Speaker A
All right, Akala. Yes, welcome to Vlad TV. Big up.
Akala discusses growing up biracial in 1980s UK, racial tensions, police brutality, and cultural identity on Vlad TV.
Key Takeaways
- Growing up biracial in 1980s UK involved significant racial discrimination and family challenges.
- Police brutality and racial uprisings shaped the black community's relationship with law enforcement.
- Mixed-race identity was often overshadowed by broader societal racism.
- Cultural education and community support were vital in empowering Caribbean immigrant children.
- Racial issues in the UK share similarities with the US but have distinct historical contexts.
What the video covers
- Akala shares his experience growing up biracial in the UK during the 1980s, highlighting societal challenges and racial bias.
- He discusses the racial uprisings in Caribbean immigrant neighborhoods due to police brutality.
- The interview covers the stigma and family rejection faced by mixed-race families at that time.
- Akala explains the role of armed and unarmed police in the UK and misconceptions about police carrying guns.
- He reflects on the cultural influences from the US and the importance of black history education through Saturday schools.
- The conversation touches on systemic racism, disproportionate incarceration rates, and the criminalization of black youth.
- Akala contrasts UK and US racial dynamics and the lack of awareness of UK civil rights struggles in mainstream education.
- He discusses the impact of Brexit and racial identity politics in the UK.
- The interview explores the challenges of mixed-race identity amid societal racism.
- Akala emphasizes the importance of understanding historical and contemporary racial issues in the UK.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Growing Up Biracial in the UK
- 03:05Challenges of Mixed-Race Relationships and Family Rejection
- 05:58Racial Uprisings and Police Brutality in Caribbean Communities
- 08:54Role of Armed Police and Misconceptions in the UK
- 14:36Cultural Influences and Black History Education
- 17:09Systemic Racism and Criminalization of Black Youth
- 21:12Comparing UK and US Racial Dynamics
- 25:53Brexit, Racial Identity, and Contemporary Issues
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
growing up in the uk uh being biracial at that time um it's that's a very good question actually because now in the uk it's very fashionable to have mixed children it's actually it's like it's like it's almost like a fashion
Speaker A
Okay, man, so let's start from the very beginning. This is your first time here. You grew up with biracial parents, yes? You're Jamaican and Scottish. Now, what was it like
Speaker A
racial uprisings because of police brutality in pretty much every majority caribbean immigrant neighborhood in the uk some of which were very uh severe so in that environment a lot of white women because it was mostly white women and black dudes were
Speaker A
growing up in the UK, being biracial at that time?
Speaker A
heavy bias towards the black community that and from my mom's own experience so her dad and her family pretty much disowned her when she was pregnant with my older brother who passed away with a as a young child
Speaker A
Um, that's a very good question, actually, because now in the UK it's very fashionable to have mixed children. It's actually, it's like, it's almost like a fashion
Speaker A
some examples they told her they'd promised to give her a [ __ ] blood you know so this is this is the environment in which uh a lot of uh mixed-race relationships happened in the early 80s in the uk so it wasn't a
Speaker A
accessory. When I was born in the early 80s, it very much wasn't like that, and to be crude, the 80s in the UK are probably the closest we've had to like a civil rights movement in the UK. There were uprisings,
Speaker A
very very thankful for because london was a lot more of a mixed community it was a much stronger black community there than in the community that i was born in and i left that i don't have any memories of living there i left
Speaker A
racial uprisings because of police brutality in pretty much every majority Caribbean immigrant neighborhood in the UK, some of which were very severe. So in that environment, a lot of white women, because it was mostly white women and black dudes were
Speaker A
schools and social movements and so i went to a saturday school called the winnie mandela school um which taught black history and you know helped you with your maths and basically you know tried to get uh caribbean immigrant children back on
Speaker A
the majority, accounting for the majority of the mixed relationships, they had to pretty much accept they would be disowned as a general phenomenon. I don't mean to, you know, broad strokes, but that was a very common thing where there was still such a
Speaker A
generation certainly just was like we're black and that's how we felt and that's how we were dealt with in the society soon as you get older you obviously start to kind of develop an understanding that race manifests itself very differently in
Speaker A
heavy bias towards the black community. And from my mom's own experience, her dad and her family pretty much disowned her when she was pregnant with my older brother, who passed away as a young child.
