Akala deconstructs race, class, and Britain's modern myths | Unfiltered with James O'Brien #32

[Music] race and class in the rooms of Empire is the subtitle the title is natives and Carlo I have to tell you that that subtitle there grabbed me you've only just given me this so I'm not gonna make any apologies for not having had time to yes it's better than pretending that I had of course the next hour but when I saw it on the sort of coming up publishers list it seems to me and I am you know a fully paid-up member of the Metropolitan liberal elite and I'm a a white bloke that went to public school but everything at the moment seems to be revolving around race in class possibly in the ruins of Empire but but certainly in the in the context of where we are yeah I mean I don't know if necessarily in the ruins it depends how nostalgic we are about Empire the fact of the matter is the scheme of the world Britain is still a fairly decent country to live in yes and so it's ironic Donavan on those tremendous problems in Britain of course but it's very interesting for some people the loss of empire and that sort of nostalgia of this thing that they think was one before this time prior to 1945 when they believed Britain was a sort this sort of lily-white idyllic wonderful place where everyone got on forget about the cholera forget about the six-year-olds gone up chimneys forget about how many centuries it took for poor people get to get the right to vote forget about all of the real conflicts that created the modern society this is to say nothing of empire yeah it's sort of romanticization of the past is quite dangerous and so I think that that kind of imperial nostalgia feeds into a lot of the threads that we're talking about today and a lot of the contradictions and the way in which the British state plays race against class so if you can convince someone in Sunderland that the problem is a nurse from Bangladesh and not the people who actually control the power and the resources and the distribution of that power and those resources even though the north of England has been poorer than the south for virtually all of recorded history because of this accident called the Thames it doesn't it doesn't matter you know these people who've come people need escape though and I think what went in a post Imperial Society like this one see as we've seen spectacularly recently you know people who appear to be different on and provide a very convenient for us one of the coolest let's start at the beginning born to a Scottish mother and a Jamaican father yes / split up but that was around it's not a kind of cliche where you begin the book by almost playing into the stereotype I think quite grow up in the sing in the cliched single parent working-class family but that's just the number of parents that were living under your roof your dad wasn't an absence correct also I did for the first eight years of my life grew up with my stepdad right and so the point of the whole book is that on paper if you just present you know the stats free school meals in a city you know immigrant et cetera where my life should have ended up and where it may have ended up but for a few different ingredients and where it has a quite disparate and part of that is the role of the men in my life also my godfather who book is dedicated he doesn't know that yeah this is not he he was just a family friend why he became so close to the family that when my mom got very sick when I was you know 10 years old she was supposed to die he signed the papers to say look if they don't want to move and live because my dad lives in West Sussex I wasn't keen on moving to West Sussex right so he was out have the kids as kind of thing so there were there were male role models around I don't think that is that's often a very easy go to sort of cliche and but but reality is often much more complex and that even in families that have split up my dad went and had another family in West Sussex and they were together and still at together now I mean so does is it was much more complicated than those kind of papers as all families are but there's there's an appeal you can see where simplicity is compelling I mean in terms of how do you fix a problem you need to be given something that feels achievable yeah and male role models is quite an easy fit for the idea that if you could only somehow ensure that young black kids in particular there's more male role models then they would get into less trouble and also I think that's not to say that male role models isn't isn't part of a wider issue but it's also to suggest that families occur outside of the context of the society that they're in so for example if we look at my family's history yes my grandmother comes to the country like most Caribbeans of our generation doesn't find employment commensurate with our level of intelligence or sure and she was expecting to I think we're all on a bit of a crash because they were very shocked they genuinely expected to it sounds terribly naive now right does it well yeah because if you know that history in the last 70 years they expected when they left the Caribbean they were British citizens remember they were being taught at school yes they went to British schools in Jamaica so they're being taught that they're British they have a British passport exactly the same as the Queen's in the classroom right it all it says is British passport Jamaica yeah or if you're in Grenada or Grenada so they leave remember they pay for themselves as I've explained to people with sort of population swap that occurred there were people leave in Britain go into the colonies at the cost of the Commonwealth taxpayer about 1.5 million people though people come in from Europe Ireland Italy Germany Poland the ones that came from continental Europe no island I'm not sure what happened with them but the ones that came from continental Europe received also state subsidy to come here so then you have this other group of people who are paying for themselves and contributing as British taxpayers and then I received not just by the public what the state has commonly done is given us this impression ignorant working-class people were just so racist the state sort of had to give in and there's no doubt that it was a bit of that mentality there any wind washed generation person will tell you that but the state had decided if you if you read the documents their own archive unless they forge their own archive to make themselves look more racist than they were they have decided from the moment that boat arrived these people would never really be citizen so at least government referred to the literal passengers on the Windrush as an incursion and said that steps needed to be taken so that no further influxes were encouraged these are British citizens yeah taxpayers mostly skilled workers you know so the only thing that was abnormal about them the quite unquote was was their blackness so we're in English speaking culturally they were more English than that people come and say from Germany a teeny or Poland well they were the wrong color yeah so what I was gonna say about farmers in that context you know my gren god bless my granite hope she doesn't mind me saying this but you know my grand has you know some personal emotional and mental problems yeah my dad goes into care for a couple of years now the care system in the 70s well let's put it like this about 150 thousand British kids were trafficked to Australia up until the 1970s from ended war to the 70s so we imagine that's what was happening to ethnically white British kids in that period you can imagine what the care system was like for a black guy in the 70s that doesn't you know free my dad or anyone else from any of their human flaws but my family didn't exist out the context of the wider society is what I'm saying my mum gets from a black guy her dad's not too happy about it kicks her out of the house and so some of my family issues are not I'm not irrelevant to the wider societal context within which they occur even big macroeconomic things you know I read I read a stat recently that child someone born in 1981 I was born a free hmm has half the average net worth by fares someone born in 1976 yeah so these big macro economic changes is big my brain worked like my grandma clean toilets and she bought a house in Kings Cross it's incredible isn't that in Kings Cross yeah now can you imagine literally physically impossible so bigger changes of bias anywhere loan in Kings Cross if you were to do manual labor exactly did you talk to your grandma then yeah so you were presumably the least surprised person in the country when the Windrush scandal broke the last few weeks I was I was completely unsurprising also because it wasn't a scan over the last few weeks for me you know this but it made for lots of other people we've been talking about this for many years because the deportations didn't only start a few weeks ago so obviously these are people's uncles these are people's aren't he's our family members um but I was aware not because of my grand actually a lot of the Windrush generation they don't talk about what happened in that generation why not for a number of reasons one because when they left the Caribbean remember these were upwardly mobile people especially the lot that came between 48 and 55 which wasn't actually my gran but the first lot that came the British government to make a feared they were losing their best people for enduring right because these were obviously if you could even fill in the forms by mind went so the end of British rule literacy in the Caribbean was still below 30% so the people that could even fill in the forms let's just start there we're