 So, today we're here with Akala, Polymath, Poet, Rapper, Orpher, because then it will be lulling you into a full sense of security to make the so excited about your book, Natives. I read it in basically a single sitting on a train journey, on a PDF, I was just like Oh, okay, okay, you did the uni reading. Yeah, but it was fantastic and if you haven't copied it, you really ought to. I guess the first question that I have for you is we're facing a really uncertain future. Climate catastrophe, Brexit, increase in conflict as we move towards a more multi-polar world system. So why does it feel so timely for you to take this step back and look to the past of empire? Because a lot of Britain's challenges are rooted in a failure to reconcile with, confront, educate about the history of empire, the recent windrush, so-called windrush scandal was an example of just this. The vast majority of the country aren't aware that caribbeans and South Asians arrived in this country as British citizens, many of them war veterans, in the case of Jamaica, from a territory that had been governed by Britain since before the act of union with Scotland, so sorry, governed by England before there was a Britain, as a political entity, that's how long England and Jamaica's relationship is. And so the idea that we are immigrants, those of us who came from Commonwealth countries, but the hundreds of thousands, in fact, 1.6 million people that came from Ireland and Europe after the war, a part of the white working class, is one of these deliberate outcomes of actual ruling class policy. And I'm not saying it to be hyperbolic, I'm saying it because I've looked at the documents and that was part of the program. They felt they could make proper brits of the people that came from Europe, even though they did not treat them very, very well, but were very nervous, even at least Labour government, very, very nervous about British citizens of the wrong colour. So they called, at least government referred to the citizens on the Windrush, the literal passengers of the Windrush as an incursion. These were fee paying British citizens, many of them war veterans, many of them skilled workers. And so this failure to reconcile with all of this history, to understand what Britain's role in the world has been and how the rest of the world perceives that role, and what America's role since World War II has been and our role in that, and how that is going to affect our lives going forward as the world adjusts to the rise of China, to the return of India as a global power, to the shift of the world economy towards Asia. All of those things are going to have real world effects for individuals living in the UK. I mean, you mentioned Clement Atley just now, and it's something which appears early on in the book, which is you say that to understand the management of race to this day, whether it's the overstaffed mental hospitals, the severe incarceration rates, exclusion rates, et cetera, you have to understand how it is we came to be here. And it's interesting to me that the Atley government is something which is really held up and valorized by this iteration of Corbyn's Labour Party. Does that fill you with a sense of mistrust or concern? I think people just have to own their class interest, and we have different class interests, even those of us who came from working class backgrounds based on our relationship to the British state historically. So I completely understand why if you are part of what calls itself the white working class, you can romanticize Atley's government and see only the good things they've done, the building of the NHS, the building of the welfare state, et cetera. If you're a Malaysian who was bombed by Atley's government, your opinion there might be slightly different. If you're a Caribbean who was referred to as an incursion, despite paying for yourself to come to your own country, and that government and setting process, the mechanisms by which eventually Caribbean's and Asians would be stripped of their British citizenship, then of course your attitude towards that government is going to be quite different. And so what happens is there can be a norm sort of on the left, what is considered the white working class norm, and if you question that, you're dividing the working class or any of this crap. So apparently we're supposed to ignore that Atley's government called our grandparents an incursion to accommodate you, because if we mentioned that, we're bringing up identity politics, even though our grandparents' citizenship was stripped of them because of their identity, we're supposed to ignore that. Similarly, if a Malaysian says, well, hold on a minute, this guy bombed Malaysia, it's trying to keep British control in that part of the world in that same period. And so I think it's just different class interests and different relationships to the British state that end up with people having different analyses. There's nothing wrong with people respecting the building of the NHS and building of the welfare state, but that does have to come in context of the history of the British Empire and in the history of where Britain was at that point. Us becoming a multi-ethnic society was not actually a legacy of the British Empire. It was an accidental legacy of World War Two. For the hundreds of years that Britain ruled the Caribbean, it never dreamed of inviting its black Caribbean slaves to live in Britain in any significant numbers. It was only because of desperation of World War Two and need in Caribbean and Asians and West Africans to fight that we came to be here. So for example, when they were recruiting in British West Africa, the local governments were very concerned about two things, actually. You see this in Frank Ferretti's book, The Silent War. They were