Akala at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

[Applause] I like to pretend that's for me no Carl is here - I'm hello and welcome to the Edinburgh International Book Festival there's quite a few of you thank you for coming out on this horribly rainy night this is the best place to be obviously I'm thanks for coming to this event which you sponsored by the skinny so a huge thank you to them for making this happen today I'm I'm Heather Perry and I'm thrilled excited and quite frankly a wee bit intimidated to be here today with the hugely accomplished and inimitable a caller where to start I feel like that's going to keep happening I'm where to say yes well where to start I'm not content with winning a mobile award for best hip-hop act at age 22 having a hugely successful music career having not one but a series of iconic firing the booth appearances winning a BAFTA being co-founder of the hip hop Shakespeare Company touring with the likes of nas and Damian Marley being the voice of reason across political programming on all channels and being awarded to honoree doctorates I'm Carla is now also a best-selling author with his brilliant and searing first book natives race and class in the ruins of empire we've done it but we'll do it again please join me in giving a huge welcome to dr. dr. Agard [Applause] that part of the show always has to be one of the most embarrassing things in the world you love it no no I honestly we're I was discussing this with someone else and this is the difference between when a big cultural differences between British people in Americans right because I was in the state store yesterday and and you just can't help it it's our natural inclination to get embarrassed when people say good things about you whereas an American would be like yeah that's me and that's not a disrespect to their most just one of those things you can't help but feel a little bit that where do I look someone's being nice anyway and just a wee bit of housekeeping before we start and we remind us to keep your phone's off and if you would like to tweet about the event and I'm sure you will we'll be having a 20 minute Q&A after the discussion so please wait until the house lights are up to get your phones out for that one and and then you can tweet away to your heart's content and also get your questions ready because they better be good I'm Carla I believe you're gonna start off with a little reading I am now I'm gonna I'm gonna read for about 10 minutes just from the beginning of the book first chapter which was called born in the 8th he's shout out to anyone else who was born in the 1980s and big shouts to anyone who was born before the 1980s which seems to mean the majority of the audience I'm only playing listen the Grays are coming my little brothers 17 I've accepted I'm supposed to start reading but I've accepted I'm not young anymore you know when you know you're not young my little brother was born when I was 17 and he's kind of like my child and me become a teenager recently this is just to show that older people I'm not making fun of you by the way and I and they were going to the cinema about two years ago this one I knew it was changing and I wanted to go to the cinema with them and there was like no you're right oh I'm not the cool with a brother no more I'm I'm one of the older people safe anyway so yeah this pie isn't that funny it's never baby it's all good I was born in the 1980s and I grew up in the cliched single parent working-class family we often depended on state benefits we lived in a council house eight free school meals I'm a child of a British Caribbean father and a Scottish English mother my teenage parents were never married and they separated before I was born my dad spent a portion of his childhood in and out of the care system and my mum was pretty much disowned by our Father for getting with a nignog the first time I saw someone being stabbed I was 12 maybe 13 the same year I was searched by the police for the first time our first smoked weed when I was nine and many of my uncles meaning biological uncles as well as family friends went to prison my upbringing was on the face of it typical of those of my peers who've ended up me in an early death or spent much of that adult lives in and out of prison I was born in crawley west sussex but moved to Camden in Northwest London before I had formed any concrete memories and I spent my childhood and teenage years living there Camden is home to 130 languages and about as wide a divide between rich and poor as anywhere in the country I went to school with the children of lords and ladies millionaires refugees children clearly suffering from malnourishment and young boys drugs for their fathers if there is anywhere in Britain that could serve as a petri dish for examining race class and culture Camden would be that place I was born in the 1980s in the mother country of the British Commonwealth the seat of the first truly global Empire the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the epicenter of global finance what does this mean what are the social and historical forces that even allowed my parents to me my father is the British porn child of two african jamaican migrant workers who came to the mother country as part of the Windrush generation my mother was an army child born in Germany spent in her infant years in Hong Kong and move into the small town in which I was born in her early teens in my parents meeting are untold histories of imperial conquest macroeconomic change slave revolts decolonization and worker struggles I was born poor by Western standards at least I was born poor and racialized as black despite my white mother and perhaps the most tumultuous decade of Britain's domestic racial history I was born in the 1980s back before mixed-race children had become an acceptable fashion accessory a nurse in the hospital promised to give my white mother [ __ ] blood when she needed a transfusion after give him birth yes the 1980s was a decade bereft of political correctness the 1980s was also the decade of Thatcher at Reaganite ascendancy the Golden Age of capitalism had ended in 1973 and the 80s saw the rollback of the post-war welfare state increased sell-off of public assets and the embrace of an individualistic self-made logic by the very generation that had become wealthy with the support of free universities and cheap council houses and literally been kept alive by the newly constructed National Health Service the decade also saw the most powerful military machine ever assembled spun into existential crisis by the enormous threat posed by the potential of a socialist evolution on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and the self-appointed captains of global democracy could be found back in genocide or regimes from Nicaragua to South Africa though that could have been any decade really it was the decade Thomas Sankara was killed the Berlin Wall fell Michael Jackson started to turn white and the move movement was bombed from the sky the 1980s were fairly eventful to say the least for Black Britain the decade began with the new crossfire slash massacre of 1981 a suspected racist arson attack at for free nine new crossroad where Yvonne Roddick was celebrating her 16th birthday party 13 of the partygoers burned to death including the birthday girl and one of the survivors also later committed suicide many of the families of the Dead have maintained to this day that a it was an arson attack and be that the police mangal the investigation and treated the families of the dead like suspects instead of victims the community's suspicion there was an arson attack was perfectly reasonable given that it came in the wake of a string of such racist arson attacks in that area of South East London the Prime Minister did not even bother to offer condolences to what were apparently British children and their families of course Thatcher could not in her heart of hearts express sympathy for black British children while supporting an apartheid government rooted in the idea that black people were subhuman so at least to her credit she was consistent there certainly was not going to be a minute's silence and most of Britain is completely unaware and despite new crossed being one of the single largest losses of life in post-war Britain the same year also saw the passing of the British Nationality Act the last of a series of Acts that were passed from 1962 onwards and whose racialized motivations were barely disguised British Caribbeans had come to learn that they were indeed second-class citizens as many had long suspected but they were not of a mood to keep quiet and put their heads down about New Cross that led to the largest demonstration by black people in British history 20,000 people marched on Parliament on a working week day and foretold