Speaker A
a challenging time for those kinds of relationships i mean i think a lot of people in the us you know because our audience is like 90 u.s they they look at england and they don't they don't really have the connection
Speaker A
People told her social services, everyone else told her to get rid of it because I was born in a small town outside of London. The nurses at the hospital, my mum needed a blood transfusion when my elder sister was born. These are just
Speaker A
illegal yeah completely you get five five years in jail straight five years in jail like there is no right to bear arms yeah um and the police act do they carry guns they do this is one of the
Speaker A
some examples. They told her they'd promised to give her a [expletive] blood, you know. So this is the environment in which a lot of mixed-race relationships happened in the early 80s in the UK. So it wasn't a
Speaker A
the regular police do not but one of the misconceptions is that british police don't have guns they just have specialists that have guns okay so when a regular police tries to to handle a situation without a gun how do they usually do it
Speaker A
fashionable thing. You really had to recognize there was a lot of sacrifice. So my mum, partly because it happened for family reasons, my mom left the small town that she grew up in,
Speaker A
specifically the unit that has arms that responds no other police are trained to or allowed by law to respond in fact there was a really controversial case a few years ago in hackney which is a rough neighborhood in east london
Speaker A
and she moved to London, which I'm very, very thankful for because London was a lot more of a mixed community. It was a much stronger black community there than in the community that I was born in, and I left that. I don't have any memories of living there. I left
Speaker A
of the complications there but so the art the armed police are the ones that deal with all the armed crime any other crime it's they have tasers they have um they have batons they have other forms of weapons they have cuffs in fact a
Speaker A
that community when I was one. So it's a very challenging time. It was a very interesting time. Now culturally, there was a lot of inspiration actually coming from the US as well. The African Caribbean community in the UK had set up a lot of Saturday
Speaker A
well i remember you mentioned in one of your interviews that there was a situation in the uk where a group of white policemen beat a black man to death and actually pissed on the body yeah so that was that was um david
Speaker A
schools and social movements, and so I went to a Saturday school called the Winnie Mandela School,
Speaker A
they were charged very quickly the british establishment realized as much as race was an issue in britain if we abuse certain parts of the community this virulently i think they were hoping like in the southern states back in the day when
Speaker A
which taught black history and, you know, helped you with your maths and basically, you know, tried to get Caribbean immigrant children back on
Speaker A
which police they will and won't prosecute themselves so even when the police are found guilty of killing someone which has happened unlawful killing verdicts are passed the police independent police complaints commission which is run by former police get to decide whether police
Speaker A
track because the state school system wasn't so great. But definitely being mixed in that era, you didn't really see yourself as mixed in that sense because of the racism coming from the mainstream society. Most of us of my
Speaker A
the last kind of 30 years including all the ones in the 80s that i was telling you about there was one in the area not far from where i grew up called tottenham um in the early 80s and a police officer
Speaker A
generation certainly just was like, we're black, and that's how we felt and that's how we were dealt with in society. As soon as you get older, you obviously start to kind of develop an understanding that race manifests itself very differently in
Speaker A
the back so these are the by the police and paralyzed these are the uh incidents that have formed the relationship of the black community in britain with the police for example we had a set of laws in the early 70s
Speaker A
different places. In America, you've got the one-drop rule. In parts of Africa, obviously if I was in Nigeria, people would obviously be able to see that I was mixed and would view me as such. But yeah, it was definitely a challenging
Speaker A
for example you could go to court and get charged with attempts to rob persons unknown and a whole generation of young african-caribbean well british-born now men were criminalized under this under this uh under this set of laws and that's led to
Speaker A
a challenging time for those kinds of relationships. I mean, I think a lot of people in the US, you know, because our audience is like 90% US, they look at England and they don't really have the connection
Speaker A
knife crime we have a huge uh disproportionate um incarceration rates particularly for for for the black community in the uk a lot of very similar situations not exactly the same but very similar situations to what we find in
Speaker A
between what happens in the US in terms of racism and what happens in the UK in terms of racism because, I mean, for one thing, gun culture is a little bit different in the US because, I mean, in the UK, having a gun is
Speaker A
know the great gangbuster from from la so there has been that sense of for us at least in the uk because if you're a caribbean immigrant particularly in the uk or of caribbean heritage you've got family in new york for sure
Speaker A
illegal.
