Akala QUOTES

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

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

22 " 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’. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

23 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

24 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

25 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

26 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

27 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

28 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

29 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

30 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

31 " 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? "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

32 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

33 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

34 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

35 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

36 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

37 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

38 " 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'. "

― Akala , Natives Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire / Black Listed / Black and British: A Forgotten History

39 " 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. "

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

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

― Akala , Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire