3
" 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’. "
― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire
11
" Open up your chakra
Because once that’s happened there’s no going back
Once you start to see what is really happening
Who the enemy you should be attackin’ is
So READ, READ, READ!
Stuck on the block, READ, READ!
Sittin’ in the box, READ, READ!
Don’t let them say what you can achieve
Cos' when people are enslaved
One of the first things they do is stop them reading
Cos’ it is well understood that intelligent people will take their freedom
Cos’ if we knew our power we would understand that we can’t be held down
If we knew our power, we would not elevate not one of these clowns
If we knew our power, we wouldn’t get arrogant when we get two pennies
If we knew our power, we would see what everybody sees, that we’re rich already! "
― Akala
13
" 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. "
― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire
15
" 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. "
― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire
17
" 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. "
― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire
