Antiracism Book Recommendations: Natives by Akala

Thursday 08-10-2020 - 10:00
Akala

As part of our commitment to becoming an actively antiracist organisation, we recently had an amazing training session with Minds of POC – a consultancy run by young women of colour with a background specifically in students’ unions. It was an incredible and challenging session for all of us, and really reaffirmed to us that antiracism isn’t something you can just do in training and consider settled – that learning needs to be an ongoing process.

As part of our organisational learning, we decided we’d found a (small, but growing) library of books themed around antiracism, Blackness and allyship – a package of resources we can share amongst staff to ensure we’re all continually working towards the same goal & mulling over the same ideas. We’d like to share some of the books that we’ve been reading with you, so you can hopefully learn along with us and maybe get a feel for how we’re approaching this important task.

I’m Kit – I’m the Digital & Marketing Coordinator at CSU. The book I chose to add to the library is Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala.

I’ve followed Akala’s career off-and-on for the better part of 15 years at this point. When I heard a couple of years ago that he’d been awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford Brookes, I wasn’t surprised. His lyrics are searing – grappling with issues that speak to the core of the Black British experience, the indifference and hostility of successive governments towards people of colour and how that trickles down into the public consciousness. Natives takes those pithy lyrics and expands them into a rich, compelling and educational work, one that’s really helped me to understand at least a part of what it means to grow up Black in the Western world.

Part autobiography and part political statement, Natives pulls on threads from the last 400 years of history. I’m not going to do a huge breakdown of the book – it’s available fairly cheaply on Amazon and there are copies available in the Parkgate Road and Leighton libraries – but I do want to talk about one section particular. 

Several years ago, I read Madhusree Mukerjee’s Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II. In it, Mukerjee paints a stark picture of Churchill’s indifference towards the famine in Bengal, which was caused by a perfect storm of bad decisions, chief among them the seizure of land from farmers and wartime trade policy. It made me really confront the ideas that I’d had fixed in my head through school about Churchill and his unquestioned role as the ‘hero’ of the Allied forces. In the years since we’ve all become more aware of Churchill’s chequered history. It seems, however, that collectively we still resist the necessity of casting our critical eye over the legacies of other historical ‘heroes’ that helped to shape our country. 

In this vein, in ‘Empire and Slavery in the British Memory’ Akala questions the narrative that holds William Wilberforce up as the face of the abolitionist movement and Britain as leading the way in abolishing slavery. By enshrining Wilberforce as The Man That Ended Slavery, he argues, we ignore the role that the enslaved themselves played in freeing themselves from tyranny. We all know Wilberforce, but do we know that Haiti declared its independence in 1804 in what’s still considered to be the only successful mass slave revolution in history? That when France briefly abolished slavery in 1794 (as a result of the French revolution), Britain sailed ships into the Caribbean in an attempt to reinstate slavery in all the territories that France had freed? That Denmark abolished slavery in 1792, and it took us until 1807 to outlaw the slave trade within the Empire, and until 1833 to get around to abolishing slavery altogether? That slavers were paid to release their slaves, while the enslaved received nothing by way of compensation? 

Akala argues that this flattening of history stems from two major sources: the ‘white saviour trope’ (manifesting itself today in pleas from some corners that white men ‘ended slavery’ and so Black people should be thankful), and ‘a need for heroes […] a need for simple solutions to complex problems, for great men instead of the convoluted mess that is human history’. 

As a beneficiary of the systemic racism baked into society in part as a result of Britain’s actions in the colonies it is, like Mukerjee’s book before it, uncomfortable to read this more complete version of history. That’s a large part of Natives’ brilliance. It’s important, I think, to feel uncomfortable as part of the process of learning; if a work doesn’t make you think or, to put it in a more scholarly fashion, challenge the epistemology upon which your knowledge sits, then how can you ever hope to grow or change? 

To know what racism is, we also have to have an understanding of its historical underpinnings. Akala weaves this knowledge together with memories from his childhood, making it crystal clear that historical attitudes towards Black people and people of colour are anything but history – they’re disturbingly alive in British society even today. Natives is a hugely important, brilliantly structured work. I really can’t recommend it enough.

Buy the book on Amazon here (£6.99/£4.99 Kindle): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Natives-Class-Empire-Sunday-Bestseller/dp/1473661234
Reserve it from the University Library here: https://libcat.chester.ac.uk/record=b1435740
Listen to Akala’s legendary first ‘Fire in the Booth’ session here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEOKgjoxoto
 

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