? Akela argues that Mandela's bravery and integrity can afford to be held in high esteem in part because the interests of the rich and powerful in South Africa - and their Western connections - have not been harmed since the end of apartheid. Cuba and Castro are targets because they have been so successful in creating a socialist state which, whatever the failings, has defied American sanctions and still raised living and health standards.
"Nelson Mandela was more than smart enough to know that ANC's compromises would mean continued misery, poverty and a virtual police state for most black South Africans, though perhaps he had a longer-term vision... when black South Africans claim that the ANC and the post-apartheid order has failed them, they more than have a point."
"So if the average Cuban is several times less likely to be murdered than the average South African - either by another Cuban or by the state - has access to healthcare, housing and education to a far greater degree and can expect to live more than ten years longer, it would be quite fair to say post-Castro Cuba is faring better than post-Mandela South Africa on many important human indices." (p.223-4)
Akala was bright and outspoken at school; he engaged in debate. He knew one female teacher was racist. She hated losing out in a class discussion to a know-it-all black teenager - and lost it, making this claim that the KKK were crime fighters lynching Black Americans. Akala resisted his urge to violence but wrote a letter of complaint to the governors - which led nowhere.
"'The Ku Klux Klan also stopped crime by killing black people'... Now imagine standing in front of students whom you are supposed to teach, in one of the most multicultural areas in the world [Camden], and saying that killing black people, including children, with all the spectacle and pomp of a summer fete, is somehow crime fighting." (p.237)
Some things are obvious when they are pointed out - but being racialized white can get in the way at first.
"Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK [Northern Ireland and Glasgow] 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... you can imagine my shock when there was, in the UK, such a thing as 'black-on-black violence'. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland... or Glasgow... has ever been referred to as 'white-on-white' crime... 'Black-on-black crime' carries the message 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..." (pp.275-6)
Akala does offer insights into Trump's first presidency but of course did not anticipate what we are now experiencing - Trump's second presidency. Akala does, however, write with prophetic insight about the geopolitical changes that Trump is now responding to:
"Now that Europe is no longer the centre of gravity in world politics or economics, and now that the biggest Western power is pivoting to Asia - no prizes for guessing where that means the US is pivoting away from - how will western Europeans react to dropping to 'third place' behind Asia and the USA in economic and military terms?... It's easy to see how, in the twenty-first century, the very idea of race and even 'Western' society itself could easily come apart at the seams." (pp.284-5)
Oh my! There is so much in this brilliant book to applaud - and so much of what we read and listen to in the media falls so far short of the sharpness in Akala's analysis.
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