Extracted from Natives, Race And Class In The Ruins Of The Empire, by Akala

At five, the hip-hop poet was racially abused at school. Could his mother ever really understand?

Before this, my mum was just my mum, a flawless superhero, as any loving parent is in a five-year-old’s eyes. I sensed that something about that image was changing in the moment, something we could never take back. I wanted to un-ask the question. My mother’s expression was halfway between shock and resignation: she’d known this day would come, but the directness of the question still took her aback.

She thought for a moment and then, using one of her brilliant if unintentional psychological masterstrokes, replied something to the effect of: “Yes, I’m white, but I’m German and they’re English.” It didn’t matter that my mum was not really German – she was born in Germany but brought up in Hong Kong – or that I was technically English: my mum had created a safety valve for me, so that I could feel comfortable reporting racist abuse to her without having to worry that I was hurting her feelings. Even at five, I knew instinctively that whiteness, like all systems of power, preferred not to be interrogated.

I told my mum that the boy had called me a “Chinese black nigger bastard”. I felt naughty even saying the words. My mum must have had to resist the urge to laugh before the anger set in. What a combination of words! We had to give the lad – or more probably his parents – 10/10 for originality.

From that day, my relationship with my mother was not just that of mother and son, but of a white mother to a black son. Race had intervened and now marked our actions and attitudes, coloured our conversations and heightened the usual conflicts, mapping on to them the loss and suffering of the black world at the hands of “whitey” – and the strange mix of guilt, fear and superiority that a great many white people feel as a result, but rarely talk about. It did not matter that my mother’s family was poor by British standards, that they had their own history of horrendous institutional abuse, or even that she was half Scottish: race overrode those nuances.

Education was not particularly encouraged in my mother’s household when she was growing up, and certainly not for girls. Her father was an ignorant, violent, unapologetically racist man. He was also conditioned by the class and gender relationships of his day, so when my mother got the highest grades of her siblings – she had three brothers – he told her she must have cheated. When her teacher encouraged her to go to university, her response was to laugh uncomfortably and say, “No, sir, that’s for posh people.”

However, she made friends with the only black family where she grew up – the family of Uncle Offs, the man who would become my godfather. Uncle Offs’ own father was a university-educated schoolteacher in his native Guyana, and it was expected that his children would get a good education. My mum was encouraged by the family to attend university, and so she did, pursuing a degree in Caribbean history. Her induction into a radical, anti-colonial black politics fundamentally shaped the way she raised her children.

Now race had made itself known to us, my mum did not hold back: my siblings and I would watch films about the civil rights struggle, slavery and apartheid. She gave me a box of tapes of Malcolm X speeches for my 10th birthday. She did everything she could to make sure I “knew myself”.

Yet for all her education and political activity, she was still white; she could never really “get it”. She could never reach her black son in the way other black people could, and we both became painfully aware of this. As I grew into a young man, our conversations became tinged with racial difference and I became embarrassed by her whiteness, drifting deeper into a half-digested black nationalist politics refracted to me through hip-hop and a couple of books I’d half-read.

I saw the pain and uncertainty in her face as I became a teenager and then a black man, her fears for and of my body; the 6ft-tall adult, the scowling brown face that had once been a naive, smiling five-year-old who didn’t yet know that his mother was not a “sister”, but the oppressor.

For a long time, race threatened to wreck our relationship, combined with the stresses of being poor and the more mundane familial resentments; but we survived and, after many, many struggles, flourished.

By the time I realised my mum was white, she knew only too well. She had been called “nigger lover” enough times; she had watched my dad fight the National Front and assorted bigots almost daily, while her own father had disowned her for “getting with a nigger”. People she had grown up with walked past her when she pushed our prams; others refused to believe we were really her children in the culture of the time.

It wasn’t until my late teens that I started to really think about what whiteness means. I questioned how Celts, Saxons, Corsicans and Nordic people had all come to be defined as “white”. “Whiteness is a metaphor for power,” James Baldwin tells us. “Money whitens,” say the Brazilians. South Africans can be found calling rich black people “white man”, and they mean this as a compliment. Or, as Frantz Fanon tells us, “You are rich because you are white, because you are white you are rich.”

The mental and emotional benefits of whiteness are why my grandad – working class, a soldier who had been tortured in battle, an uneducated alcoholic with few serious accomplishments – could still say, “Well, at least I am not a nigger” as often as he did. What did my grandfather understand about whiteness that so many pretend they cannot?

