# Natives by Akala - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? A study of British identity and Blackness.

Future generations and historians will remember the summer of 2020 for two things: the global Covid-19 pandemic and the similarly global Black Lives Matter movement. 

The death of George Floyd lit the fuse of the latter, but the powder keg that exploded that summer had been long in the making. As demonstrators saw it, the killing of Floyd wasn’t an isolated incident of police violence. To understand his death, America had to reckon with its history of anti-Black racism. 

But British demonstrators across the Atlantic made it clear that this wasn’t just an American phenomenon. Britain, too, has its own history of slavery, imperialism, and racism. This history is all too often poorly understood, or distorted by convenient myths. These distortions continue to justify the treatment of Black Britons as second-class citizens. 

But how should we understand this history? That’s the challenge musician, commentator, and activist Akala decided to tackle. He did this by documenting his experience of growing up in a Britain that racialized him as Black. 

In these blinks, we’ll follow Akala’s story from his grandparents’ generation, who came to Britain from its Caribbean colonies in the 1950s. Then we’ll move on to Akala’s own youth in a multi-ethnic working-class neighborhood in London. Along the way, we’ll explore the entangled histories of racism and empire in Britain. 

A short note before we begin: these blinks contain frank descriptions of racist language and attitudes that some may find upsetting.

You’ll also learn:



why racialized stop and search policies don’t solve crime in London; 

how official narratives about British history often distort the truth; and 

why anti-Black racism takes so many different forms across the world.

Caribbeans arriving in Britain were met with a racist backlash.

At the end of the Second World War, Britain was exhausted, indebted, and in physical ruins. It also faced a labor shortage. To get back on its feet, it needed workers. 

Despite its wartime losses, Britain still possessed a vast empire. In 1948, it passed the British Nationality Act. This gave anyone born in a British colony the right to settle in Britain. With the encouragement of the government, Caribbean subjects bearing British passports began landing at Tilbury, a port near London. 

This was the “Windrush generation,” a reference to the name of the ship that brought many Caribbeans to Britain. They saw themselves as equal citizens who had come to help rebuild the war-shattered “mother country.” But that wasn’t how white Britain saw them. 

The key message here is: Caribbeans arriving in Britain were met with a racist backlash.

Between the late 1940s and 1960s, around half a million Caribbeans arrived in Britain, among them Akala’s grandparents. They quickly realized that stories they’d been told about the mother country weren’t true. 

Britain, for one thing, was full of poor white people. Out in the colonies, whiteness had been a sign of power and wealth. The only white people many Caribbean subjects had seen before coming to England were members of the imperial elite. Imagine their surprise, then, when they first saw a white man sweeping the street. It was absurd. What was this Britain? 

But this wasn’t the only surprise. Caribbean arrivals had been told that they’d be welcomed as heroes. They were shocked when they were met with hostility instead. Akala’s grandfather, for example, remembers that he was regularly called racial slurs in public within a week of setting foot in the country. As his new neighbors saw it, he wasn’t helping rebuild the country – he was a freeloader who’d come to steal “their” jobs or even “their” women. 

How had white Britons come to this conclusion? Well, no one had tried to explain to white Britain that the popular welfare state then being built was in large part supported by revenues raised in colonies like Jamaica. Nor were they told that the people who’d produced coffee, tobacco, and gold in those colonies, and who were now coming to Britain, weren’t “immigrants.” They were British subjects like anyone else in the country.

In the absence of such explanations, hostility to Britain’s Black citizens only continued to grow.

Akala learned what it means to be Black in Britain at an early age.

Akala was born in 1983 to a Black British-Caribbean father and a white English-Scottish mother. His father had come to England from Jamaica, and his mother had lived in the colony of Hong Kong. Both were children of the globe-spanning British Empire. 

They met in England. It was a time of ubiquitous, unashamed racism. When Akala’s mother met his father, her family all but disowned her for being with a Black man. Neighbors, meanwhile, spat at her in the street.

It wasn’t just words; this racism was also physically violent. Like most Black men his age, Akala’s father’s scarred body told a story. Some scars came from beatings at the hands of the Special Patrol Group, a notoriously brutal police unit. Others recalled fights with far-right skinheads. 

The key message here is: Akala learned what it means to be Black in Britain at an early age. 

In Britain, Akala was called “mixed race.” In Jamaica, he would have been called “high colored,” the term used to refer to the lighter skin tones of wealthier Black Jamaicans. In the UK, though, Black was Black, and being Black made you a target. 

Akala was five when he was first racially abused. A classmate, presumably copying something he’d heard from his parents, called him the N-word. When Akala returned from school, his mother noticed he was upset. She asked him what was wrong.

He started telling her about his classmate, whom he called a “white boy.” Then he stopped in his tracks. It was the first time he realized that his mother was white. She was a quick thinker, though. “Yes, I’m white,” she said, “but I’m not English – I’m German.” This wasn’t true; she’d only lived in Germany when her military family was stationed there. But it was a safety valve that allowed Akala to report racist abuse without worrying he was hurting his mother’s feelings. 

Akala began to notice that hostility towards people who looked like him went further than little boys throwing slurs around schoolyards. Later that year, an infamous incident was captured on camera during a soccer match. It showed the Jamaican-born Liverpool winger John Barnes kicking away a banana skin that had been thrown at him by fans chanting racist abuse. 

What did this photo mean? Akala remembers staring at the image. He knew it was significant, but he hadn’t yet figured out in what way.

Policing in London treats crime as a racial issue.

In many cultures around the world, pubescent boys participate in a coming of age ritual. Whether it’s a bar mitzvah or a camping trip, these ceremonies mark their entrance into adulthood. 

In London’s poorest boroughs, Black teenage boys undergo a different kind of rite of passage: being stopped and searched by the police. 

Akala was 13 when he was first searched. There was no adult present and he was not informed of his rights. This is both illegal and commonplace. Over the following years, being stopped became a bi-monthly ritual. Black boys were always searched; their white friends weren’t. The law, Akala learned, does not apply equally to all people. 

This routine violation of civil rights is often justified by the need to eliminate teenage knife crime. But that’s not the outcome it achieves. 

The key message here is: Policing in London treats crime as a racial issue.

Read a London newspaper and you’re likely to come away with two impressions. First, that London is plagued by knife-wielding “teenage thugs.” These youngsters have allegedly made the British capital one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Second, you might conclude that these teenagers are overwhelmingly Black. Both ideas are used to justify tough policing and the targeting of Black boys.

Let’s clear one thing up right away. Knife crime is a real problem in London and it does involve Black teenagers. Just ask Akala. The same year he was first stopped and searched, a Black boy attacked one of his friends with a meat cleaver. But here’s the thing: race isn’t the determining factor in violent crime committed by teenagers. 

London – the city where most Black British people live – doesn’t have the highest rates of teenage knife crime in Britain, let alone Europe or the world. In 2015, for example, a national study concluded that the highest teenage knife crime rates were to be found in overwhelmingly white, northeastern English cities like Durham. In overall terms, the Scottish city of Glasgow, which again is largely white, is the most violent in the country. London, meanwhile, ranked as the eighth most violent in the UK. 

So what links areas with high rates of teenage violent crime if not race? Well, whether it’s the London borough where Akala grew up or virtually all-white neighborhoods in cities like Glasgow, these violent areas have one thing in common: they are all working-class and poor.

Black sporting successes are often treated as a strange anomaly.

In 1995, Akala watched Dreaming of Ajax, a BBC documentary about the Dutch soccer club Ajax Amsterdam. Ajax, a poorer club, had dominated European soccer for years. It regularly outperformed its richer English counterparts.

What accounted for this disproportionate success? The documentary pointed to the club’s organization: Ajax was better run and had a better coaching system than English clubs. 

Fast forward to 2012, the year the summer Olympics were held in London. A special BBC panel was investigating another sporting disparity. Just 82 athletes had completed the 100-meter sprint in under ten seconds. Almost all of them were Black. No one talked about organization or coaching this time, though. 

The key message here is: Black sporting successes are often treated as a strange anomaly. 

The subtext of the panel’s discussion was clear: it was unusual that more white athletes weren’t winning. A short documentary tried to explain this puzzling phenomenon. 