not from the kind of uneducated subset of Caribbean society so they leave expecting opportunities expecting better education expect in all of this stuff and in a way a lot of them just couldn't cope with the rejection so a lot of people wanted to go back and instead of going back what they did instead was they worked their ass off and sent money and what we call barrels back home that they actually couldn't afford to send sure because they couldn't admit to people back home what a failure the expedition had been and so my grand and lots of her generation if you actually talked to them that they're not very free with what they think and fill that up here it's a lot of what I've learned you know nuggets have come from a ground here in them NPCs and he's not around anymore but um a lot of is actually come from books and from study and those who were willing to talk CLR James Claudia Jones or sure people who did write about that period um Peter fryer even New York Sherman White York Sherman who wrote perhaps the definitive history of black people in Britain so that's where I've made sense of my Gran's experiences from scholarship a lot it's what age were you when you started seeking out that sort of scholarship well I was lucky so in the 60s the Caribbean community who came to Britain as part of this reaction yeah they were very dissatisfied with the level of education their children were receiving in Britain schools partly because of institutionalized racism but partly ironically because because in the Caribbean you have to educate a middle class civil service ironically a black caribbean migrant was probably better educated than a lot of poor people in england so they've come to england expecting to get an upgrade as caribbean civil servants or as Nigerian civil servants might have done in the last twenty or four years and instead essentially got an educational downgrade and so as part of the reaction to that they sell we call Pan African Saturday schools so Saturday schools for black kids dealt with maps in English and teach African history and all this sort of stuff there were about 150 of them at sort of peak every Caribbean community Britain had one till quite recently some still do I went to one of those as a child and so I had some support and some insulation from a lot of the negativity so but what this meant on the other side was that these kind of issues that I'm writing about know I was really very aware of at six seven eight nine years old because of my Black Saturday school and so in a way I think that what I'm trying to do with the book is for young working-class kids in general and young working-class black kids in particular is to say look no one's saying that personal responsibility doesn't matter what personal responsibility occurs in a context and one of the greatest things that haven't happened to me was I was not deluded into believing that Bryn was a meritocracy he's written a better society than maybe France probably or Italy in terms of these contradictions perhaps that doesn't mean the country is flat on meritocratic doesn't mean everyone gets the same chances it would be ridiculous to tell a kid in the easter house in glasgow on a portion they was in Western Europe he has the same life opportunities as a kid in High Street Kansas even in kenzan to tell a kid in grim fell yeah they have the same opportunities as a people in park which are 30 seconds away is ridiculous and so for me one of the great benefits was my parents my pan-african Saturday school the entire sort of radical Caribbean intelligence yeah it was working-class people but was very much an intelligence a that I was part of my step that was a stage manager of a Empire so I saw loads of theatre growing up they never deluded me into believing I would get the same opportunities as everyone else because it's quite a bleak message to give a child it's almost the opposite of what some people would consider to be the path to aspiration but but is it I mean saying to a kid you have to work twice as hard that's just the reality I'm still still entertaining the possibility that you you that work would be rewarded they weren't telling you yeah no bother because you're never going to get through that correct right it was never saying oh racism exists oh you born poor so just give up and go back no that place that that was not what I was saying at all they were saying work twice as hard do better in school or as my great my good friend MKS anyone when a great scholars african-american scholars he he says take two sets of notes that's just that's just the game like there's plenty of current think about the problem we have in Britain is that there are plenty of nation-states may be one nation states in the world where there is some minority who the state doesn't like and serve as a useful scapegoat perhaps because we believe our own PR is why we're surprised here but it isn't a surprise in France isn't a surprise in China isn't a surprise in India with the Sikhs or those I think I think I mean every state probably has the PR as well all right we have a slightly more well I'm much more sophisticated the greater your power the greater your ability to craft self image so if you if you are the first truly global Empire if you conquer a quarter of the world's surface and if you didn't know that about it I mean remove the Empire just for a minute not that you can but some of Britain's intellectual cultural achievements are undeniably impressive all of the kind of racism and conquering would mean nothing if Newton hadn't existed if Darwin hadn't existed if Shakespeare in existence so it's one with the other it's not as simple as saying oh Britain went around and conquered everyone and therefore you still have to have some fruit at the end of it and I finished answering that combination of and this goes for Western Europe in Geoffrey I'm not one of these people who seeks to deny that Western Europe's intellectual cultural difficut events across the last half millennia are impressive I just deny the racist propaganda they were used to justify song China was impressive they were printing books 600 years before people were printing books in Europe or medieval Mali or the kings of Mesopotamia were being elected to serve fixed terms into 5500 BC and this is what you're learning at your service no no you mean you're self-taught then but but yeah I mean I think oh you need only finish the way you've done knew this was gonna happen we've been here 15 minutes you're jumping around so much I want to get the arc of your life yeah I'm seeing the fruits of your learning without understanding where the learning camera so let's start with a simple course and how old were you when you realized you were particularly clever um well it's hard because I think that I always was lucky enough to know cleverness was relative so for example my older sister is incredible at drawing in sculpture and art I still draw I would say an average free year-old I'll draw you a picture and you'll say he's got me joking my handwriting's really worried about but I'm not gonna sit here and be overly humble and say I didn't know how it was kind of bright I won't allow you in a sense because ironically because I went to a very mixed school not just racially but economically yes we had lots of we basically had the wealthy white parents who didn't want to send their kids to private school right went to this kind of school Darwin's right and so what it meant very early I was that oh you know this person lives up on Highgate Hill you've got big detached house and you know they've all clearly got lots more money than we have even though they live five minutes up the street but actually not any cleverer than I am and in in a sense more so than my cousins who went to school in brick stone or Hackney who went to essentially segregated schools in an evening what name if not just racially what was economically I saw very early the difference in treatment more than perhaps they would yes because I got putting the special-needs group for kids who didn't speak English when I was 7 which is what my chapters in the book zoom out why because I think one particular teacher and it's not to put her in a bad apple jumping again in that period for this particular teacher I was too bright for my own good yeah and and in any fairness traffic it's too easy to sell you one individual bigot you bad woman she was born in the night in phase yeah this is the 1980s she's brought up a time when the idea that Europeans were genetically superior to everyone else was considered a scientific fact the rather uncontroversial it's too easy it's very easy as I say in the book I say look it's understandable in that context in that Imperial context as well the subjection of subject races even in a highly class stratified society remember British education was never even equal for white people kids in East Glasgow were never given the same education as kids to go to ian's so the idea that black migrants to Britain were being educated to become the next Roger Penrose or the next Richard Dawkins ridiculous we're not even educating poor white kids to do that so so why would that why would we think that would be on offer to black immigrants to the country you can do it if you're David Adjaye and you I don't know whether he went to private school what happened in his family there'll be exceptions so what was happening was I was being rewarded actually so the special needs group they put me in they gave me hot chocolate and biscuits didn't tell my parents this is how you know they knew I didn't have special needs and it was actually my pan-african Saturday school who noticed that my behavior had started to slip them my grades started to slip who happens to be visiting my school one day for the other children who noticed that I'm not in regular classes and they tell my mum then my mum comes up to school goes wild and it's the teacher herself who sat kind of says you know she also feel so struck me over rudiment and a book and she saw I admit to hitting him but it's not because he's brown so she brought that there wasn't even my mama brought it to the table and so what I try and do in the book is put that in the context of a class stratified and racially stratified education sorry forgiving who you know Sarah Lee what I'm saying is what I tried to use is my know cuz I think it's too easy it's not I'm being forgiving it's too easy to blame the individual teacher so you're going for the explain rather than excuse I'm saying yeah exactly I'm not saying that that's okay what she did she could have ruined my life if I stayed in there for a whole year because she's an evil person well she did it because she'd been conditioned a particular way and you can't be the scholar that you are unless you acknowledge everybody else is looking at the world through the lens of their own essence for her she would be a traitor to her race in our nation in our culture if she taught me that I was to expect the best fruits of British society and this is one of the problems for little brown kids are a bit too clever boys particularly how much of this would you've been processing at the time more than more of it than a usual child because of my Saturday school yes and so because of my Saturday school I I got to see the difference between the Caribbean kids who went to Saturday's corn those who didn't eat like and the difference in outcome was was what I mean my cousin who had in much more tougher upbringing than I did even he also took his Massachusetts yearly and got ten G says he's it's not a fluke I've got nine siblings eight of us got 10 GCSEs yeah I don't know how many kids on free school meals get five but I think it's something like 5% or less eight of my 10 siblings got 10 and my cousin who also entered pan-african Saturday schools my Jamaican cousin he also got 10 and also took his Massachusetts yearly so there was this support it's kind of real and it's working-class I don't know if you can answer this question I've never heard of pan-african Saturdays yeah yeah before for good reason why because it's easier to give the impression that black people just don't care about education because then we don't have to explain the problems that we're seeing in Hackney or Brixton and why you need the alternative or the augmentation right I mean why if people if Caribbeans came to this country with a lack of value for education with a lack of value for family just wanted to be gang bangers and go to jail why did they bother setting up 150 Saturday schools why did it all virtually ask anyone of my age the difference between our grandparents and our parents almost all of our grandparents stayed married to their dying day even if they shouldn't have no it was frowned upon do it what we deal with is people the same a lot of the same people understand how seventies and eighties fad tourism and that tumultuous period in British history the collapse of the Golden Age of capitalism and all of that people understand how that affected mining communities in the north if you understand how that affected East Glasgow people understand how that affected Belfast suddenly don't understand how that affected Caribbeans who would concentrate in exactly the same time type of manufacturing jobs and I find that quite fascinating that's hard to understand so if you go to a lot of the form of mining towns of the north perhaps not on the same scale as London right now but what will you see you'll see alcoholism you'll see drug addiction you see low education you'll see violence you see many of the same problems that you see in Hackney just in a completely different demographic and apparently Caribbean immigrants to Britain are subject to different laws to all our human beings and it's sufficient to say they brought this culture with them and as I was I was arguing with a conservative woman on Twitter today she didn't respond obviously because she has an argument she says you know there's some cultures that have fatherlessness at their core and I said okay can you provide me just any data on the level of single-parent households in the actual Caribbean migrants that came from the Caribbean so not their great-grandchildren so if the problem was fatherlessness that we brought with us then you'd expect the violence the problems are now and actually the state in the post-war period commissioned a number of studies actually to try and prove that caribbean migrants were a drain on british resources that they were more likely to commit crime all of which concluded the exact opposite so the government didn't report them they didn't release them publicly because they literally concluded over 95% of them are gainfully employed yes and they're no more likely to commit crime than anyone else and and if we acknowledge that then we're the ones with questions to answer then now in this court and that doesn't free black people of self-responsibility I have a lot of self-respect I'm not like oh you know my TYT is responsible for everything that's gone wrong in the world or in my life that's not the argument what I'm saying is for kids in East Glasgow even along a class level for kids in Crocs Stephan Liverpool to not acknowledge how their communities came to be the way they are he's not helping them so it has to be a combination of yes of course you have to work twice as hard in school you can't expect a fortunate world it's not fair you can't expect something back for nothing for giving nothing at the same time I've got to be honest of you and say to you know the world isn't fair so you know I haven't really this hadn't occurred to me before so I'm just thinking of all the symptoms of what of what you what you're describing and of this thing you've got addiction you've got dysfunction you've got violence you've got a single endemic single parent all of which would apply to what I would slightly unpleasant but it's an easily understood phrase you'd apply that to your kind of Jeremy Kyle demographic without ever stopping to wonder why we just presume that it's colour related for African Caribbean famine what we presume that in London I mean if you're going ask people who live in the roughest Council stays in Scotland they call him scheme he's up there so even if we were not here yes it would be someone else before we got here same problem it was the Jews in the Irish before we might do town in East London at the turn of the century the the there was there were a couple of acts of anarchist terrorism and that was blamed on the entire Jewish community crime knife crime itself was said to be endemic to Irish does that mean so this is not new issue Irish immigrants before did bits of it are because because I bits of it I know and yes I'm struggling to keep up with you I'm not gonna lie which is quite a novel experience for me so what I'm hearing is yeah a little bit guilt inducing if I'm honest because what it had never really occurred to me before the the problems within the black community in London were the same problems that you see within poor communities in other cities yeah and that they were a result of having the certainties that were provided by the combination of welfare state and a proper concept of society pulled from beneath the feet of your parents generation without any safety net being put in place but but also there were specific policies and this is where and this again like I said none of this is often an excuse but you can even look at the difference in education outcome today yes between later migrants who predominately came from West Africa who actually do significantly better in school yes then both poor white and black English the black English had deliberately mislabeled Caribbean this a lot of them have never been back to the truth this is the other problem a lot these kids who have been labeled Caribbean in the press have never visited your tour Trinidad or Barbados and if you look at educational outcomes Barbados has suffered like 99% adult literacy hmm st. Lucia has the highest number of no it's just convenient highest number of Nobel Prize winners per capita in the world oh sure Jamaica despite being one of the poorest countries in the world again if you look at the educational output of the tiny fraction of Jamaicans actually go to university there astronomically more intelligent than their cousins that live in Britain and interesting is American right-wing black Americans that Thomas soul for example his argument in America is the exact opposite he says Caribbean immigrants into America doing so well in school proves that the problem in America is not institutionalization because look the Caribbeans have done so well so how is it our literal cousins that went to America apparently valued education but the ones that came here didn't so again these structural issues we sort of no one's saying that that excuses people from personally doing anything with their life but to ignore the difference in as the original point I was making was that if later migrants from West Africa doing significantly better in school and something's happen but if you look at the way the press reacts to that and press reactions that has been poor white boys left by in the school system when when the reaction should be shouldn't we be teaching now the reason why we know that's that's a racist reaction is because black boys mixed heritage boys and poor white boys black English boys eyes fail with almost an identical right now like it's like 1 or 2 percent ahead the black English boys aren't apparently that that means the white boys are left behind shouldn't we all be saying why don't we all follow the West African kids in the Bangladeshi kids who still have that cultural value of education rather than say we've been left that's quite depressing isn't it because that suggests that the value of education was diminished in that generation or of course gaps there so that you you came over Windrush generation came over that it's a bit of a trite anecdote but there's a great line in Andrea Levy's book about I think one of the heroes of her book had lost a brother in the war he'd been fly Spitfires and he just presumed that this would afford him heroic status when he got him that it would somehow mean that you know he'd get treated as being a bit special because his brother had made the ultimate sacrifice and and when you realize the reality is that you're expected to know your place and you're expected to toe the line and you're also expected to to endure some pretty grim attitudes education suddenly doesn't seem to be the the key to the kingdom that it was for previous generations and that even subconsciously gets passed on to the next generation so then when the West African kids arrived for them the key is still real yeah of course and we can literally see that an outcome yes give it two more generations what is it two more generally two more generations and what will happen is they'll become acculturated so the the Ghanaian and Nigerian parents were currently like if you don't get a degree yet you better leave my home yes the more English you become and that's not because the British class system needs it only needs to 3% of the public to be properly educational know the atony ins and the kind of Oxbridge set it's all you need to run the country efficiently so lambaste in kind of more working-class communities for not becoming roger penrose or Richard Dawkins when we're not encouraging them to do so anyway we don't have a public language it's very strange it is very strange not least because we're we're jumping so multiple choice we'll go all in we seem now to be seeing an education system that's even more geared or is becoming more geared by every year towards education being a means to an end rather than an end in itself so what you've just described almost contradicts that even though what you describe is accurate because that's who 2/3 percent of people being needed to run the country that means that you have to render education something that's a rewarding and of itself rather than just a a path to professional advancement and yet our education system especially on tertiary level is now almost devaluing everything that can't be immediately translated into into material benefit over the degrees that don't deliver a job immediately I think if the brexit trajectory continues they'll be the ones you have to pay for soon and you might be able to go to medical school or engineering school for free it's it's a strange sort of state of affairs and it's even stranger to primarily lay the blame at the people who don't have any power to make all of those decisions but if you can persuade the white people who as you've just said that their problems are actually caused by people like you then nothing ever needs to get fixed yeah but I think what's fascinating again like I said it's how this state plays I've got anywhere I am politically at the moment I'm on this weird what do you call it almost like the top of a pyramid I'm not quite sure which way I'm going to roll because to think of it as all being deliberate it's quite it's it's close to conspiracy and yet the evidence mounts especially with regard to the Windrush ya story that we've seen that's the tip of an iceberg I think there's a lot more to come out on this as you as you will already know yeah but the idea that it was a deliberate plan with an endgame I find almost too sinister to believe which is understandable given your lived experience yes the first time I was searched by police I was 12 yes there was no adult present I wasn't reading my rights when I taught when I tried to serve teacher at my school gave us all of the old lap was in our school he gave us a form with our rights on it cuz he knew it was gonna get searched by the police at some point because that doesn't matter what your grades are I mean you can be like me and go to the Royal Institution my from how'd you got searched I'll talk about this once in the book I've got search on my way to door institution mathematics master classes once and that was when it hit me is that respectability politics don't mean anything because I was born in the bottom 1 or 2% of you know it's socio-economic leagues weakened academically I was in the top 1 or 2% it didn't change the fact that some of the people with the power just saw a criminal and this was before I I did become a bit of a naughty boy myself and part of that trajectory was being treated like a criminal Mike the point the point I'm making is is that for me especially going to the kind of school I went to I saw he was bringing drugs into school and he wasn't and I saw he was getting session he wasn't and the kids bringing drugs into school were the ones who could afford it Class A drugs anywhere know my name you know race the one weed I'm not gonna lie but in terms of drugs drugs you know it wasn't us and so it was it was very clear to me very early that the lunacy of sort of ethnically targeted stop and search which we want to bring back when you even look at the numbers now what this does is it doesn't help solve the problem it helps make the problem worse for the reasons it should be entirely common sense let's say there's roughly a million black people in them I think it's not 800,000 somewhere in that region that's 40 50 murders a year but let's just do it easy mass right of 50 murders because actually less than 50 usually that means five and every 100,000 or to put it another way 0.005 percent or whatever that is actually kill somebody and if you look at the police's own report so research in this book I did a lot of look at police's own reports it from the days of operation Trident and in the reports they actually deliver they understand very well the type of young rap was that likely to kill people not random at all when you adjust for abuse in the home when you're just for expulsion from school crucially you start to see on there the same socio-economic demographic as the kids who've been doing this in Glasgow or Liverpool or Sheffield in the 1920s or or Middlesbrough but we can ignore all of that and so ironically treating the other eighty five ninety percent of young black boys in Hackney who just want to go school and get a job like criminals actually prevents us from allocating the resources where they need to go which is helping the most vulnerable people and the worst part by is if you're a kid like my little cousin for example when you live on a council to stay in Hackney if this doesn't happen to him but this is this is very common and you've been robbed two or three times growing up you know boys are pulled a knife on you to your mobile phone then you get searched by the police because of the very boys are getting bullied by it yes of course you're gonna be peed off this is natural if we if we said let's put like this is young boys give people if we took the case of jimmy savile and Rolf Harris and whoever else and we said right all middle-aged white guys in TV are potential defiles and lets police Andrew Neil on the assumption when he goes to pick up his grandkids let's just stop and make sure they're his grandkids just in case because of what jimmy savile done this is what you get when you get collected blame but we sort of accept it and it's not again I don't even entirely blame the public because when you have a language of public policy when you have a language of media that emphasizes race whenever there's a negative story or a significant portion time but not when it's a positive story so the four youngest kids to ever take GCSEs in Britain also black race was not emphasizing any reporting six-year-old Joshua Beckford from Tottenham yes we're studying philosophy Oxford his dad to him naturally race and certainly the black father was not emphasized which in both cases is the case so again with the West African kids who are doing very very well as thousands of them race is not emphasized it's emphasizing the negatives they go is that the West African kids are doing better than we are we need to fix this and it's very interesting because the journalist were right in that are not concerned with poor white kids failing if you read them all that I've got loads of site loads of them in there they're concerned that poor white kids are failing relative to black get that then I actually concerned with poor white kids himself is a sort of weird racial nationalism we're like well ok for the chaps to fail it's got a touch of the whip hand yeah chaps to fail with failing more than the immigrants do kind of thing and weirdly enough for someone like me who's done a lot of Education and work in poor communities full stop I want all young kids to do well why wouldn't we want more smart people like it's strange to me what is your answer to that question do we go back to the two to three percent that you need to run a function higher education is dangerous which is 100 imagination and empathy building blocks of educated people very very dangerous we're a hierarchical society we're a post-industrial society I mean there's others Society has just taught me back through the first time you were stopped and so yet when you were 12 years old yeah mom I have been 14 it was in that year right so I was in that year you ate at school I was to be fed to be fair to the police or as fair as I can be I was a very big lad so there's no way they for I was 12 still though I did try to explain that yeah and they still shouldn't have said I went to school lads he went on to play pop forward for England rugby they never got stopped yeah I mean but I was about this size still not big enough for clearly it wasn't that right why did the officers actually said to me so I lived in near between sort of the weather winter nah suppose I lived in that sort of in the archway Camden sort of that that bit but the officer said to me where you're from Tottenham so go away so you know what he was trying to say from the jump and I was I know I actually live up there right and and and it's interesting because I didn't tell my mum when I got home because I couldn't be bothered that I was like okay cool I knew this was coming seriously and so yeah because it's it's just it's a rite of passage and so I I fought her tongue my mum she's gonna get upset she's gonna feel actually need to go to the police station and tell them this was wrong I just can't be bothered it's just it's it's nothing they just search for me and they they they could say nothing they just searched me I've never been searched in my life yeah what's up with six months ago so because this is what happens when you have a stigma Tory language so the last time I got pulled over to tail in the - it was literally a week kids it was so ironic after the Commissioner of the Met went on TV and said tougher sentences for teenage fog black men in London are 20 times more likely to be killed which is very selective way of presenting the information if you're saying blackness is the common denominator the way to present the information would be to say what percentage of black people actually kill people and as I just showed you with the stats earlier when you present it like that he realized that the type of the percentage of actually kill Pitt was significantly less than 1% which means it gonna have to offer more of a common denominator than blackness but when you present blackness as that come into Narnia even when a significant portion of the black on black violence that's are people like me you are half white you get a situation where police can pull over a grown man in his 34 years old and say gang members drive cars like this and I'm like well so the people who run companies which happens to be what I am I met you on my way to a meeting but but thank you very much I'm sure that it was the car that made you think I was a gang member and one of the officers a female officer came around the other side of the car and she recognized me right and so she got terribly embarrassed and then the other officers you didn't that's all what you do matters another one well if you think we've got you know if you've got a better suggestion last known I wasn't actually I'm I'm right in - I was preparing at the time working with groups young people - to work up some solutions long-term solutions to the problem the communities are facing but the point of what I'm saying is interact and I already knew interaction with the police was an inevitability and in a sense my experience was one step better than my parents experience if you talk to even a lot of the Irish community of my dad's age in got someone like Kilburn yeah Irishman in there a in the 50s police patel it was right normal in the seventies and a's but they were all terrorists ago so in a weird way did one of the things i've caught up in pointing out to people a lot recently the degree to which the state legitimizes racial hierarchy public language and policy nor can be seen really clearly in the difference between the way black and irish people relate in america men in Britain so in America the relationship is fundamentally hostile for a whole host of historical reasons in Britain the probably the one white community in the 70s and 80s who Caribbeans were really close to was the Irish for the exact reason that they were sort of the even though there were loads of poor white communities the Irish understood why was to be targeted because of who you were knows is in America they became police there you go so so that relationship shows you very clearly that the state does influence but again Paul's relationship thing that I'm going to enjoy most I think from reading more deeply into your work is this contention of it being deliberate because that that is I don't want a hawk on this point but the evidence that you present makes it look like a plan as opposed to what I've always presumed it wasn't it as a phone in host you get exposed to quite a lot of raw prejudice and they thought figure in history I've always presumed that was the tail that wagged the dog whereas you're making me wonder whether actually what do you example with there's a very very good book called white washing written by a scholar called Kathleen Paul and she wrote this in 90s I believe because the state's own archive was now available so for example if we talk about the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act the act that began the process of D citizenship isin whether the word is right taking or removing the citizenship from the brown parts of the Commonwealth the Home Secretary time Rab Butler privately said this is now a public statement he said it's great merit was that it could be presented as non-discriminatory when in fact it's restrictive intent was intended to and indeed would affect colored people almost exclusively you do that from memory then that's pretty much a verbatim course because you see someone from my background Rab Butler is one of the good guys yeah that's pretty much a verbatim choir I believe you and so so I mean there might be a word or two that slightly differ all that sure I've read it and and that's the book it's from so my point is I love this is not even it's it's it's supremacism I know that's like I'm reaching for the big word but what it is keep saying hierarchical but you just mean that there is an utterly implicit and occasionally explicit bow never in private sense that like a caste system yeah of course but but the difference is we know that other societies have a cost yes we know our system and we pretend that we don't and then we say to the people at the bottom of the cost whether they're the schemas in East Glasgow or the former chavs in East London how long wrong we exist and been replaced by West Africans and Bangladeshis or whoever else is the Irish and the Jews of a hundred years ago we say those people the results of this caste system are entirely your fault and there's nothing to do with the whiteness and that's why you keep talking about personal responsibility yeah and I'm fine with about four or five unfiltered segoe the comedian Russell Cain was here who was in a minority at school in Essex well I opened my eyes in a way that hadn't happened before because he started seeing a girl who was much more middle class and he was Suzy at University so he started staying at her halls of residence he'd been brilliant at primary school spent all of secondary school pretending he wasn't clever so many poor kids did to avoid going his head kicked in came from a poor background and I've never known anyone have this before because with you this has been it's impossible to plot the beginning of your journey your intellectual journey has been endemic to who you are pretty much from I sense from when you could start reading and talking certainly from going to Saturday school yeah which I went stagnant status caught five there you go Russell at the age of about nineteen and you can watch the interview it's an astonishing moment just looked at his girlfriend's world people reading poetry on the lawns of the college and I won't swear but he did basically just said my birth was a sentence what he had been posed but you see it's helpful for me to see both in the same or what you're describing and what he described in the same way because it completely enforces the point you're making about the poorest people the people at the bottom of any pile regardless of their ethnicity regardless of geography and color they are not there by accident and then we say to the kids who live in East Glasgow a place that has been structurally poorer than Glasgow as Western for 250 years yes you're the reason it's like this did they build those housing estates then and I'm not even saying it totally equal societies entirely possible I don't know this is the great but bright wing but weapon but what is if you think the environment doesn't define you it's point like this and it's one of the things actually I'll say this on hearing that I shouldn't because it's something we've been privately working on Beware right let's say we started a board in school yeah and we took kids from Hackney and Tottenham and Brixton and we put them on a farm in Cambridge right feeling [ __ ] - pigs part of my language right for the whole years of secondary school yeah is anyone gonna honestly tell me they think the outcomes would be identical so if they stayed in that environment or to take it even more extreme would anyone choose who has money to raise their child in a favela in Brazil hmm would anyone make that choice I've been to the fellows in Brazil some of my best friends live there no one who's got money is willingly unless they're you know should work there but you're gonna raise your kids in a non-violent my choice so when people say your environment isn't defined I mean IIIi any right-wing version of signaler who believes that I publicly challenged them yes I will we can bet some of money they can go live for one year on Angel Town estate in Brixton right or or in East Glasgow they can pick and if at the end of that year they can still say the societies remember to crack that your environment doesn't define you that whatever you if they genja and it has to be during a period of time that is crucial to their child's development so let's say that last year of a-levels last year of GCSEs you have to go and live in that environment just for that period of time and see what it does to your personal perception see what it does to your confidence you were not an excuse the people that lived there based absurd to suggest that they have the same child I see it with all my friends I have friends I almost every every boy I was friends with expelled from school 13 without exception went to prison everything one and the former head of the Prison Service Martin Narey he said the 13,000 kids we expelled from school every year we might as well give them a prison sentence then and there because the correlation is that correct then you have these exceptions but Plan B who is here a month ago actually his life was changed these people referral unit but you can't hold up people like him but if he wasn't a talented musician bingo everyone not everyone can write music no so if you're not telling a musician or a footballer and and it got discovered right and it got discovered on top of all of that then you don't become Plan B you just become another little chav in jail right and so it's it's all of those different forces that I think what affects a lot of people what creates a lot of frustration and rage in Britain he's not the brain is unequal pretty much every society on the planet is unequal it's their lies that we tell ourselves and isn't we pretend that we've we've achieved we're not Sweden and even Sweden's got problems we're not Norway and even though it's got we're not Japan there are countries where similar levels of development Germany ISM more we have we imprison our population at double the rate the Germans do and this is why the ironies of racism with brilliance is of it is that some of the very same people currently demonizing black people as criminals I hand in the state power to put their kids in jail with 2% of the country the brita british proper let the prison population is growing about 82% in three decades do we think that's all black people we don't live in America and so this is the irony of it was brilliant having a racial scapegoat means that kids in Wales you know IPP is so IPP is when you go to jail and you actually don't know how long you're gonna be in jail you're not given a proper sentence and definite right so you can go in for one year and up doing ten years or some ridiculous stuff like this happen into kids in rural Wales now but it's because handi were persuaded that we made really tough power the snow's basically during the demonization of the Caribbeans in the irish in the 70s and the 80s and so a lot of this you know the kind of would be dismissed as quite unquote marxist nonsense but the ironies when you look at the state's own documentation often it's there you find the actual admission and evidence of the very thing that they're claiming isn't isn't the issue is it a to ask you this but how complicit then do you think journalists are because I have no hesitation in describing people like Kelvin Mackenzie or Paul Dacre the editor of The Daily Mail is appalling appalling scars upon our national conscience but but the idea that they deliberately do this I don't think everyone sat in a room and said right no we're gonna use the phrase black on black violence 54,000 times between 1990 and 2005 I don't think it's like that never mentioned Islam right exactly I don't think there's like that level of broad practical it makes the bell ring it lights up the light but also it's if you employ overwhelmingly a certain set of people from a certain set of background with certain set of prejudices along lines of class and along lines of race you get roughly predictable outcomes so in school for example state knows the black kids are more likely to get expelled yes regardless of what they do like there was a study so two studies done one by Brazil one by one at university and as the Department of Education study done in 2004 this is Department of Education zone study they said when you take every control factor into account single-parent homes free school meals special educational needs previous expulsion criminal records all of that right because I still 2.6 times more likely to be expelled what could explain such a thing no one in any of the solutions is saying well should we look at the expulsion rates similarly with GCSE entrance and all these other things that the state knows I mean I've seen these reports as much as I have it's just not everyone who is from a background like mine or yours for that matter has time to sit down and work through all of this documentation and so what happens is what scholars know to be true is not widely often public knowledge and therefore in the newspapers a massive scandal like the fact of thousands of kids essentially getting unfairly expelled from school simply because they're black and their teachers believe their trouble is no story at all the fact that young black kids are significantly less likely to be entered for higher tier GCSE even when they have the same grades as everyone else the fact that African kids are assumed to be so much less smart than everyone else even they're doing so much better in school and again these are national studies looking at every school in Britain this is not me and I'm again I'm not even blaming individual teachers we live in a world where the only image of Africa is poverty in violence and war the image of Africa is not the Ghanaian accountant or David Adjaye or or the nicest city in the land or wherever else right is it there's a particular image on and that has an effect what the state does is allow popular prejudice to manifest and say well that's what I mean that's that that fascinates me that taking an egg element to what you're describing is ideally pandering to the prejudice or are you creating the project I think a bit of both and I think you do a bit above I think if the if the education system as we've seen with this kind of recent right-wing virtually signalling yes if it was producing smarter black kids yes you've seen what their actions been the reaction hasn't been to say to working-class white kids will work as hard as the Ghanaian Nigerian kids now black English kids are failing just as much as the white English kids so that we know it's a it's racial propaganda because the same people who they're not even concerned about the mixed kids and if it's not bothering me why would I bother trying to understand it better if it's not affecting my and why would I bother trying to articulate and it's not clearly okay again it's like if I go so this is one of the things again I point out in the book when I go to Jamaica when I go back to Jamaica which I do every year I'm one of the privileged yes because simply because I'm light-skinned and cuz I'm a foreigner I have an English accent yeah so one of the legacies of color coded capitalism in Jamaica is that almost all of the people who owned all of the property in Jamaica are not Danskin black people when there's a 90 percent black country so you have sort of a kind of a white hierarchy but also syrian-lebanese la people don't know we have Chinese people in Jamaica and then you have what we call someone like me it's called high colour your mother higher colour all right and I'm assumed to be upper-middle class what boys I grew up with you've killed people you've gone back to Jamaica and if one assumes they're basically posh that is a boys from the hood who've gone to jail for murder who just being of lighter-skinned they go back to Jamaican they get the benefit of the doubt major it's complicated cuz dreads have certain political and cultural implications in Jamaica but my point is I've seen it from the other side of the fence where if you're on Uptown light-skinned Jamaican I've had Jamaican say to me Jamaica is not violent because they live uptown Wow and they view the police is an instrument of legitimacy even though their Jamaican police kill civilians how did you stay so optimistic um because you cut because the world is also beautiful at the same time like I think a wise man said to me once if you if the news has a report every good deed that people do they'd have no space to report anything else so as bad as things can be I actually find solace in under the book is really about me making sense of my own experiences and actually I found the emotional and psychological solace in knowing the way things work oh yeah like I like taking something to pieces yeah I don't even think I don't even take it that personal the the recent stuff of Windrush is a port in it is it stuff that many of us were expecting wiesel immigration insecurity has been enormous in Snite in 48 so we were not oh my god I can't believe this is happening philosopher people they weren't in it in a way that that shock registers is how much people haven't really been paying attention yeah and it's easy not to pay attention when it doesn't affect you so I may even like I said I'm not even blaming necessarily the widest society but I'm I think in terms of optimism it's it's more actually I think it's fair up uuk to really understand well why why did I get in the special needs group why was I search by please said the same year that I've got first got searched bhops was the first year I saw someone get stabbed you know I'm one of my closest friends big brother got a meat cleaver in the head four times in a local barber shop and I was expecting it this is the weirdest thing I was it was the first time I'd seen some of that I didn't stop cutting my hair I went to the phone the phone box to phone my friend and say yo your brother's been bored up you better go to hospital and check him I came back to the barbers didn't finish getting my trim and went about my day I've never seen that before I knew it was coming my little brother's essentially middle-class one of the boys who got killed recently was in his class at school he knew the family very well free of the boys we've got killed recently in Hammond he knew them personally but essentially ironically even those black and this is one interest of things I've seen in my younger brother he's 17 today by the way happy birthday um the difference that just having a little bit of money makes yes right when I was growing up my mom was stressed because she spent 29 days of every month trying to figure she was gonna keep the lights on and keep the rent paid she's not that she's not stressed anymore and it's not that way you know we're not rich people rich but my mom is not worrying about whether or not she's gonna be homeless or whatever not she can keep the lights on and I mean she's an entirely different person because if he all you if all that can occupy your headspace is our do I give my kids gas or electric this winner which was literally our situation how can you possibly be a happy human being havin tomatoes eel on daily basis as I've seen in my little brother a lot of the things that would affected me even his he's just a much nicer person than I am and I don't mean an away to put myself down when I was his age if someone spoke to me rudely it's entirely likely that I would just punch them in their face that was growing up the way I grew up that was the logical content and take me for you I'm not a [ __ ] or no I'm not having that being taken for a [ __ ] yeah was worthy of killing someone it sounds so dumb to people today in it but when you have that level of insecurity and fear and aggression that is the logical response it only sounds dumb for as long as you forget what what is happening at the moment yeah God says violence and a knife crime and gun crimes doing in fact it's the opposite of damn it would make sense for a lot of people that hasn't before I start occurring enough when I was maybe fifteen because a grown man at a kebab shop came off the moon with the kebab shop knife and boys from my area happen to be on hand and he gave me a flick knife and from then on oh yeah I've seen quite a few people get stabbed by now maybe I've seen four or five people get stabbed partly that was my own choices what are the statistics on that do you know because you're a bit of a - are you less likely to be a victim of knife crime if you carry a knife do we know you're almost certainly more likely of course it doesn't feel like that when you're when you're 50 staring down the river and also when you're you know again I don't I don't say that my own personality is in no way responsible most of the young black boys I grew up with didn't carry knives even though they'd seen the same thing so I still I'm not saying my personal responsibility is irrelevant mo but my family home and even that is complicated my mom and stepdad split when I was nine had they have stayed together and I don't just mean because they're having a foreign oil yeah two incomes but you know less stress my mom got cancer the year after he left me and my big sister had had to take care of my mum then when my mom gets better my big sister no longer wants to be told what to do because she's an adult essentially and she's been mum she ends up leaving the home at 16 or right and going to live in a hostel all of this vanishes from our broken home single parents what happens to fact my mom didn't get cancer or my mom my stepdad didn't split up I might have been one of the poor kids who was just poor but didn't get involved in the violence didn't get sucked in by you know my friends lived in Tottenham anatomy in Hardin so I was the boy from Camden which was you know now become a very rough area but when I was growing up with semi-rough and actually a lot of the rough gangs in Camden when uh growing up what Irish kids places at Queens Crescent on in angel round packet in a state before angel was um was gentrified those were the people who every was off the Irish boys remains were there about his life right so I am I made bad decisions but those bad decisions were made in a context and unlike the rest a lot of the rest of my friends because I had good GCC's because I had self-confidence because I had this pan-african support when I decided to stop making bad decisions I had the equipment to progress and partly also you know our family situation changed my sister became a pop star yes and that provides a sort of security that wasn't like in the way that you just taught about your mum I mean but weirdly enough I one of my the problems by that age I was so egotistical was a young I didn't know I didn't want to live off my sister No and so I was you know my sister won't notice now but I was still being a bit of a naughty boy even when my sister was what do you mean when you said you mean you were dealing no no no no I mean I I knew people that knew people okay and sort of became a how do I say this without all that get myself and too much talk I just became a bit of a naughty boy for a period time and not for a long period of time you know six months a year so I don't just mean in terms of activity I just mean I carried a knife I was still playing football sort of then I left football and opened a restaurant and that didn't quite work so I was sort of what we call a fringe person I was never ever some kind of bad guy I don't wanna give people impression I was some kind of big-time gangster I wasn't I'm just saying I was around badness and a lot of my closest friends one of my closest friends can never come back to England you know he came to England too and this was different from the Windrush cases because he was a very naughty boy so he got sent back to Nigeria he's never allowed back his whole family's here but again his decisions were made in a context it doesn't excuse him but it's how do we trace back those steps if were actually concerned with solving a problem which we pretend we are the outputs of people ways like this we spend astronomical sums of money looking up young people more than any other country in Europe would it be even if you're just a free market fundamentalist would it be me economically efficient to provide those families with a bit of extra assistance at age 9 10 11 12 then the inevitable imprisonment that we know is coming at 16 and as taxpayers as people who've become successful which now includes me we have to decide which we would prefer and even if it's just from a right-wing perspective which is more economically efficient to spend 80 grand a year whatever the hell it costs to put someone in prison it's more than it costs to go to ian's or to spend a little bit more helping that family in the more formative years it's a new wrinkle though isn't there in America and increasingly so here in the logic of the answer to that question it seems clear until you factor in the third group of neoliberal free marketers who got shares in a privatized prison so here we go and then you have these situations in America where judges are practically on commission there we go oh you've got people who just deep down don't believe in what they're selling they believe in they believe in support for them and their families but they don't believe in it for other people so they'll say the market there's the market that allocation this allocation that the state shouldn't mean well but they're perfectly happy for state intervention when it comes to other things so it's it's also a lot of the time people's professed values are not consistent with their actual behavior which happens to all of us to some degree by the way I'm not claiming to be boys who do you most want to read this book um I'd be lying if I said it wasn't young black boys but it's not exclusively for them because it's not exclusively that story it does look at it very much doesn't look at gender so much it touches a little bit I'm asking the reason and I'm sure I'm gonna get criticized by it by some people for that and I'm fine with that I felt that the gender dynamic was better left to better qualified women I knew a little bit and I've you know I've read my little bell hooks but I didn't want to kind of take the gender angle to be cool and be down with the latest vogue when I'm not really intellectually qualified and also you are intellectually qualified but you don't yet know enough to have arrived that I thought that's what I mean by intellectually I quite a fight it might be smart enough sure if you don't know something about something you don't know something I don't know enough about geography an opinion on water that is anti zeitgeist as well because when I was preparing to talk to you I wondered it's weird I want more people to say I don't know I think that would actually it's the free most undervalued words absolutely and more so now than any other point in living memory Freeman undervalued words when I looked into some of the stuff you've done your TED Talks and and some of the work I realized you have immense intellectual confidence on these issues so to hear you say that about yeah the masculinity issue that is as you say unfolding at the moment that that that's so valuable all the politics of Russia I hear a lot about Russia all the time I don't know I stay out of it