I’m complimented that the officer thought I might be 16.” ‘White imagination’ “I asked why and they said: ‘Gang members drive cars like yours.’ But gang members don’t have money and I’m not even the right age to be a gang member. His friends are still the people he grew up with and he brings them to the west London members club where our interview is taking place.īut some things never change: “I was stopped by the police recently,” he says. Today, he feels conflicted by his success, “trapped between two worlds,” as he writes in Natives. When England play Ghana or Scotland, it’s tricky for me, but if it’s Germany at the World Cup then of course I want England to win.” Whether or not I support them depends on who they’re playing. One of his book’s most moving scenes describes his “epiphany” at 25, when he realised he had survived his upbringing: “There is no ceremony,” he writes, “nobody congratulates you, you just wake up one day and it’s over.” He recounts vividly the violence he witnessed and the – frightening in different ways – experience of being stopped and searched by police. When black children do well at school, instead of celebrating that, the press says: ‘White working class kids are being left behind.’ But black boys on free school meals fail at the same rate as white boys on free school meals.”Īs a teenager, Akala carried a knife to protect himself. There’s a racial nationalism in this country that’s a legacy of the British Empire. The right-wing press loves to play class against race.
I still see what I call ‘the violence of low expectations.’ The worst thing you can do is tell poor black kids that it’s ok to fail. When he gives workshops in schools today, does Akala get the impression things are better for working class BAME children than they were 30 years ago? “I asked why and they said: ‘Gang members drive cars like yours.’ But gang members don’t have money and I’m not even the right age to be a gang member.” “I was stopped by the police recently,” he says. I had this armoury that could pick up on it and nip it in the bud and keep me in school.”
Fortunately, my mum was already sending me to Pan-African society on Saturdays, so I’d learned to be prepared for this kind of discrimination. “But I was put in a special needs group because of a teacher who thought I was too bright for a working class brown boy. “I was one of the smartest kids in the class,” he says. Near the beginning of Natives, he describes how, when he was growing up in north London as a mixed race child (his father is Jamaican and his white mother is Scottish), some of his teachers resented his intelligence and tried to stop him from fulfilling his potential. Akala believes that education is the best way to empower young black people.
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