list.co.uk/festival Akala | FESTIVAL BOOKS
ROAD TO RUIN
Speaking to Stewart Smith in the run up to his Edinburgh International Book Festival appearance, rapper and writer Akala unpicks the inherent racial and class narratives examined in his passionate polemic-cum-memoir
A s Akala writes in his powerful new book Natives: Race and Class In The Ruins Of Empire, public discourse about racism is still as ‘childish and supine’ as it ever was. We have been trained, he argues, to see racism as an issue of interpersonal morality, rather than a form of structural violence. And as the hysterical reaction to decolonising activism like the Rhodes Must Fall protest has shown, Britain is still strongly wedded to its imperial past.
In Natives, Akala unpacks these thorny issues through a combination of analysis and memoir. The rapper, writer and social entrepreneur was born in Sussex in the early 1980s to a British-Caribbean father and Scottish/English mother, and grew up in the north-west London borough of Camden, ‘a petri dish for examining race, class and culture’.
A self-proclaimed
‘nerdy
boy’ drawn to books, music and sport, Akala faced the same struggles with poverty, racism and gang violence as his peers and family members. ‘I was setting out to write a politics book, but we realised that the best way to do that was to use
my own experiences,’ he says from his London studio. ‘Rather than have race and class as these abstract ideas, this is how they manifest in the lives of ordinary people on a daily basis.’ He gives the example of his friend, ‘a very successful black British actor’ whose children are essentially upper middle class yet have had interactions with the police throughout their lives. ‘We live in a city where there is no class analysis for black people. Crime committed by the black underclass is black crime, so upper middle class black children who’ve gone to private school, who’ve never committed crimes, who are statistically unlikely as almost anyone else in the country to ever stab anybody, it’s still somehow legitimate [to see them] as potential gang members because we have a narrative that is classless, that is solely focused on the skin colour of the perpetrator. Scotland has had long problems with gang crime too, and of course there is a whole class-based stigmatisation of the schemies, but no one would ever call what happened in the east end of Glasgow white on white violence.’ >>
15–27 Aug 2018 THE LIST FESTIVAL 33