concerned that the West Africans should not be given the impression that it was a war for democracy, lest they got the opinion that democracy applied to them after the war, which is exactly what happened. And they were very concerned not to badmouth the Germans too much in case disobedience to one branch of the white race taught them disobedience to another branch. This is, you can read, you can read Frank Ferretti's book. These are quotes directly from British colonial governors in that period of the world. So we really underestimate the massive impact World War Two had on the racial balance of world power and on the undermining of what was presumed common sense white supremacy up until 1939 really. I mean, it's a tremendous driver of the civil rights movement, which is you send over these black GIs. They spend years killing blonde-haired blue-eyed men in the fatherland. They come back and then suddenly they can't leave. They've got no rights. Exactly. And the Western governments were cognizant of that at the time. There's loads of evidence. I'm saying the danger of using colonial troops in Europe, the French got a lot of stick for this during World War One as well. What was it World War Two? Let me check that one. But anyway, the French got loads of stick for using colonial troops, Senegalese colonial troops. I think it was actually World War Two because of what they feared the racial consequences would be. They wouldn't be obedient when they came back to the colonies. It would undermine what colonial governors at the time called white prestige. The other thing they were concerned about, ironically, and this was even true of our grandparents coming here, was that we would see white people at their worst. See, in Jamaica, the only white people we knew, and by the way, at their worst is what they said. That's not what I'm saying. The only white people we knew in Jamaica, our great grandparents knew, were aristocracy. Obviously, they were concerned that when my grandmother came here and they integrated with the white working class, they would realize they'd been fed lies that actually most white people were poor and most of them were uneducated. Still, in that period, I remember my uncle saying, I'm going to come to England and I can't believe it's a white man that sweeps street. He couldn't believe that they were white street sweepers. It sounds stupid today. I mean, that was one of my favorite moments in the book, actually, is when you talk about your uncle, about five years old, straight off the boat being like, what do you mean there are poor white people here? It seemed to me like it was the opposite of that moment in Blackskins' White Mask where Fanon goes to Paris and he discovers his, you know, his blackness. And that for him is the moment where the illusionist shattered, whereas you've got this kind of photo negative moment, whereas actually upon contact with poor whites. Yeah, well, remember, a lot of those Caribbean's who could even fill in the forms. I mean, after 300 years of British rule, there was less than 20% literacy in Jamaica. That percentage of Jamaicans that were literate were middle class civil servants. So they come to a country in which the vast majority of the people are working class are poor and uneducated and find that even though they're black, they are now all of a sudden in contact with white people of whom they are better educated. They've never been in that situation before. They assume that all of the white people in the world live like the ruling class in Jamaica because that's what they'd been fed. Sounds stupid, but there was no TV and there was no internet. And so in a weird way, seeing white working class people was, had the exact effect that the ruling class didn't want it to have. The white prestige was shattered, but also they realised, raw, we've been lied to, like this is what they've done to their own people. They've been teaching us for so long, they're so civilised and everything is wonderful and it's the mother country and everybody's rich and wealthy, which is what we were being taught in the, well, what my grandparents were being taught in the Caribbean. And then they realised actually white people at home are quite oppressed, actually. I mean, you're pretty scathing in the book of an anti-racism which is based just on black bourgeois excellence and you do really interrogate that kind of way of thinking. What do you think the potential is right now for a multi-ethnic, anti-racist, class-based movement? I think it depends where in the world you are. I think it will be really arrogant of us to say to black Americans, for example, given the history of white supremacist, racist terrorism in America, lynchings, etc., from the white working class, given the history of the banning from unions, etc., for us to go and tell black Americans, you must accept our analysis. No, they must not. They've got to figure out for themselves as black Americans, based on their particular history, what to do next. But the situation for black and brown British people is quite different. We were moved into hoods where white people already lived. And even though there was certainly a violent, racist reaction, there's nothing that can be compared to lynching in America. And it would be disrespectful to put it in that same category. And in a way now, Broadwater Farm or Stonebridge or Toxtef, these are multi-ethnic working class neighborhoods. Whether or not that's going to translate into a multi-ethnic political struggle, I don't know because I think a lot of Marx warns against this himself. And I'm not even sure I would consider myself a Marxist. That's how I would define myself. A lot of people might be surprised by that. But Marx himself warned against it, this sort of idealization of the working class, this idea that the passions that middle-class analysts or people as intelligent as Marx himself see and have the time to sit down and write about that are felt from within that class itself. I don't think, you know, when I was growing up, most of my Braggians were not talking about seizing the means of production. That's the truth. They were talking about how can I pay my rent and keep my gas on it and how can I create a situation where my kids don't have to choose between, you know, gas and electric every winter and, you know, maybe I have some half-decent clothes. Those were the things that were concerning poor people. So I also am conscious of those of us who have become politicized have to be very careful that we don't impose our wishes onto people that are maybe growing up the way we might have grown up. Now our lives have become a little bit better. But I mean, isn't that really about respectability politics? So we can recognize, for instance, a march demanding better housing as political. Whereas we might say that a riot which involves looting is just some kind of, you know, a feral outburst. And I feel that there's a bit of an overlap with maybe some of the pop cultural analysis that you do in this book. Because you talk about how your own attitude towards making music has changed. Your attitude towards celebration of violence has changed. You said that N-word has changed. I think at one point in the book you say no truly self-loving people can celebrate their own death. Is there at times a danger of sort of lapsing into reinforcing a binary between so-called conscious and, I guess, unconscious rap and then thinking about how that mups onto politics? Yeah, I don't think, I don't, I don't see that separation. I mean, Tupac is quite possibly the greatest gangster rapper of all time and the greatest conscious rapper of all time. And I don't see this celebration of violence, let's be clear, as an innate, uniquely black negative. Korean revenge cinema is very, very violent. Korea is a very peaceful country. Anyone, I can watch every Italian mafia film, as I have done, and not come out thinking that all Italian people are in the mafia. If people listen to rap music and it drives them to believe that every young black boy sells crack and shoots people, that's their own stupidity. That's not rapper's fault. And I think we're even seeing now with Creptin Conan opening that ice cream shop, with gigs on his Instagram, spending more time on his Instagram posing with his daughter than anything else, right? We're seeing that what happens when young black men from the hood get some money, naturally it changes them and not even in a negative way. When your material, so just in case it's not clear when I was talking about my friends wanting to improve their material life, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. It's perfectly legitimate desire in life. I suppose what I am saying, that doesn't mean that all poor people are Marxists is what is what is the point I was trying to make. Not that it's wrong for poor people to want the norms of middle-class life. Who doesn't want to have a comfortable life? Who wants to spend 12 hours a day working and have nothing to show for it at the end of 50 years in the factory or wherever it may be? But yeah, I definitely think another thing that's changed is as I've got older, I've felt that a lot of middle-class black outrage at the so-called gangster rap, for example, is more about middle-class black people wanting to look respectable because every other culture celebrates violence. And if you're arguing that it's going to make us look bad, what you're doing is you're normalizing the white gaze. You're saying it's going to make us look bad? To who? Middle-class white people don't say, oh, Danny Dyer makes us look bad, right? Do you know what I mean? So it's still them refusing to interrogate why they think a white audience is not intelligent enough to know the difference between the black underclass and black people. They're not part of the underclass for a reason. But it's also a case of 10 years later, 15 years later, things get, I guess, defund. So what's interesting to me is that people who would have been terrified of NWA when they first came out are now praising NWA as a culture shock. Similarly, with gigs, I was reading this terrible article in the Telegraph about drill. And suddenly, gigs was being held up as this elder, sensible statesman, as if he hadn't called what one... But even with me, I think, for a lot of middle-class... This doesn't happen with young black boys. One of the reasons I'm respected, whether people like it or not, is everyone knows how I grew up and what I was on and what my friends were on. I'm not as different from gigs as some people would like to believe. Difference is gigs went prison as a teenager and I didn't. I carried a knife as a teenager. My best friend used to steal his dad's gun from under the mattress and we was on the road. I'm not who they might want to... It's one of the reasons I confessed to a lot of this stuff in the book. A lot of stuff my mum did not know. And there's some stuff that we left out because we had to. But it's because I don't want people to put me on this pedestal as the unique Negro. Look at him. Why can't you all be like him? I ain't that different, fam. I am not suggesting that I'm in some innately moral wonderful... When my life was shit, or at least I felt it was shit, I behaved in some very shit ways. My life's good. I no longer behave in those ways. Neither does gigs. Gigs ain't going to go out on the road tomorrow and be like, you know what? Even though my life's great and I'm on tour and I'm very well off now, you know what would make this all better? Going back to prison. He's not dumb enough to make that decision. You know