It began by outlining Darwin’s concept of the survival of the fittest. It then noted that top Black runners, like that year’s Jamaican gold medallist, Usain Bolt, could trace their ancestry back to enslaved Africans. Since only the fittest enslaved people survived the ordeals of forced transportation and plantation labor, their descendants, like Bolt, must have an inherited genetic advantage. 

This is pseudoscience. Studies show that both white and Black athletes have the so-called “fast twitch” muscle supposedly key to sprinting. There are also other explanations, like the resources invested in athletics in, for example, Jamaica. So why was this genetic theory even put forward? One answer is that white success is regarded as normal, whereas Black success is seen as an anomaly that requires an esoteric explanation. 

Consider another example. After 1945, two countries dominated European soccer – Germany and Italy. Why was that? The common-sense answer is that both nations are soccer crazy and have excellent coaches. 

But what happens if you don’t accept this commonsensical view? You’d have to look for more creative explanations. Germany and Italy, you might say, both had fascist dictatorships and lost a war. Maybe that gave them special soccer genes! 

This idea is nonsense, and it’s hard to imagine someone proposing it on a BBC panel. Yet the BBC was happy to consider an equally absurd theory to explain away Black athletes’ superior performance. This underscores a key point: white superiority is still widely viewed as the norm.

Britain’s involvement in ending slavery isn’t as clear-cut as many believe.

In 2007, Britain celebrated the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act. This parliamentary act from 1807 prohibited slavery in the British Empire. On the anniversary, prime minister Tony Blair expressed his sorrow that Britain had participated in the slave trade. But he stopped short of an official apology. 

Most commentators agreed with Blair’s decision not to apologize. Britain, after all, was the first country to abolish slavery, they said. This was a unique achievement. A BBC documentary spoke of a “remarkable” decision: Britain had ended the slave trade and thereby forgone “enormous profits.”

This idea, which obscures much of the historical record, is central to Britain’s national self-image.

The key message here is: Britain’s involvement in ending slavery isn’t as clear-cut as many believe. 

In fact, the first nation to abolish slavery was Denmark, and it did so in 1792. Revolutionary France followed two years later, when it abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies.

This included Haiti, or – as it was known back then – Saint-Domingue. It was one of the world’s most profitable colonies. The enslaved people who lived there produced half the world’s coffee and as much sugar as Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica combined. 

Britain’s response was to dispatch troops to Saint-Domingue. Their goal was to seize the colony for British rule and reinstate slavery. The plan was thwarted by freed enslaved people fighting under the French flag. Around 50,000 British soldiers died. 

In the end, France’s post-revolutionary leader, Napoleon, decided to reinstate slavery himself. Dominguans revolted. They beat back a genocidal French campaign and, in 1804, established the world’s first free Black republic: Haiti. It became the third nation in history to abolish slavery. Having supported France’s bid to exterminate the Black republic, Britain now refused to recognize this new nation. 

Even after banning slavery, Britain continued to work with slave-owning societies. It happily traded with, and invested in, southern slave states in the US, as well as Cuba and Brazil. Slavery in those places wasn’t abolished until 1865, 1886, and 1888, respectively. 

And British slave traders didn’t exactly lose their profits, either. In fact, with the Slave Trade Act, they received the largest public bailout in British history before 2008. The British state only finished repaying that debt 182 years later.

Official narratives don’t align with how many Black Britons remember the past.

History has two facets: facts – things that happened, and interpretation – the meaning we attribute to those facts. Interpretation isn’t just something historians do, though. It’s a public process. 

In the Britain of Akala’s youth, there were few Black voices in politics. That situation is changing. Black Britons play a growing role in public life. The nation is also changing demographically. By 2050, around 30 percent of the British population will have African, Asian, or Caribbean roots. How will this affect debate about the country’s past? 

Well, Britain’s history of imperialism is already being re-evaluated. You can see that in recent campaigns to remove statues celebrating white supremacists and slave owners. But more recent events will have to be rethought as well.

The key message here is: Official narratives don’t align with how many Black Britons remember the past.

Take the official narrative about two iconic 20th-century leaders: South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. 

When Mandela died in 2013, the British government and press rightly called him a “hero.” When Castro died in 2016, by contrast, even the liberal Guardian newspaper instructed readers to “forget Castro’s policies.” All that mattered, the paper said, was that Castro “was a dictator.”