And it’s also why, though my mum was far from rich and had a great many sufferings of her own, she still shared a degree of racial discomfort when faced with the questioning eyes of her five-year-old son. But she sought and led him to answers, and did her best to rise to the challenge

Natives, Race And Class In The Ruins Of The Empire by Akala is published by Two Roads.

Source: The Guardian

For the first time in my adult life, someone I would consider to be a fundamentally decent human being has a chance of being elected.

However, I will be voting for the first time in June and I will – I am shocked to be typing this – be voting Labour. I am not a Labour supporter; I do not share the romantic idea that the Labour party was ever as radical an alternative as some would like to think. Despite building the welfare state, Labour has been an imperialist party from Attlee to Wilson to Blair, thus as a “third world” internationalist I have never been able to vote for them.

So why will I be voting now? Jeremy Corbyn. It’s not that I am naive enough to believe that one man (who is, of course, powerless without the people that support him) can fundamentally alter the nature of British politics, or that I think that if Labour wins that the UK will suddenly reflect his personal political convictions, or even that I believe that the prime minister actually runs the country. However for the first time in my adult life, and perhaps for the first time in British history, someone I would consider to be a fundamentally decent human being has a chance of being elected.

I recognise that Corbyn is an imperfect “leader”. He was abysmal during the Brexit campaign for example. He is a politician, and he will make more mistakes.

We do not need perfect politicians, because we are not perfect people ourselves. As well as his historical stances on apartheid and other issues, Corbyn has consistently voted against the UK’s worst acts of foreign aggression, including being one of only 13 MPs to vote against Nato’s horrific intervention in Libya in 2011 – an intervention that has played no small part in the subsequent refugee crisis and the direct spreading of terrorism.

We keep being told Corbyn is unelectable. Yet we were also told that he would not win the Labour leadership. He may not have the “electric” personality that electorates are concerned about in these days of celebrity culture, but politics should not – primarily – be about personalities; it should be about policies – and Theresea May hardly exudes charisma. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are probably the most charismatic English-speaking politicians of my lifetime, but their actual policies were horrendous.

I understand that for much of the UK electorate British foreign policy is not a priority. But for those of us that still have family in the global south and/or have political worldviews shaped by ideas of human solidarity, this is a primary concern.

What would happen if at some point in the future the Jamaican (or any other global south) government decided to nationalise what little bauxite (or other commodity) it has left, or to default on its IMF repayments? What would be the US response? Blockade? Invasion? Would Jamaica’s homophobia and police brutality suddenly get bumped up into the “human rights issues” club? Would the positive trends in Jamaican society (such as ranking 32 places above the UK for press freedom or being one of only three countries on Earth where your boss is more likely to be a woman) be ignored by the media so that a one-dimensional, despotic, draconian vision of the country could be drilled into the global psyche in preparation for invasion? Would Britain berate its American ally for its aggressions and force it to seek a peaceful solution to a problem in a Commonwealth country? Maybe ask the Grenadians.

We could ask the same of much more powerful countries, say India; could the treatment of Sikhs, Adivasis, the issues in Kashmir and what Narendra Modi himself oversaw in Gujarat be manipulated to justify war, should India disobey global corporate power? Certainly. It seems increasingly clear that America is preparing for war with North Korea and make no mistake about it – if the Tories get their mandate, our taxes will be right there with them.

These scenarios may seem far-fetched to some, but when we hear these revisionist imperial morons chanting about Empire 2.0 like it’s a new flavour of sugar-free drink what are we to think?

There are a great many other progressive policies that make Corbyn a genuinely different candidate from what we have seen before, but another key area is the NHS. If you want to see what privatised healthcare looks like just ask any American. The ethos behind the NHS is one of the most egalitarian ideas ever: it must be protected at all costs. The Tories have made their intentions in this area quite plain – as has Corbyn.

Let’s be quite clear, I am not suggesting that we cease any other sort of progressive political activity. I simply think we cannot afford, in this very particular set of circumstances, to not vote. You may believe Labour has no chance of winning and therefore it is pointless. I disagree. Let’s at least show how many people need and want the progressive ticket that Corbyn is running on. Then, at least, we have something to build on. Though of course the aim is to win – and there are more than enough people like me that did not vote in the last election to swing it entirely.