This article is a preview from the Autumn 2018 edition of New Humanist
The audience member’s question fitted squarely within the dominant discourse of the moment: why was the Labour party struggling in “traditional working-class towns”? But one of the BBC Question Time panellists, the rapper Akala, was puzzled. Wasn’t Labour doing quite well in places like Hackney, Tottenham and Moss Side? So what exactly was meant by “traditional”? What was that a euphemism for? The questioner was unable to answer.
In a set of overlapping and increasingly polarised national debates over who we are as a society, how we want to run our economy and what relationship we should have with the rest of the world, a few assumptions appear to be commonly shared. One is that Britain’s defining socio-political division is between a metropolitan liberal elite and a small-c conservative “traditional working class”. Another is that Britain must continue to play its traditional role as an enlightened global power. In his first book, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (Two Roads), the writer and musician Akala brings a much-needed perspective, informed by his roots in a part of British society that tends to be excluded from Westminster and Fleet Street.
Akala, aka Kingslee Daley, grew up in inner-city north London during the 1980s and 1990s, the son of a black father of Jamaican heritage and a white Anglo-Scottish mother. Natives is an ambitious and impressively successful attempt to tell the story of his own upbringing as a child of colour in a working-class single-parent family, and to make sense of that story within a wider context. From chapter to chapter, intimate and striking personal stories are woven together with an informed, wide-angle overview of the social forces and trends behind his particular life experience. These shifts of focus are not easy to pull off, but are made to look effortless by a writer-artist who has honed his skills as a rapper, poet and public speaker for many years.
Born in a decade of urban riots arising out of poverty and violent racist policing, brought up on free school meals, young Daley first saw someone stabbed at the age of 12 or 13, and was first stopped and searched by the police that same year. In a particularly powerful chapter on the official harassment and criminal violence of his youth, he writes that “it is hard to overstate just what a scary place London is to be a working-class black male teenager”. He estimates being stopped and searched roughly every other week for several years. This harassment has continued, albeit less frequently, into his mid-30s. Despite their supposed progress, he makes clear that institutionally the police continue to treat black men and boys like “matter that finds itself out of place. Dirt.”
Daley’s schooling, notwithstanding a number of good teachers, did little to help him understand his place within wider British society, whether in terms of class, race or the historical context of empire. This failure to actively nurture and include was accompanied by something much worse. He recounts several disturbing instances of teachers exuding a palpable discomfort at encountering an articulate and critically minded child of colour. In the most shocking example, a heated classroom discussion around historical racism culminated in a teacher telling him that “the Ku Klux Klan also stopped crime by killing black people”, the more telling detail being that the teacher faced no official sanction for this comment.
These should not be seen as isolated memories from a long since transcended era of political incorrectness. Daley notes that a study conducted by Bristol University in the mid-2000s showed a glaring discrepancy between the higher marks awarded to black school pupils by blind external examiners and those awarded to them by their own teachers. The disproportionate exclusion rates for black pupils tell the same story. This doubtless unconscious yet unmistakeable racist bias is being produced, to a systemic degree, not by some stereotypically ignorant “traditional working class” but by one of the most respectable (and liberal-left) elements of the professional middle class. The damage this does to people’s lives is incalculable.
One advantage afforded to the boy who grew up to be Akala was a politically conscious family and community. The deficiencies of the formal education system as far as children of colour were concerned were so egregious that supplementary Saturday Schools were set up by the working-class black community to give their kids the historical context and critical skills to help them make sense of their place in society and their specific experiences. It was here that he began to develop an understanding of the origins – the political economy – of the hostile attitudes and exclusionary state that he was confronted with.
As a grandson of the Windrush generation, Daley was a product of the British empire, and a target of its ideologies. In one chapter, he explores how fluid concepts of “race” and “whiteness” were invented and developed by elite intellectuals (including key Enlightenment figures) and continually adapted – scientifically, legally and socially – to serve the managerial and ideological needs of imperial power over the centuries. He observes how these historically ingrained and insidious assumptions endure into the present day, recounting with moving candour how their legacies even affected how he related to his white mother. Today, racialised ways of thinking remain pervasive throughout society, and yet seemingly invisible to all but those forced to live at their sharper edge.