what I mean? I know him personally. So I don't think people should try and make this big separation. Akala, the good black guy who reads all the books, isn't he wonderful? I was reading books when I was 15 and I was carrying a knife. And I was in the black bookshop with my bridging and my oldest. One of the main points I'm trying to make is that I am not that different from these young boys out here. In fact, ironically, there's loads of black boys I grew up with who weren't about this life. And me and my friends, we kind of looked at them as soft. And it's only when I got to 21, 22 where I was like, no, I'm not on it no more. I'm not in it. And a lot of my bridgings, I think, did say, you've lost it. Now, 10 years later, after 10 years of being in and out of jail, and one of my best friends got deported. He was in England since he was two. He was a naughty lad. People are saying, oh, actually, maybe you made a good decision, but I shouldn't be separated from other street black youths to make middle-class people feel good. I'm not that different from them. I think that sense of a refusal to pander to the white gays, I think, either through sensationalising violence or through kind of rejecting it and separating yourself off was something that really came across in the book to me. The other thing that came across was just how very, very British it is, and in particular, very, very North London, which absolutely made my heart sing. So I've got two questions for you on that. One, why is it that all you Acklin-Burley boys were such heartbreakers growing up? No, I ain't taking credit for the rest of them. I don't know. Oh, my God. No, you 100% why? It would take like an Acklin-Burley boy would like completely fuck your heart up and you would need, like, Northumberland Park boy to fix it. That was how it was. Northumberland Park? No, that man was way worse than we were. I'm not having that. I'm not having that. No, it's because the Acklin-Burley boys were like a little bit hipster, so they'd mess you around a bit more. Yeah, maybe, but that wasn't my, I can't take, Burley was a much more mixed school than say Northumberland Park or D&K or, I can't, my set was, I spent much more my childhood in, you know, Tottenham or Hackney or Halston and I did in Camden. This one of the things I talk about in the book, in a weird way, it's like I gravitated to where my cousins lived and where my friends lived because of that sort of isolation of, yeah, going to school with a lot of middle-class white kids and poor white kids, but then getting to a point in my mid-teens where I felt like I could no longer relate and sort of like self-get-wise and then kind of vacate in Camden for Tottenham. I mean, I guess the other thing I wanted to ask about that is because it feels so rooted in North London, so rooted in a British diaspora experience, do you ever think that as anti-racists in this country we're a bit too reliant on an American model of understanding racism? I very much, I think for African-Caribbeans in particular, and I've only started to realise this in the last five years, that can be one of the dangers. We love our Black American cousins, Malcolm is on the wall, Martin is on the wall, Mohammed is on the wall, but in a way the British state has encouraged that. Think about how many great documentaries the BBC have done on the civil rights movement, on Malcolm X, on Martin Luther King, almost a way of saying, look at these wonderful Black Americans and look how racist America is and look how much they've done over their Black people. You talk to most Black people in Britain even, they'll know that Alabama church bombing, they won't know New Cross, and so one of the points I'm trying to make in this is not that that's wrong, that we know about what's happening in America, it's the centre of the empire, it's the centre of world politics at the moment or at least believes it is, but one of the dangers is sort of hovering the British struggle and that being sort of a secondary of secondary importance, I do think it's very, very important that we are as familiar with Stuart Hall as we are with Tony Morrison or Angela Davis, and at the moment we're not, we all know Tony Morrison or Angela Davis, but we won't know Stuart Hall or Gilroy or Gus John or Claudia Jones and those are equally important because our situation as I've said is quite different, very similar but also very, very different. What are the specific things that you think make the British situation different? Well the lack of formal apartheid, it meant the British government had to try and achieve the outcomes of apartheid without having those legal mechanisms of actual segregation and never really actually aimed to achieve the same things that America had. One of the things post-war British governments were really concerned about was the creation of actual black ghettos in Britain because they felt that was too troublesome and so they did want a degree of assimilation, they didn't want to appear to be too racist so they wanted to restrict Commonwealth migration on racial grounds but then felt that the black people that were here, it would be too embarrassing to treat them as badly as they were being treated in America or Australia or Southern Africa and so that subtleness of British racism is why a lot of people think you're going over the top when you say police battered people in my family, people think you're just making it up to sound cool but if they talk to Irish people over 50 they'll find similar stories. In fact, the Irish story in a way in post-war Britain shows exactly what I'm talking about, the Irish in America by then had very much become white. They were not really accepted until the mid-90s after the Good Friday agreement when I was growing up Irish people in Kilburn getting