For Black Britons of Akala’s age, there’s something amiss with these narratives. They elide Britain’s own complicity in racism worldwide. 

For one, the British government wasn’t calling Mandela a “hero” back in the 1980s. In fact, prime minister Margaret Thatcher called Mandela the leader of what she termed a “typical terrorist organization.” She refused to censure activists from her party’s youth wing when they ran a “hang Mandela” campaign. As other nations boycotted South Africa, Britain continued to offer it material and diplomatic support. 

And as for Castro, Britain’s refusal to see his positive side also shows a historical blind spot.

In 1975, Castro’s Cuba sent 36,000 troops to Angola to defend its revolutionary government against South African aggression. In 1988, these soldiers joined forces with Namibian and Angolan freedom fighters to defeat the South African army at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. 

During a visit to Cuba, Mandela said that this victory had broken what he called “the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressors.” It wasn’t just a symbolic hammer blow against apartheid. The negotiations that followed the battle led directly to Mandela’s release from prison and the legalization of his party, the ANC. 

Mandela, at least, didn’t think we should forget Castro and Cuba’s policies.

Anti-Black racism takes different forms in different places.

White people often deny the existence of “white privilege.” These are the systemic advantages that white people possess due to their skin color. From the perspective of a “mixed race” person like Akala, though, the existence of this privilege is undeniable: different societies treat him differently based on how they see his Blackness.

As we’ve seen, in Britain a person of his color is seen as simply Black. In South Africa, by comparison, he is seen as “colored.” This again contrasts with North African countries like Algeria. There, Black people are still regularly referred to as abeed, meaning “slave” in Arabic. Akala, though, isn’t an abeed. He passes for a brown-skinned Amazigh local. 

The key message here is: Anti-Black racism takes different forms in different places. 

Many Black American revolutionary icons, for example, were lighter-skinned. In the Caribbean, people like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Huey P. Newton would have been viewed as “uptown people,” members of the lighter-skinned Black elite. 

In the United States, however, they were seen as Black. That classification was a legacy of the so-called “one-drop rule,” which stated that anyone with a single Black ancestor was, legally and socially, Black. 

Skin color, then, means different things in different societies. 

When Akala visited Australia, he met many people who looked white but referred to themselves as “blackfellas.” Many Aboriginal people use this term to refer to themselves. It reflects their experiences of extremely harsh anti-Black discrimination. 

To understand how people with a “white” complexion came to be seen as Black, we have to understand the history of how the Australian government treated Aborigine people. 

Between 1910 and 1970, around one in three Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families. They were then raised either by white families or in children’s homes. Some historians believe this policy qualifies as an act of genocide. That’s because it tried to sever the ties between these children and their traditional culture and language. The goal was their “integration” into white Australian society. 

The outcome wasn’t “integration,” but generational trauma. The children were taught that their families had willingly abandoned them. Many of the children were undereducated and subjected to terrible physical and sexual abuse. Together, they are known as the “stolen generation.” The “white-looking” Aboriginal people Akala encountered in Australia are one of the legacies of this racist policy.

Final summary

The key message in these blinks:

Caribbeans came to the “mother country” as equal citizens of the British empire. They were met by a wave of racist hostility. A child of this generation, Akala learned early on that being Black in Britain meant being a second-class citizen. As a teenager, he was subject to racialized policing and taught convenient myths about Britain’s less than glorious past. But things are changing. Today, Black Britons are more prominent in public life than they were in the past. That’s likely to change the way the nation sees itself and its history. 

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What to read next: From the Ruins of Empire, by Pankaj Mishra

As we’ve seen in these blinks, the British Empire was a global force. Like its French, Portuguese, and Belgian competitors, it helped create the modern world. Racism, the division of the globe into “higher” and “lower” races and peoples, played a central role in European imperialism and, by extension, the making of this modern world. 

European imperialism, however, wasn’t an uncontested force. Across the world, colonized peoples set about understanding the empires that ruled them and fighting back. What did that fightback look like in practice? To find out, check out our blinks to From the Ruins of Empire, a study of the thought and strategy of the anti-colonial revolutionaries who remade Asia.