Racism provided the ideological cement for some of the foundations of British capitalism, and by tracing these histories, Akala helps us to look at the nature of British power with fresh eyes. The prosperity of modern Britain was derived in no small part from the back-breaking labour of those whose modern descendants in the UK are excluded from the category of the “traditional” working class, namely the slaves of the Atlantic colonies and millions of other people of colour from around the world.
Violence, conquest and exploitation are the defining features of any empire, yet Akala’s frank engagement with these fundamental characteristics of Britain’s history stands in jarring contrast to the story told by both the chauvinistic right and the supposedly internationalist liberal wing of the political class. David Miliband’s claim that “if the world is increasingly divided between firefighters and arsonists, then Britain has for centuries been a firefighter” only makes sense in the alternate reality where we are encouraged to take patriotic pride in the abolition of slavery, rather than dwell on the formative role of its murderous and decades-long practice.
Akala situates today’s British foreign policy within a historical continuum tracing back to empire, remarking that ostensibly liberal rationales for the exertion of military power have been a common theme throughout, and noting the dissonance between carrying out supposedly “humanitarian” interventions in places like Libya while being actively complicit in indiscriminate bombing of civilians and the creation of a humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen. To take another example, the UK’s support for Apartheid South Africa was, for Daley, myself and many others, the most powerful symbol (in a crowded field) of the enduring character of British power, and where people like us stood in relation to it. The recently exposed cover-up of imperial-era records by the Foreign Office exemplifies both empire’s indispensability to understanding modern Britain and the establishment’s carefully selective approach to that history.
Akala is fundamentally an intellectual. His analytical style is clear-eyed and unsentimental, alive to nuance, complexity and contradiction. Scrupulously fair and always humane, he wears his erudition lightly, perhaps because from Saturday School onwards (and very much in spite of his formal education) critical intellectual activity has been of second nature to him. His conversational writing style is highly engaging, showing constant awareness of the reader’s potential counter-arguments.
Beyond his undoubted qualities as a writer, Akala’s voice is refreshing and stimulating precisely because it does not share its origins with those who tend to monopolise British intellectual life: that is to say, the white, the economically privileged and those educated in the conventional tradition of Western scholarship. Or, to put it more bluntly, those positioned adjacent to or within the core of British socio-economic and political power. It is precisely his distance from the dominant myths and ideology – indeed, his own direct experience of the realities that contradict those myths – that allows him to interrogate important aspects of our past and present that an increasingly disoriented pundit class can at times appear almost wilfully blind to.
He notes that right-wing social attitudes, particularly towards migrants, were far more closely correlated with a Brexit vote than social class, that black Britons (disproportionately working-class) voted overwhelmingly for Remain, and that working-class voters made up only a quarter of the total Leave vote. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump lost heavily in 2016 among people on low incomes, and overwhelmingly among people of colour. In both cases, a far more significant electoral factor that those “left behind” economically are the right-wing upper and middle classes; like those who, when Daley’s Windrush-generation grandfather earned enough money to move out to the suburbs, got up a petition to have him removed from the street.
After centuries of racialised hierarchy, the relative progress that has been made against racism is being experienced by many white people as a threat to their identity and status. A common theme expressed explicitly on the far right and through dog whistles on the more conventional right is one of white victimhood and paranoia, fomenting a backlash against a changing world. Racialised phobias expressed as “concerns” about immigrants sit within a broader backlash encompassing anxieties about the status of the West relative to the emerging powers of Asia (“make America great again”).
Akala helps us to understand these interlocking phenomena not as a culture war but as parts of the multifaceted battle for power and freedom that defines the world of 2018. We miss out on such enlightening analysis and perspective when people like the young Kingslee Daley are excluded from the national conversation.