of the harsh realities of the decade to come blood of our own if justice Nicole was the charm it was to prove prophetic [Music] I'm thanks that was fantastic and I think gives you a real insight into your brilliant mix of anecdote and historical narrative you've really all should buy this book and you can do so after the event where we'll be in the signing tent so you can get your book signed and have a little chat with the caller but to dig in this book feels like the culmination of decades of education and research and experience of these issues can you tell us a little bit about when your education in the contradictions and complexities of race and class in the UK began um yeah really two kind of incidents really one I write about this in the book there's a chapter called the day I realized my mama was white because believe it or not I had no idea right I'm a child she's just my mom right um and so I went to school one day and a boy at school caught me a Chinese black [ __ ] bastard which come on you can laugh it's okay as far as racial insults go ten out of ten for originality right because I have never heard that one before and the truth is if for those who don't know I mean we have lots of Chinese people in Jamaica and actually my so my great-grandmother kind of looks like she's mixed with black and Chinese whereas my grandmother just looks straight West African so there probably is some Chinese ancestry in there so ironically that the the kid or more likely his parents who probably don't know the history of to make a war hinting on on something because I did I had different features to what I have now when I was younger but the point was I came home and I was that and I went to say mom the white boy said and then I was that but hold on a minute mom you're one of them and I was like mom you're white on you and and she said no I'm German they're English [Laughter] as if there's never been any racism in Germany but the point was she wanted me she wanted me to feel comfortable she could she could have just said I'm Scottish they're English but but she didn't think of that and and so she was that um German their English and she tried to make that separation side I'd feel comfortable but obviously from that happened my mom realized well I know I've been through I make the point about the the nineteen eighties a lot of people will forget what it was like for white women who decided to get with black guys in the eighties my mom what's Pat she got chased by the NF she got called [ __ ] lover more times than she could remember it wasn't like a lot of people complain about political correctness now if you were alive in the 80s you'll remember or seventies even you it's not such a bad thing that bigots have to show up sometimes it's not the end of the world you know you pay a price for civility but um so she knew some of these issues would come up and in fact one of the reasons she left West Sussex and came to London was because she felt being in a more multi-ethnic City would would give her chances to educate her children in a particular way and to get away from some of the small-town bigotry and in a way it very much did Camden is you go there now and you think this is remarkable a lot of people I bring to London they say how these people work this all out so on the face of it London is very successful what we have things to say but it was that incident and my granddad who told me I should paint myself white because I was de between those two I sort of was like my granddaddy English went that way not not that Scotland's free of problems but I'm but that's a that's one of the contradictions in the book as well but but I remember when when he said that it was interesting cuz I was maybe five or six and I remember feeling sorry for him I didn't actually feel I felt a little bit of shame by fault like what an idiot the kind of thing and I was very conscious even at that age that that was a really stupid and ignorant thing for an adult to say no need to have any anger no I was angry I was angry yeah but but there were things that happened later in life that when I was five or six Germans that was more like it more slightly upset by just walk by how stupid are you kind of thing but I think those those two little we've known there are only comments it's weird because I realize me and my mum were different and from that day on when I when I was five or at least in this society we would be perceived differently and from that from that day on really our relationship became a white mother who had black children not just a mother and a child and my mom to her credit did her best to try and engage with that she sent us to pan-african Saturday school and so we could know ourselves she just tried to give us some sort of coherent sense of black culture and which when you look at how my siblings have turned out you know my older sister I'm sure you all know my next sister down is a professional stunt woman who's you know just done just working on Game of Thrones last week she was working on James 1 before that you know my youngest brother has just got 10 GCC's we were off on free school meals 70% of kids on free school meals don't get 5 GCSEs so in a way I think my mum's decision to give us a really strong black identity even though we're mixed had a positive impact on how we could navigate some of the challenges we faced growing up in London but it really began then you write in the book as well about the choice you made and you make clear that it was a choice to identify identify more with your black heritage than your white heritage can you talk a little bit about how you came to this choice yeah I think I think it's all about your personal experience right what a lot of people again if you're not Caribbean you won't know this but in in Jamaica someone like me is privileged without a shadow of a doubt I'm assumed to be wealthy I'm assumed to be educated we have so one of the ways that the system of color coding worked in Jamaica was really not almost up until independence it was illegal for a fully black person to own over 99 lots of land so the richest black man in in Jamaica was a man who only thing called Devon house you can still go to Kingston it's still there the whole architecture of Kingston is built in a particular way because lady musgrave one of the top British people at the time didn't want to have to drive past the the rich black man's house so she built the road and screwed up Kingston's traffic til today the point I'm making is those of us who are my complexion in Jamaica were permitted to get education were permitted to own a certain amount of land where were permitted to rise up the social hierarchy so if you go to Jamaica today if you go to the upper-class neighborhood place called cherry Gardens or noir Brook you'll immediately know it's not that most of the people are Chinese Indian lebanese-syrian or of lighter-skinned it's it's changing a lot now actually as a black middle-class is is increasing in Jamaica but certainly that's only southern over the last two generations and so my point was I suppose that my had I grown up in Jamaica I would have been racialized quite differently I woulda been what they call high colour in Jamaica and my entire experience of life would have been quite different to to give one last example of how extreme that sort of light-skinned privileges in Jamaica two boys I grew up with and I'm not dry snitching on anyone they've gone to prison now but um they went on the run to Jamaica right he's a big-time drug dealers from my neighborhood they shot someone went on the run to Jamaica now imagine they've gone on the run imagine being able to shoot someone traffic heroin and go some and basically be assumed to be posh and educated not that posh and educated people don't traffic drugs but you know I mean the assumption that comes with being light-skinned in Jamaica isn't is it's similar to be important in England whereas growing up here of course that is not the perception mixed-race kids are included in the black on black violence statistics because of course they're black half must be what causes the violence the the the the your racialized as black and my mum understood that I understood that so it wasn't I denied and either side of my heritage it was that I understood the police search me when I was 12 for a reason they didn't search anything white kids in my class even though I lived in an area where crime was being committed by everyone because there is a perception of blackness in this society so that for me it was there was no way to run from that another friend who's mixed to grow up in Nigeria again his experience was quite different so depending where you grow up and then depending how the racial boundaries of that society are set why is kind of why everywhere almost but there's boundaries with that we talk about even in the book and black is kind of black everywhere but if you're in the middle you make a decision I suppose based on your own your experiences and I are very much because I went to pan-african Saturday school because I had their sort of really strong black radical culture my stepdad was a stage manager of the Hackney Empire fear which was the leading Africa African Caribbean theatre at the time I had a real coherent sense of my Caribbean identity and ironically I think being living in London so my the English side of the family so my mom is half Scottish half English and I'm not saying this just to placate you because I'm in Scotland but the Scottish I have family actually pretty cool in fact we kind of got the sense they disliked my English that more than they dislike anyone anyone wrong right um and so like so for example my uncle Kenny's you know my Highland uncle is from the Outer Hebrides from Benbecula when I first met him he brought me a list of all the typical Scottish thing to do but my list of all the things Scottish people have invented you know penicillin the rain Mac all this stuff right because he wanted me to be proud of my roots and so maybe if I'd have spent more time with that that side of the family I'd have probably had a bit more of an even kilt our Father they lived in our hobart ease so anyone see them once whereas my jamaican gran lived five minutes up the street and saw ice I had a very Caribbean um upbringing and you had a really great role model your uncle uncle is one of these people right who you take I didn't I once I took him for granted when I was a child but it's only now I'm an adult I realize the sacrifice he made so he was my mum and dad's best friend basically and he was um a good father but when my mom moved to London he also moved to London he had a family of his own he basically played a greater role in in my life than to earn his most dad's playing there in their kids life and I don't mean that to disrespect dads I mean you know like he was properly that guy till of about ten and their mom got very very sick and he by then had you know two children of his own and being the man he is he did the right thing and looked after his own children but when my mom got very sick he actually signed the papers to say you know if if you die which she was supposed to she didn't luckily I'll take the kids and this is a working-class guy living on accounts of the state in Hackney were three kids of his own and he still fought enough of my family and of my mum and his friendship with us and his love for us that he would take on free of someone else's children it's only now I mean I don't thanks for that um it's only now I'm an adult and I think would I do that for any of my friends probably not I really realized what level of sacrifice someone like him was willing to make and he is a lot of the reason why I was so into education you know cuz big strong guy he want to be like he was very handsome you know but he was you know he was used to tell me how you're smart enough to do quantum physics I didn't know what quantum physics was but I'm but the point is I kind of had that positive reinforcement for education very early and that did make a really big difference and your pan-african saturday school as well seems to have been a big influence on your sort of understanding of the world yeah well I think what a lot people don't know or at least people in England don't know there's it there's a perception of Jamaican culture and heritage there's actually quite specific to Britain this kind of negative I mean Jamaican gangsters exist let's be clear that in countries in the top ten in the world for murder rates I'm not saying there's no problems in Jamaican society but this sort of simplistic rendering of a sort of yard if I'd you know when I was growing up in the night that's what it was kind of Jamaican culture that isn't in tours David Starkey put it militates against education I'm qualified um but interestingly in America for example the exact opposite argument is made so if you look at black American conservatives like Thomas Sol and people like that they frequently argue that the academic and occupational success of Caribbean immigrants to America proves that the problem is black American culture and not racism so as ironic that Caribbeans in America I mean Jamaicans in nineteen twenties and thirties America used to be called Jamaicans yeah because they were seen as that was one of the slurs against them because they were seen as proficient in business basically they were seen to put blandly how often indian people were sort of seen here yeah we simplistically sort of take the success of a particular set of good right indians and we say asians are successful even black people do that I'm like well no actually when you look a little closer Asians broadly speaking are not very particular set of people are successful but anyway one of the things I'm writing at the moment which is which relates to this pan-african Saturday school is a paper comparing the academic outcomes of Jamaican kids in Jamaica with their third and fourth generation English cousins because if Jamaican culture was the problem then Jamaican kids in Jamaica would be doing much worse than Jamaican kids in Britain the average wage in the island is two to three thousand US dollars a year the countries in the top ten in the world for murder rate even the best schools in Jamaica do not have the facilities of an average British state school yet what do you know the furtive rank school in Jamaica are still over 75% of the kids get five A to C GCSE including math in English and their GCSE is based on our own Oh level so sad you're harder GCSE and and so it's hard to explain how children in a country with that much poverty in that much violence could do well in school if their culture was anti education and and obviously I teach in Jamaica quite a bit so I was lucky enough the point I'll make about pan-african and a school I was lucky enough to be the inheritor or a very specifically Caribbean militant Caribbeans came here with the same upwardly mobile aspirations that migrated 5,000 miles across the world to say I don't want my kids to do well in school and so they're sort of the the stereotypes that we now would associate with people from Asia or maybe even West Africa the first generation of Caribbeans came here with those same ideas and aspirations but now that we've been here longer we've become part of the English working class but I was one of the lucky ones that so for those who don't know lost point I'll make on it during that period of time 60 70s and 80s Caribbean migrants to Britain who often in were part of the aspiring sort of boos huazi back in the Caribbean were set up a special Saturday schools to educate their children there about 150 of them at the peak the one I went to was called the Winnie Mandela school and so it meant I went to school on a Saturday when the rest of the kids were not I had extra help with my homework I had episodes of black history other kids didn't learn about and so then I had a real positive cultural reinforcement again it made a huge difference all of the kids that I went to pan-african Saturday school with we're not the kids that ended up dropping out of school we're not the kids that ended up in particular set a problem so that culture very much insulated people you've touched a kind of a little bit on this mmm he write really powerfully in the book about how class issues are often racialized and to justify our necessarily harsh treatment of black communities I'm thinking specifically of your conversation about knife crime in Glasgow versus London can you talk to us a little bit about that yeah I mean so for example it's routinely argued that what we have this thing called black on black violence in London to the point that even black Londoners believe it and when I say so okay so explain what exactly that means if what's happened in London is black on black violence the inference is that the blackness is the cause of the crime so if blackness is the cause of the crime there are a few things we would expect to see one we would expect a significant portion of black people to be involved in in violent crime 2 we would expect the crime among black people to be evenly spread across all demographics I middle-aged black grandmothers who are just as black as black teenage boys would also be stabbing people yeah University students would be just as likely as people right and we would expect violent crime to be absent from all our communities if the blackness is the cause of the crime London last year had the eighth highest murder rate in Britain even after decades of reduction in the murder rate was hiring Glasgow than it was in London there are 1.17 million black people in London in a terrible year