yeah until I've actually done some research I'm not gonna give a proper informed opinion and I think I think one of the humbling things about writing a book like that is even research in a subject I earn I knew quite a lot about already yes how was that well compared to some of these people that I'm reading yeah we spent 30 40 50 years going through state archives going through primary sort I have such respect for that process and the diligence it takes for that process there's made me not less confident but it made me more likely set up don't know enough about yes I'll come back to you when I die this is it is a Socrates I think the more you know the more you realize you don't know or the really clever man is the man who realizes how little he knows but this is your eye I mean it's this is your thesis this is had you been to university your PhD yeah this is in a sense the fruits of your learning do you ever Isis I don't know what your answer to this will be I could normally guess but with you it's going to be very difficult to guess do you wish you had gone into the world of academia yes and no because I know and I do when I teach I teach it you needs quite a lot and and I'd like guest lecturing and I get very jealous yes think even the thing is even Oxbridge this is that sure we're I like to think of myself as being able to have a nuanced perspective even if people are very much disagree so why not go to Oxford or Cambridge it's not like I'm blind to how magnificent these institutions are in the face of it and why the people that come out there might be a little bit bloody arrogant because they are a phenomenal institutions whoever or not I agree what their political output or not I agree with their function knowing you went to the same colleges Isaac Newton there it's gonna make you a little bit arrogant and that's okay in a sense I don't think that's abnormal it's it's the implications that has for the rest of society so what I mean even when I go to some of those institutions I do think right I have been good to be here battling it out as a student on the other hand a lot of the experiences I went through in the streets which are why the young boys and talk the more Hackney might listen to me and not someone else I wouldn't have had those expect my mom wanted me to private school when I was a kid and I resisted out I don't know those four schools just posh white kids which was basically I said to her I was fine with being a school white kids but I don't want to be in school where ya the class dynamic just took it too far right in fact in primary school a lot of my friends were white because the middle-class white kids were the kids who are in the top set so ironically I ended up having two very different experiences between primary school and secondary schools one of the things I talk about again we're in secondary school your experience is getting searched by the police differential changes you can you see can you stop robbers middle class all of his bones virtually but when you see having when you see that move because primary school to secondary school seems to be a really underestimated Junction in people's lives and and it's going to be a more profound Junction I suspect that the less privilege you have can you see when when when a when a young black kid is crossing the line can you see when they're going I can see it with any kid I can see Bengali kids in Tower Hamlets who I've also worked who I can see it with Brighton has a hood yes bright and lovely Brighton in fact probably the most difficult kids I've ever worked with was a young offenders institute or a what's the one between the young offenders in stood between school in prison not a unit something else right it was one of those close right most difficult it was in Brighton really the kids from accounts for this day in Brighton so I can see the turn because I lived it myself yes because then I saw other people in my area no boys I grew up with hmm at 12 years old we knew they weren't gonna make it unless something to make happen unless they were shipped off somewhere we just knew so it's not these kids are not random then what's happening is some of the bad boys are killing random kids who have no let somebody boys being killed have nothing to do with nothing wrong place wrong time but obviously if you're a young black boy it's still the feeling you must have done something you must be involved somehow so what happens is you know it kid even if this happens to one of my closest friends sons you know he's the archetype for middle-class kid his parents moved out to the suburbs you know his dad actually works in gang intervention in the old neighborhood on the face of it they're the family that made it ends up wrong place wrong time wrong estate the kids stabbed him ten times over something he's nothing to do with but in a sense he can never really be a victim because there's this feeling of ethnic implication like gone black right you're somehow ethnically implicated in the crimes of other black people in a way that other groups of people in your Muslim which is not an ethnic group that's a whole nother conversation or listen you're Irish thirty years ago you're not you're not responsible for what the kids in the scheme YZ do in Glasgow and so I think it's other comment what the original question was but I'm about spotting it seeing this suddenly you can get on the cops can you can see it at 10 11 12 13 it's very clear and the worst bit about is a lot of the time is vulnerability that turns to violence and that doesn't excuse the person in question the to be oh I love most in the world are teenagers black boys my nephew my little brother now I did I'm interested in making excuses for people that pose a great danger to them is ridiculous clearly I'm not of course however if I thought excessive melanin syndrome would help us which is essentially what that phrase suggests would help us to solve the problem I'd be here for it but then I'll have to explain why Ghana one of the poorest and blackest countries in the world is less violent than London for example where does that fit into the Ghana Jamaica wrists 30 times more violent than gone a 50% of Jamaican come from Ghana how do we explain such a humongous differential if this and Jamaicans remember obviously we have even black Jamaicans my grandmother great my mom looks Chinese we have a whole lot of ethnic mix every go myself social Darwinian race and crime theory goes no garnish should be more free times more violent than Jamaica not the other way around especially after 300 years of being governed by Britain versus 70 Oregon so it's it's it's a much more sophisticated explanation that doesn't excuse young boys who are potentially murderers but also protects the other 95% of the boys and 99% of boys who pose no danger to anybody so the things that we haven't talked about yes we can't now we're banging out time we haven't talked about your music now I'm eight it's been an absolute education which which I mean quite literally we haven't talked about the Shakespeare stuff we haven't talked to a guy takes we haven't talked about all sorts of things and part of the reason for that I sense is that you are you're on a mission so bear in mind this is the last question what's next when's this going up a couple of weeks okay so that be passed by then um I don't know I mean I'm working on a few different things obviously we got we got the book out I'm working on a young adult fiction I'm actually sitting Shakespeare in England you know I'm working on a few community led initiatives as well you know it's not just all you know talk and scholarship we're trying to develop a few natural solutions that we hope can get by and even from people that would traditionally disagree when the evidence is presented in in a particular way so you know there's a few little bits and pieces in the patent and I won't be putting a new album out till next year because music has taken a backseat to to writing and stuff like that now but it should be good fun really thanks so much any time Susie hello I'm James O'Brien thank you for watching this episode of unfiltered not only is there plenty more where that came from but there's plenty more to come as well so make sure you subscribe to unfiltered and put yourself at the front of the queue for all forthcoming infinities [Music]

Channel: JOE

Views: 823,170

Rating: 4.7302589 out of 5

Keywords: JOE, JOE.co.uk, JOEcouk, Akala, Music, Rap, Hip Hop, Culture, Race, Class, Britain, Windrush, Immigration, Knife crime, windrush generation, Akala Interview, Akala James O'Brien, akala unfiltered, James O'Brien Unfiltered, Black Lives Matter, Racism explained, Racism in Britain, akala reaction, james o'brien brexit, james o'brien, akala interview 2019, james obrien, akala interview racism, akala knife crime, akala racism debate, knife crime london

Id: atfVUgyEIOI

Length: 64min 6sec (3846 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ArtistEngineer]

Thanks for sharing. That was a good and balanced talk. I like how Akala didn't descend in to victim mentality, and just analysed the facts from a fairly objective standpoint.

Similar things happened in Australia after World War II. Loads of European immigrants came out to Australia in boats. Many of these people were educated, doctors, engineers, scientists, but their education wasn't recognised in Australia so they had to start from zero. To be fair, many of these people didn't speak much English, but the government set up English schools for them.

I can imagine the shock, and the disappointment, if you were brought up in English speaking schools, with a heavily British influenced culture, and then still being rejected.