battered by the police was still very, very normal and so it's all of those different nuances but mainly the fact of living in a neighborhood that is not segregated. My business partner is from Vandevere projects in New York and when she grew up there were literally zero white people in our neighborhood or in her class, in fact zero non-black people. There was nowhere in Britain that is quite like that, maybe Hansworth, maybe and that's Caribbean and Asian even, do you know what I mean? So it's not even like there is nowhere where there's that complete level of spatial segregation and that just creates a slightly different environment, a slightly different analysis and also having that direct connection to the Caribbean or West Africa to majority black polities is very different from being essentially isolated in America and severed from even though there's been migration from the Caribbean into America, severed from those connections to those places and so there are similarities but there are big, big, big differences that I think have to be wrestled with and now we're coming more of cultural confidence, none of this is the divorce from popular culture, now we're coming more into our own, I think we're going to start analyzing those things even more. One final question, the year is 2022, we have a labor government, I'm often Ibiza somewhere getting munted and Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn approaches you and says you can suggest one single policy to significantly improve the conditions of people of color in this country, what would you offer up? Probably what I would suggest and I'll just say this publicly now because it is what it is but I've been working with lots of different groups of young people for a while in the ends and trying to look at what solutions there can be to some of the problems of serious youth violence and things of that nature and one of the things that keeps coming up is this idea of setting up community-run boarding schools and so the logic for that is very, very simple, despite what we're reading in the press, so for example in London the percentage of black people in London actually kill someone in any given year is less than 0.005%. So there's over a million black people in London, there's always less than 50 murders in the community so actually even though there are definitely big problems it's interesting the way those are being spun as if blackness is a sufficient common denominator, what's happening is the underclass within the black underclass is being used as a weapon against the people who are the primary victims of their crimes. The other 99% of black people who don't kill anybody are being held ethnically responsible. 47% of all the people in Britain's prisons were expelled from school as children, 24% were in the care system at some point. So the British government, the state, the Department for Education, the police themselves if you read their own reports understand very very well what the common denominators are and what the predictors are for crime or later attraction to violent crime that's as true in Glasgow or Liverpool as it is in London. So the rationale is same with these young boys who get expelled at 12, end up in a PRU and then end up causing problems later on if they were removed and put on a farm in Cambridge. But with people who understand them, I don't mean middle class missionaries, I mean the man them go out to Cambridge with them, elders train them you know you swim in the lake, you get that what it does it achieves two things is the argument on the one hand it tries to work with the group most at risk causing problems going to jail or being violent etc and the other hand the other 99% of kids in Hackney or Tower Hamlets or Brickstone or whatever else who actually just want to go school and get their grades and get a job despite being poor they're freed from the burden of the young people who've been less fortunate than them not just economically but in terms of their family circumstances and everything else. So that would probably be I think that would probably be the policy that I would suggest. It seems remarkably fleshed out considering I just like chucks this question at you out of nowhere. It's been something I've been thinking about quite a lot now looking at like this is significantly more expensive to send a kid to prison than it is to send them to Eaton. So we're perfectly fine to subsidize young poor kids to be in the countryside we just prefer they were in the countryside in a prison and so even for people on the right I'm expecting hopefully when you know these ideas get suggested lots of support on the grounds that it's economically more efficient if nothing else and so yeah the money is there and it's whether the political will is there to say we'd rather repair the damage than add to it. If you've got a larger prison population you've got more people growing up with parents in prison you've got more people who go to prison and Britain incidentally has the largest prison population in the whole of Western Europe right now and we've got people who want to grow it so that is probably the main solution I would suggest to achieve in many of those outcomes saving the taxpayer money lowering serious youth violence stopping allowing the black underclass being used as a weapon against the other 99% of black people promoting education there are so many things that we feel a policy like that properly implemented not as a means to spy on young people which is what it could end up being used for but as a means to seriously work with young people and repair some of the various damages that are in their life as a policy we would I would suggest. Thank you so much for joining us today it's been wonderful to have you and yeah Prime Minister Jez get on it