maybe 50 of them will kill somebody is that a higher murder rate than the general population absolutely is there a problem absolutely is the problem caused by defective genetics is it caused by excessive melanin syndrome no and as I keep as I keep as I keep pointing out to people um those of us who are half white are included so black people have to take responsibility for us killing people even if we're half Scottish we're knife crime has been a problem for a very long time so the point is when you look at this violence and the asite police put the police's on reports in the book the police are not stupid they understand what's going on boys aged 15 to 25 who've been expelled from school who come from the poorest families from the poorest areas we often have a history of abuse in the family they're killing people a black male university graduate who's studied architecture probably as a crime profile more similar to a middle-aged woman than to the black boys he grew up with like the idea that you're gonna leave University and say you know what would complete this degree I'm black so it's my obligation to shoot someone and so what what's happening is really a crime a problem that is a national problem and has been a national problem for food for centuries really you know there's gangs in Glasgow 200 years old a national problem is being in London we keep being given the impression that these people are foreigners and they brought this problem with them from elsewhere so London will be compared to New York so when they compare London to New York in the press there's a reason they're comparing London to New York and not Greater Manchester which actually had the highest murder rate in Britain last year or Glasgow or elsewhere there's this sense that London is this foreign city and my point is I have a lot of skin in the game in this the two people I love most in the world are teenage black boys earlier this year my best friend's son was stabbed 10 times no reason complete wrong place wrong time on paper he's the archetypal middle-class kid his parents are together they live in the suburbs in Sudbury he's on his way to uni where does he fit in in the narrative what's happened in his black boys like him are not allowed to be victims he's just on his way home from school while University one day he's in the wrong neighborhood people assume he's one of the gang members he runs away from them tries to explain to him yo I'm not part of you Lots nonsense I'm a good boy I'm not even trying to be a tough guy they stabbed him ten times anyway and and so what's happening is the UH the black underclass essentially it's being used as both an ideological and literal weapon against the other 99% of black people who are not going to kill anyone and and what this means is even in police in terms the resources are being spread them uh the last time I got pulled over as a suspected gang member was six months ago I said the office I'm leaving the right blood eh you know if I went to try and join a gang even the gang members would be like flap you off your [ __ ] or so by date so so if at this last point I'll make on it if for example the police in London said we're gonna concentrate stop and search on young boys and men aged between 15 and 25 and high gang crime neighborhoods who've been expelled from school and all who've already got criminal records few people could argue with the logic well as when you say we're just gonna stop and so it's random black guys this is how you get George the poet he's the youngest member of the Arts Council getting stripped searched by the police or you get Daniel Cole ooh oohs and Oscar winning actor getting dragged off a bus and strip search it's just absurd like he's gonna say you know I'm nominated for an Oscar but I should stab someone in the intervening period and so the point is blackness is a class signifier so if you just say black the assumption is lower-class plenty of black line that is actually doing quite well now which is something you think we would be celebrating um so for example children of West African heritage actually are doing much better in school than black English kids and white working-class kids interestingly thousands of West African kids doing better in school is not blamed on black culture but 21 kids stabbing someone is black culture there's also looking at what is and isn't pinned on cultural values the four youngest kids ever take GCSEs in Britain a british nigerian kids's was that i would argue in fact i'm invited on sunday i can't go but I'm invited to a Federation of Nigerian schools on Sunday odd that Nigerians have come here and set up separate schools to do extra work on the weekends for their children it's almost like they value education or something and of course when the problem isn't racialized there's a black problem the treatment is different so you write about how they treat knife crime in Glasgow as a public health issue only reason let's be clear no one is suggesting that the people who run this country either of the countries really give a [ __ ] about working-class white boys that's not my argument in fact part of the reason there are the black on black violence is convenient because you can just ignore poor white kids if you can if it's a black problem you can just ignore Sunderland or Middlesbrough or Cleveland or crock Stefon Liverpool all of these other poor neighborhoods where been killing each other since time immemorial so it's actually a way of just completely ignoring working-class right but saying we can't see you so I'm not suggesting that there is a compassion for poor white kids or schemas as they're often called up here you guys will know that it's it's only recently to my understanding that a compassionate approach has been taken in Glasgow and that approach has been successful the woman who ran it whose name escapes me but I believe is Karen McCluskey but don't quote me on that that's just off memory and you know she's been saying this and I've been coming to London trying to say to these guys look what we've done in Glasgow and no one's interested so if people are not interested in taking an approach that was relatively successful at least in what was the most violent city in Western Europe there's a reason they're not interested and and so what often happens is laws that unjust laws that are sort of perfected on the racial scapegoat are applied to everybody else so we used to have a law it's recently been overturned but called joint enterprise does anyone know about that no so that one kid will stab someone and 20 kids go to jail for murder not you don't go to jail for not snitching you're not going to jail for accessory to murder you're going to jail as if you killed the person and and laws like that and all IPP where you get a tariff you go to prison you get a two-year tariff and you're not doing ten years because you know I've told you how long you're going to jail and when you start to see that 20 percent of our prisoners are now housed in private facilities it starts to look really quite quite sinister at last point I'll make on the violence you know as bad as things are in London London is no more violent than Berlin it's no more violent than Naples in fact it's less violent than quite a lot of our major European sees so that doesn't mean we don't have a problem but anyone giving you the impression that we're basically having a civil war in London the entire country of Scotland had a murder rate almost equivalent to London last year means if you take Scotland as a country there were 56 murders is nearly six million people London there 116 murders there's nearly 10 million people so this idea that we have this massive crisis and it's hard to even try it ironically black Londoners affinity for one another in a way is now feeding the narrative I'll give you one last example on this so I was talking to a middle-aged Nigerian auntie all three of our kids are at university she said to me but our kids are killing each other I said are they your free kids at university they haven't killed anyone and the irony is that she identifies racism in a way makes even right-wing black people identify with underclass black people in a way that middle-class driver we don't have to she's middle-class her free kids are at uni she's a doctor her husband's that a comment what her husband does but she sees underclass black children as her children so when she says our kids are killing each other she some want a specific set of black kids yet she sees them as their responsibility so there is a while and narrative that needs to be a discussion think see we heard there is a national discussion that doesn't preclude anyone from taking responsibility none of this is saying of course people have the right to kill anyone else's children but if there are common predictors that enable