Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Psychologically, the mulatto is an unstable type.
In the thinking of the white race, the mulattoes generally are grouped with the backward race and share with them the contempt and dislike of the dominant group. Nowhere are they accepted as social equals. The discrimination varies all the way from the more or less successfully concealed contempt of the Brazilian white for the socially ambitious metis, to the open and bitter hatred of the South African for the “coloured man” and the Native boy, but it seems to be present everywhere. The origin of the half-castes was everywhere an irregular one; this is a point about which prejudice can always center. Their nearer approach in physical appearance to the white type is simply taken as evidence of additional irregularities in ancestry. The two things—the lower ancestry and the presumption of a dubious origin—are the focal points about which the white man’s contempt for the mixed-blood group centers.
By the native race, the mixed-blood group is generally accepted as superior. The possession of white blood is an evidence of superiority. The ancestral blot excites no prejudice. The mulattoes are envied because of their color and enjoy a prestige among the darker group because of it.
Between these two groups, one admiring and the other despising, stand the mixed-bloods. In their own estimation, they are neither the one nor the other. They despise the lower race with a bitterness born of their degrading association with it, and which is all the more galling because it needs must be concealed. They everywhere endeavor to escape it and to conceal and forget their relationship to it. They are uncertain of their own worth; conscious of their superiority to the native they are nowhere sure of their equality with the superior group. They envy the white, aspire to equality with them, and are embittered when the realization of such ambition is denied them. They are a dissatisfied and an unhappy group.
It is this discontented and psychologically unstable group which gives rise to the acute phases of the so-called race problem. The members of the primitive group, recognizing the hopelessness of measuring up to the standards of the white race, are generally content and satisfied with their lower status and happy among their own race. It is the mixed-blood man who is dissatisfied and ambitious. The real race problem before each country whose population is divided into an advanced and a backward group, is to determine the policy to be pursued toward the backward group. The acute phase of this is to determine the policy to be adopted toward the mixed-bloods. To reject the claims and to deny the ambition of the mulattos may cause them to turn back upon the lower race. In this case, they may become the intellectual leaven to raise the race to a higher cultural level, or they may become the agitators who create discord and strife between the pure-blood races. To form them into a separate caste between the races, is to lessen the clash between the extreme types and, at the same time, to deprive the members of the lower race of their chance to advance in culture by depriving them of their natural, intellectual leaders. To admit the ambition of the mulattoes to be white and to accept them into the white race on terms of individual merit, means ultimately a mongrelization of the population and a cultural level somewhere between that represented by the standards of the two groups.
Natives delivers the answers, and some of them are hard to hear. In one of the most touching of many personal passages in the book, Akala retraces the steps by which he was racialised – as a mixed-race child – into blackness, and by which he realised that his mother, who fiercely protected her children’s pride in their heritage, enrolling them among other things in a Pan-African Saturday school, was racialised as white.
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Akala: ‘a disruptive, aggressive intellect’. Photograph: Rob Baker Ashton/BBC/Green Acre Films
In a powerful, polemical narrative, the rapper charts his past and the history of black Britain
In 2010, UK rap artist Akala dropped the album DoubleThink, and with it, some unforgettable words. “First time I saw knives penetrate flesh, it was meat cleavers to the back of the head,” the north London rapper remembers of his childhood. Like so much of his work, the song Find No Enemy blends his life in the struggle of poverty, race, class and violence, with the search for answers. “Apparently,” it continues, “I’m second-generation black Caribbean. And half white Scottish. Whatever that means.”
Any of the million-plus people who have since followed Akala – real name Kingslee Daley – know that the search has taken him into the realm of serious scholarship. He is now known as much for his political analysis as for his music, and, unsurprisingly, his new book, Natives, is therefore long awaited. What was that meat cleaver incident? What was his relationship with his family and peers like growing up? How did he make the journey from geeky child, to sullen and armed teenager, to writer, artist and intellectual?.
Natives delivers the answers, and some of them are hard to hear. In one of the most touching of many personal passages in the book, Akala retraces the steps by which he was racialised – as a mixed-race child – into blackness, and by which he realised that his mother, who fiercely protected her children’s pride in their heritage, enrolling them among other things in a Pan-African Saturday school, was racialised as white…
U.K. artist Akala stopped by the Vlad Couch to discuss a plethora of topics surrounding the history of the impact of slavery throughout the world, Black culture, hip hop’s influence across the world, and what it means to be mixed-race in today’s society.
Akala starts the conversation discussing the difference between racism in America versus the United Kingdom. Then delves into police brutality and the gun laws in Britain. Then the rapper gives a brief history lesson on Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, and how they’ve maintained a very “white” history. Akala explained there is nowhere in the U.K where there are only Black people. “You know if you go to the south side of the Chicago, or you go to certain parts of the Bronx, I’ve visited family up there, and literally everyone [was Black.]”
In breaking down the presence of hip-hop in the UK, Akala talks about his Black Shakespeare theory, and how he believes that centuries from now, someone like Nas or Lauryn Hill will be the Shakespeare of their time. He also explains why he feels Damian Marley out-rapped Nas on ‘Distant Relatives,’ after explaining why as a Black man he chooses not to use the N-word anymore.
Listen to the educational and entertaining interview above.
Akala in Notting Hill last month: ‘In Brixton and Tottenham my sister was worshipped because she was representing a side of intellectual black culture that is never usually acknowledged.’ Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer
Rapper, adapter of Shakespeare and brother of Ms Dynamite, Akala is on a mission to correct a few misconceptions
A few weeks ago in these pages, Birmingham rapper Lady Leshurr asked why there had been no high-profile female rappers in the UK since Ms Dynamite. Akala seems a good person to consult – one, because he’s her brother, and two, because you can ask Akala just about anything and you’ll get a pretty comprehensive answer. In the course of 68 minutes in a London community centre under the Westway, he talks about 16th-century explorers, Biggie Smalls, the universities of 13th-century Timbuktu, tai chi, the Black Wall Street of Oklahoma, the African city portraits of Olfert Dapper, Eminem, peanuts, Napoleon’s generals, traffic lights and golf. But back to Ms Dynamite.
“I remember the Daily Mail wrote an article about my sister at the time,” he says, “and essentially their argument was, ‘Well, she’s not really black, is she – she’s quite clever and she’s got a white mum!’ It was so funny the way they tried to co-opt us. Remember that big story about Bob Marley and his ‘white dad’ last year? He was unequivocally black power, but he’s rewritten as this fun-loving Rasta. Mark Duggan [the Tottenham man shot by police in August 2011] was also mixed race, but no one’s ever going to co-opt Mark Duggan!”…