us to say which demographic is this type of behavior going to come from and we all know that why are we not allocating the resources where they need to go and while we're not pushing the narrative where we need to go if we're actually concerned with saving life that's my question to follow on from that let's get into the deep cuts i I've heard you say that the British government had to try to achieve the outcomes of apartheid without the system of apartheid in place can you explain what you mean by that expand on it yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't quite say so the British Empire was happy to explore apartheid to the colonies so as I mentioned even in Jamaica 90% black African country of black African origin there were laws that prevented black people explicitly from rising up their social hierarchy similar laws in India similar laws in virtually every British colony that was where there were non-white people so but domestic Britain was presented with a problem because one of the things the British Empire did was expel Britain's domestic class conflict so the great to use that term in the sense of meaning impactful not nice British imperial Rhodes puts it puts it like that he says you know if you wish to avoid Civil War you must become an imperialist and so that it was very conscious that they by expelling populations to Australia or to New Zealand or to Canada or elsewhere they were avoiding domestic troubles one of the things that happened after World War Two was Britain for the first time ever and did not have enough domestic population to satisfy the needs of its labor it was becoming a multi-ethnic country was not a result of the British Empire was a result of World War two in all the hundreds of years Britain ruled the Caribbean there was no dream that they would invite black people here in any significant numbers even even even black World War one veterans were not invited to come and live here World War two created this this crises what the British state did after World War two was a couple of things and so as ironic we talked about mass migration after World War two when what actually happened was a state-sponsored racialized population swap so the British government on the one hand many many of you will know this because many of your family members probably went to Canada or to New Zealand or elsewhere the British government sponsored state-sponsored migration from Britain to the colonies more people went from Britain in the postwar years to the colonies and all of the Caribbeans and Indians that have come to Britain ever it's 1.5 million people at the same time they subsidized every post-war government subsidized Europeans to come here and this was explicitly done because they wanted to maintain the racial balance of the country this is why I mention it in this context so they subsidize post-war Europeans coming including German and Italian prisoners of war what was interesting is a lot of the the British ruling classes racism was blamed on the public so if you talk to most people about the 1962 Commonwealth immigration act the government say are the prop the public were just too racist we just we had to pass these laws but when you look at whether actually said privately at the time there's a lot of good scholarship on it now that the archives available the reason that took them 14 years to pass that legislation so the 1948 British Nationality Act makes the entire British Commonwealth legal citizens of Britain it's not until 1962 that that's undone the reason that that 14-year gap went by was because the government basically perceived the public to not be racist enough yet so that's basically what they said privately they were like actually we've just all fought a war against the Nazis basically we can hardly say the brown people who just fought with us can't really be citizens and they felt that the public wouldn't swallow it actually so as ironic that they've now turned around and said the public was so racist we had to do it I'll give you an example there was a negative reaction against Polish people that came here off the World War two a lot of the British public perceive them to be fascists so they negatively reacted to them the British state decided to take out a little PR campaign on behalf of the Polish called what the Polish did for you which is fine to integrate them now can you imagine if a similar campaign had been taken out on behalf of Caribbeans and Asians how differently the last eight years might have gone by if we actually listed what I was what's the Caribbean in India done for Britain but they didn't they consciously did not do that benefits were given to people who came from Europe basically non-citizens will turn into citizens and citizens were turned into immigrants based on race so the final example I'll give of this which kind of illustrates the absurdity is you know people whose grandparents came from Poland would tell me to go about where I came from or call me an immigrant my maternal ancestors the closest thing this can this island has to an indigenous population and my dad's family came from an island that was in a legal union with England before Scotland was in a legal union with England yeah Jamaica became part of a union with England in 1655 and when British nationality was first casted Jamaicans were British and so this idea that we were foreigners that suddenly appeared out of nowhere particularly for Caribbeans even more so than the people that came from Asia or West Africa I don't see that to put them down in any way I said because culturally the Caribbeans were more English than squash people were like they only spoke English they were all Christian they were educated in English system they had a parliamentary democracy they didn't have a separate language that Gaelic or whatever else actually and if you talk to the average score and you confuse them for an Englishman they wouldn't be that happy you talk to the average Jamaican in 1945 of course I'm English so the only real difference was was was the skin colour and so that's what I mean by consciously privately the the the state was saying to itself we can't have a part ID in Britain because it makes Britain look bad and we're not a country that does apartheid domestically how do we achieve some of those outcomes without having explicitly racialized laws and they said this so last very last point I'll give on this when the 1962 British Nationality Nationality Act was passed the Home Secretary at the time when a butler said so much a direct quote we said is great merit was that it could be presented as non discriminatory but it's restrictive intent is intended to and would indeed apply to colored people almost exclusively so they're very conscious that what they were telling the public was [ __ ] and that privately that's what they wanted to do was was maintain this sort of idea that of an unchanged ethno nationalist politics I like about you I call it on one of the things I love so much about the book is that you're unapologetic in telling us this I'm Noam Chomsky famously told Andrew Marr on TV journalists and don't have to self-censor they simply don't get a platform to speak unless they're saying the right thing and you seem to buck that trend we've all seen you on news night in shows like this do you have to temper your voice or your message to get on these shows no I think what I think what has changed is the internet I'll give you an example I was thinking about it there's a film called injustice it's a film about black deaths in police custody in Britain when that film was made the police threatened the director and they threatened the cinemas that were willing to show the film this was in the 90s there was no internet back then I know the film director personally now you have the internet the police can't do anything about it it's on Vimeo and so what's happened is in general things that you would never when I used to say to white people you know even people I grew up with the police sometimes kill people so don't be so ridiculous was that Jimmy don't be ridiculous a boys a boy I grew up with a Quixote's grandmother that's what set off the 1985 World War Farm right now you can imagine we'll kill your grandmother you might not trust the police or let me rephrase that before I get sued she died suspiciously in police custody a week later Cheri grows another elderly carribean was shot in the back and paralyzed one week apart that's what set off the Brixton riots so this deep distrust one of the reasons you know it's not just black people being crazy you go to Jamaica and even though did you making police a pretty corrupt sometimes black people in Jamaica got no issue with the police they don't see the police the way we do gangsters in Jamaica see the place where we do if you talk to an ordinary Jamaican they're like yeah we hate the police but we hate the gangsters more kind of thing is so there isn't the same level of contempt for the for policing because there isn't this idea that you must be a criminal because you're black there is this idea in Jamaica that you must be a criminal cause you're poor and you come from the gown that's true but you can change that you can't change me and black in terms of going on TV and censoring myself I think because of the internet and because of being an independent artists and because of the way things are changing I think in general you see more people saying stuff that they just I mean when I grew up you won't even have heard a Scottish accent on the BBC you really just start basic stuff like that you had to speak cut-glass Queen's English to get on the BBC so lots of things that changing very very quickly about about this society and lots of people find that uncomfortable I think it's great that we have more voices and a greater range of voices that's what democracy is supposed to be about um you know sometimes people that I don't like get to talk very very loudly but that's life you you pay a price for that but no either I don't feel like cause I've never tempered myself because there has been occasions I hope no one Minds if I swear but there have been occasions where so for example when I was on I was on a program of Michael Gove and Ed Balls and I've really just wanted to tell him to [ __ ] and because they were being there were being they're being so patronizing but if you watch the program back it's on YouTube you can see in my face I'm just going lack because ah when people have rude TV under certain point the way I grew up don't talk to me that we'll go outside black that's that's the traditional working-class response to beyond the certain level of rudeness and so that is the one thing that's hard when people kind of patronize you and talk down to you and you're like you wouldn't talk to me like this off-camera so why you know I wasn't rude to you let's have adults debate but no I feel lots of people young people will say to me family gonna kill you yeah young people really do gets young black people in particular if you keep going on TV and saying stuff like because there's this belief that people who speak out are always gonna be you know assassinated I personally don't think that much of myself in the British government gives it gives a damn and a poison my water or something no but um I do understand young people's paranoia also because there is a history of states killing people they disagree with but I do think we live in a really unique and interesting time as much as it feels like a hard time and I don't think we can afford to sort of rest on our laurels and assume that the very hard one very basic democratic freedoms that have taken centuries to secure are in any way definite they can easily be eroded and things that you think that could never happen here yes it can and so I feel like we I one of the things I get really offended by is when posted to meet you hate Britain and and just like what you can kind of waste this much time criticizing something I hate are you joking and one of the other things it shows is how little people know particularly bout Jamaican music I mean Jamaicans just expect you to cross the government it's just part of what you do if you were to make a nice and ironically even though it's a poor and undeveloped country did you make some government doesn't kidnap artists or talk to them in fact one of the weird things about Jamaica is in this sense it's very very democratic the common will give you a visa to go around the world and make millions of pounds cussing the Jamaican government and that's one of the things we just wanted to make is greatest exports so I've I always grew up viewing artistic criticism as well as a musician's job it was only when I got older and people started to write negatively I was that I just thought that was musicians women Adu I grew up listening to Dennis Brown and Bob Marley and Peter Tosh I just thought that was my job but there you go and I think that's a good point to flip over to the audience because I could talk to you all day but they might rip me apart and you've got four roving mics with our roving people so stick your hand right up in the air please cuz I feel like there's gonna be a lot of you oh god the agony of choice I'm let's start with this gentleman right here if we can three mics okay sorry thank you very much that was really great no in the first chapter of your book you speak about Fat Joe in 1981 so in the light of that and in the light of X Home Secretary Theresa May trying to deport people from Windrush in the light of Kensington and Chelsea hmm conservative councils I live in Kensington fell in the light of exhale on secretary Johnson's racist remarks haven't that has the Conservative Party really changed and will it really change no one no would be the simple answer to that but I think I mean I I live in lab or grove and so that if you were there in the in the data afterwards it is one of the strangest things I've ever seen and it was one of the things there was a con I don't care what anyone tells me there was a conscious decision high up in the British state to just retreat and just say you know what [ __ ] him like I mean there were in the nights after the fire there were three thousand conservatively three thousand mostly young men actually out on the Block down there I'm talking from Brixton from Peckham from Shepherds Bush who do not get on with lab but grow from Harrow Road who do not get on with Lubbock Grove like it was a recipe for disaster on on paper obviously but obviously no one came there with that vibe and that energy there weren't even any police there were that one policeman it's like they left the one policeman on his own at the end of the road as a target by a cone it's like they wanted there to be a riot in fact the first set of people to arrive on the scene I wasn't I wasn't there directly in the in on the night of the fire I got there the morning afterwards luck I went to sleep that night my friends were phoning me like but they said the first people to arrive were riot police but then once the riot police leave the next few days they just did just left the state just completely retreated in it I think it was a real lesson for working-class people of something really quite sinister and quite quite evil to be honest with you that you can actually live in one of the wealthiest boroughs in the whole world a guy emailed me and I don't mean this to disrespect Kazakhstan by the way right guy emailed me from Kazakhstan and he said we have sprinklers in our buildings in my [ __ ] of a country that's what he said I'm not saying cuz it I'm not saying Kazakhstan's of [ __ ] oh I've never been there the point is he was like this would be a disgrace if happen in Kazakhstan and this can happen five minutes from Buckingham Palace um and I think it one of the interesting things for me at the outfall of grim fell similar to black on black violence in London a lot people seem to think because half the tower were Muslim that if this was poor white people there'd be some wonderful reaction from the state and so you see people marvel regions of the country are they will illegal immigrants anyway cut don't worry like this cladding on there's non fireproof cladding on your buildings too and don't think the government's gonna take it off just because you're white and so this is really weird thing where people's racial hatred blinds them from realizing do you think the reaction would have been every any different really other than extra racism and connecting them to London Bridge and everything else do you remember yours bra were those people remembered nicely and so I think there is this deep-seated it's not just about them being poor there is this kind of heiress to crack contempt almost like an ethnic hatred for people that are not of a certain class and of a certain cultural group that runs really really deep in the Conservative Party it isn't just about this but but it is obviously about that too I just I I don't think he's ever going anywhere and I said that about Boris Johnson 10 years ago the stuff he's saying now is no surprise to me you may remember last point I'll make on him you may remember when he laughed about the dead bodies in Libya remember that and the audience was laughing this is what's most important so this is what the people are saying privately publicly we're being told we intervene in Libya because we love Libyan so much we just want to save them from their evil dictator privately people are laughing about about this this tragedy here and so now I don't think that the the DNA of that or at least a particular strain of the people in that part it can change doesn't mean I think everyone that believes in small government and low tax is an evil person political conservatism versus the British Conservative Party's maybe a slightly different conversation but we haven't got time for that one here please mmm can we take the gentleman in the green shirt should we pick free so this so that the mics can go good choice shall we go for this lady in the middle yeah and the third one this one she's a we've come oh you've already got my knock yourself out mr. green go ahead hi there Carla so I'd like to jump into an ideological question yeah I'd say I've been to Cuba recently yes there are setbacks other problems they seem to broach racial integration and socio-economic class quite well I think seemingly so my question to you would be do you think there's any socialist ideas given it's quite the beast object over here or socialist policies that would actually progress Britain um I think that's a good question and I would say this and I'm not saying this to cop-out I'm saying this because I genuinely feel like lots of people like to repeat trendy cliches that they're not really qualified to speak on so this is an admission of lack of knowledge anyway even though I've you know I've read Marx and Piketty and Thomas also and hadron Chiang I've read it decent admirer of economics but I'm not an expert I'm emotionally a socialist in I believe societies have a responsibility to look after their most vulnerable to look after their most poor and that they should be proud of that how best whether the mechanisms the best mechanisms to achieve that are through a socialist state I can't answer that what I will say about Cuba I'm going for the first time in September I write quite a bit about Cuba but everything I know about q I know from a distance I know I have a from relationship with Jamaica I know from so for those who don't know Cuba has more doctors working abroad than all of the g8 countries combined it has more doctors working abroad than medicine some Franti a UNICEF and the British Red Cross combined in countries like Liberia or Sierra Leone or Haiti where the countries can't afford the doctors Cuba just sends them for free they train to making kids in fact they've got the largest foreign body of students studying medicine of any country in the world 23,000 students studying Cuba for free I think one of the problems about socialism is that we can't have an adult conversation so people in Britain can't even admit the curative anything positive which all matter to my country this is the first country in the world to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV you'd think for that alone we'd give them some [ __ ] credit for something right and so the demonization of of socialism has been so silly and so childish that we can't just say actually well maybe this part can be learned from Cuba maybe we don't want to replicate that part and I think that's a lot of fear-mongering and a lot of lack of academic accountability of the mainstream press but but certainly a country that puts the needs of other people citizens even before its own the other think you did that often gets left out of the history books was they sent 37,000 of their own troops to fight apartheid South Africa while we were supporting them funding it and so again it's weird that Cuba doesn't get remembered for having at least some positive impact on global human rights I'd think the fall of apartheid was some sort of achievement for global human rights and I'd think saving lives in Liberia and Sierra Leone they were the first responders in Pakistan when there was the earthquake in 2000 if I have loads of other places they'd at least get some credit for that but I haven't been myself so when I go I will offer you based on seeing it there but but so enough at the general principle that a society should have some pride about not wanting to have homeless people about one and everyone's have health care about one and everyone to have the basics of life socialist ethics if you like I would think that self-proclaimed Patriots of this country they'd be the first thing line for it but they seem to be the people most eager to want to see British people starve we're gonna go to the lady in purple so and she's been a social worker for about thirty years the stuff that she talks to me about about knife Prime and now more recently gun crime do you think that the government or the authorities need to do a lot more a lot quicker so that the gun violence that is happening especially in East London yeah like five minutes from my house yeah do they need to do more to make sure that it doesn't become such an epidemic like it has been in the states I think we need to be careful the word epidemic that gets used a lot in the press there were 180 murders in London in 2005 there were 116 last year okay so I'm not saying we don't have problems but but we're even this kind of stuff when we start comparing even to New York New York is at its lowest murder rate ever and there's still three times more murders in New York every year than there are in London so it's we just have to be really careful that we address yes there is a serious problem and I say this is someone kids I work with have been killed so I'm not saying to someone who has an emotional distance yeah but we also have to say well hold on a minute its city of nine million people having 120 hundred 50 murders here's terrible but if it's not an epidemic and I think we we just have to be very careful about about the language because that those kind of words are used to fuel not solutions but actually extra police in putting more kids in jail bit bigger so actually the negative outcomes because guess what this is going to shock everyone if you have more people that grew up with parents in you have more people that are likely to go to jail themselves it's not rocket science and Britain already has by far the largest prison population in the whole of Western Europe light years ahead of the French light years ahead of the Germans why our murder rates are not massively higher than their rape is not massively higher than is in those countries seriously 71% of all our people in prison I believe that's the number I will check in my Howard Lee report but I believe is 71% are in jail for nonviolent offenses our prison population has grown 82 percent in 30 years so there are lots of similarities with what's going on in the US and a lot of this hyperbolic reporting is what fuels the idea that these are good solutions I do for the state needs to do more but it needs to do more or at least we need to have some referendum or vote or say on what we think should be done of there's two suggestions from working with young people that I've four could really work one it's not an original one is boarding schools you take the young people who are most at risk and you remove them from London or Glasgow or Liverpool or Sunderland a couple of things happen the other kids who think they're bad but they're not really that bad the level up the whole level of badness becomes lower because now the baddest kid in the neighborhood he might hit you with a bat or something but he won't stab you or shoot you right what's happening is kids get expelled I saw this firsthand the really really bad kids so the kid in my school is you know he's dead now unsurprisingly he got expelled on the first day of secondary school for a chair at the headmaster he was clearly had really really massive problems all the other boys that were expelled but really that bad they were just silly they now end up in the unit with him in the pupil referral unit and they now have to up their level of badness to cope with him and this is what's happening up and down the country kids who have no business being expelled they just talk too much and I'm I even blaming the teachers if you've got 35 kids and you're understaffed and you know you stress them out rent and everything else it is hard and so actually the solution is in education I think the solution is in in removing some of the young people from that environment because clearly they can't cope with it and that frees up the others and last point I'll make on this cuz I can see you looking at your watch one of the other suggestions I suggested was based on the report I'm doing with Jamaica is a Commonwealth educational exchange program Britain clearly can't cope or doesn't want to cope with a particular strain of young black kids fine give the David Cameron's government was willing to build a 25 million pound prison in Jamaica give Jamaican schools in 25 million quid and send the kids back there for teenagers so you talked a bit about China and the perception of China in your book and I was wondering if you could talk maybe just share your thoughts about how or what you think about China and Africa and the relationship that's kind of happening there development great question that the shoe answer would be I don't know enough details to give you I have suspicions but I don't know if details in Africa to give you an informed response I've been in Jamaica a lot this year so I can talk to you a bit more about Jamaica because you could imagine I asked every Jamaican I could speak to what they fought about China's role in in Jamaica and what I could glean was whatever we think of the Chinese they are building infrastructure in Jamaica that Britain chose not to build in 300 years this is just a simple fact of it they've just cut the travel time to Montego Bay in half which obviously what that does for Jamaica kind of mean jamaican business is there a worry should there be suspicion yes of course it's in a major international power to make as a small island however what was interesting talking to most of the Jamaicans I spoke to in fact all of them even the ones that had a problem with the Chinese relationship there when I said what is it the Chinese are doing the American capital or British capital or French kafir always not doing what are the specific negative things that the Chinese are doing and no one could name anything so their gripes with the Chinese were grabs with capitalism not grabs with the Chinese the problem is and those of you who carry and will know this there is a sort of slight anti-chinese bigotry in the Caribbean because they're the successful people that's okay to hate you can't really hate white people have too much power in the Caribbean and we sort of learn that if when white people die there's big consequences so Jamaicans in Jamaica they sort of still admire Europeans despite that history and there is this suspicion of the Chinese and that's not to say that there is not valid reasons to be concerned I'm just saying the suspicion is a suspicion rooted in their chineseness not rooted in the actual behaviors one other example I'll give you there are several projects that the Chinese have proposed in Jamaica the Jamaican people said no to the Jamaican government had to say no to the Jamaican government then said no to the Chinese what was the Chinese response was it to send the CIA in and was it to overthrow the Jamaican democracy was it to cut off aid to Jamaica no they said okay we proposed a business deal you said no here's another one so what I would put to people and I can't speak I can't say this is the case in Africa because the power dynamics may be completely different in the case of Jamaica if the Jamaican government does not negotiate in the best interest of the Jamaican people whose fault is that the Chinese government is negotiating in the best interest of its people we might say that because if we've told them no for three or four things already and they haven't murdered us or bombed us all over for then clearly we can keep telling them no if we don't like something my fear genuine fear is that some of the crooked politicians in Jamaica will embezzle some of the money coming from China and then say hey look the evil Chinese did it I genuinely fear that as a possibility also so I think we have to be this is a situation we have to manage very very carefully because there is an opportunity for the Caribbean at least to parlay a relationship with China slightly to its best interest that does not mean China was on a charity project that does not mean China doesn't have human rights abuses at home that does not mean that China is there because they love Jamaican people they're there to make money and do business the question is can you make all other countries parlay their relationship with China to their benefit if the question is no then they should sever relationships with the Chinese if the question is yes the question is how do they do that by I think we have to be very very careful in the sort of Yellow Peril sort of vibe and the assumption that they will behave exactly the same as other major powers of babe it's not proven yet and I'm not saying I'm naive that they might they might they might also do that but I'm just not I don't think it's in intelligent to approach that relationship as I see a lot of people doing with the assumption that it will be identical to relationships with other major powers in the region happy to be proved wrong and happy to learn more but that was my assessment from talking to last example I'll give you on this I know I keep saying that when you've gone see them building the roads in Jamaica you see Chinese workers and black workers working next to each other in Jamaica it's the first time in the history of the Caribbean anyone who wasn't black or Indian did manual labor it's the truth so it's a different attitude the you see the bosses are desert Jamaican boss there's a Chinese boss so you see the workers there's a Chinese working there's jamaican workers doesn't mean it's perfect it's in no means perfect but no country develops perfectly so I I just I think I have a bit more of a nuanced view of the Chinese probably just cuz I'm biased as well part of it the relationship Jamaica's particular relationship with Britain and America has been so negative that I just don't want to allow that baggage to allow me to approach a new country that way but but Jamaicans in Jamaica may see it quite differently there's people on both sides lots of you were like I'm making loads of money at the Chinese so it's wonderful lots of people alike like Bounty Killer criticized them recently they're taken over the country all this kind of stuff but foreigners own most did your maker anyway so when we say the Chinese are taking over who really taken over from they're not taking over from Jamaicans because Jamaicans own the country so they were already foreigners own and so what we're really complaining about is Chinese capital replace an American Canadian or British capital but we never said the Americans were taking over even though we pay a hundred forty percent of our GDP to IMF in some years anyway I think we've got time for any more is that it isn't I'm afraid I've been so sorry about okay I take too long to answer questions during the event it's like every time a caliph speaks in public it's really inspiring and I think his knowledge and awareness of like history the interplay of culture and like the social anthropology is really important I really want to see a panel at the big festival because actually like my brother we both grew up in it and roughly girl from Scotland and my brother is actually half a Nigerian and a lot of things that I Carla was describing today and my brother experienced my mom experience like we grew up on benefits we girlfriend free school dinners my mum was spat out like these things happened and you know my brother didn't have the same experience going off from Scotland decided and I think it's really important to hear a colors voice for his voice to be projected loud and for him to make a difference to other people who may have that experience and advocate on their behalf and encourage other people to advocate on their behalf as well karl has been like a big inspiration he's been a hero for a quite a while so I'm kind of like we're got past just to seeing him on stage you know I mean I always what he says I think is working listening to you I think he's extremely articulate and really gets his messages across and when I say messages and he's very a really good ambassador I think for all kinds of ideas but particularly keen cuz I'm involved in education myself so his emphasis on education and really sharing his ideas and being a very positive role model I think comes across very well I just wish there were more articulate people in you know and and raising the level of political debate like he does is just fantastic everything from the sound of his voice and just how eloquent years obviously seen him on the telly before and you just seem to have an answer to things even not only just the scripted stuff that he was kind of prepared for but when the questions came at the end and it had a lot of information but also was not scared to say well I don't know much about that III I totally relate it's a lot of stuff they was talking about particularly so if identifying with that with a white mother and the same I'm also mixed race so I identified with I identified with what he was talking about about Africa pan-africanism and doing that M I unlike the way he he definitely see things with like like God said I just think he doesn't see things with M without knowledge so he actually actually says I don't know about that I look up but also he battled off a whole look isn't it yeah

Channel: edbookfest

Views: 374,255

Keywords: Edinburgh, International, Book, Festival, Akala, Heather Parry, EIBF, 2018, natives, mobo

Id: U0iiybe5-nA

Length: 64min 52sec (3892 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018