Speaker A
or whatever but we had that direct family connection and that's one of the ways we came into into hip-hop like when a dj clue tape would come out here in the 90s in in in the bronx or queens or wherever
Speaker A
Yeah, completely. You get five years in jail, straight five years in jail. Like, there is no right to bear arms.
Speaker A
whole of american society if that makes sense the uk has a has an interesting history when it comes to slavery because were there actually slaves in the uk or was it more of a transatlantic yeah yes overwhelming majority of britain's
Speaker A
Yeah. Um, and the police, do they carry guns?
Speaker A
britain had was uh to quote britain is too pure air for a slave to breathe so this idea that slavery shouldn't happen in the uk we should only do it abroad but fascinatingly they weren't treating their own poor people
Speaker A
They do. This is one of the
Speaker A
uh situation during industrial revolution so then you had a situation where enslaved or formerly enslaved black people were coming back to the uk sometimes even getting their freedom but then slave catchers would kidnap them and put them back on a boat back to the
Speaker A
misconceptions. So there's certain units of police that are armed. Actually, the mayor of London is trying to expand and give us more armed police at the moment, which is interesting. But there are units of police specifically trained to bear arms.
Speaker A
subject to tackle head-on in the uk is because the slavery happened over there because the empire happened over there we can pretend none of it happened here and somehow all these buildings in liverpool and bristol and london have nothing to do with kind of
Speaker A
The regular police do not. But one of the misconceptions is that British police don't have guns. They just have specialists that have guns.
Speaker A
i mean they aren't alive anymore obviously but you know have great great grandparents and so forth that were actually slaves they were actually whipped they were actually tortured they were they were bred like animals yeah but but the uk was technically
Speaker A
Okay, so when a regular police tries to handle a situation without a gun, how do they usually do it?
Speaker A
what britain had was in the 18th century britain um got the contract for what's called the acienta so this was the right to supply enslaved people to all of the spanish colonies and then eventually the french so britain became the premier sort of slave
Speaker A
Um, that's a good question. I think that, so if there's an incident involving a firearm, regular police will not respond to it. Does that make sense? So if there's a shooting, if there's a bank hold-up, it will be
Speaker A
you look at you know black white relations in in the uk compared to the us are they similar or are they a little bit different i would say they're they there's some similarities and then there's some huge differences
Speaker A
specifically the unit that has arms that responds. No other police are trained to or allowed by law to respond. In fact, there was a really controversial case a few years ago in Hackney, which is a rough neighborhood in East London,
Speaker A
that everyone that you won't see like in fact my business partner grew up in brooklyn uh when she before age 10 you know i don't think she'd even seen any white people do you know what i mean so there was
Speaker A
where a kid had been stabbed but whoever phoned the police thought the kid had been shot. And whenever there's a firearm incident, the ambulance won't turn up till the firearm police turn up, and the young boy died. And so that's one
Speaker A
peckham or mossad in manchester back in the day actually it's much more racially integrated even than say france so one of the things france did was chose to take its immigrant community which are predominantly west and north african and put them outside
Speaker A
of the complications there. But so the armed police are the ones that deal with all the armed crime. Any other crime, they have tasers, they have batons, they have other forms of weapons, they have cuffs. In fact, a
Speaker A
difficulty in the uk where because there wasn't formal jim crow in the same way there was segregation being practiced and the british government never did anything about it for a very long time but they didn't enforce it you had
Speaker A
famous Premier League footballer was tasered to death just last week. He used to be a Premier League footballer, a very, very good Premier League footballer. Rest in peace, Dalian Atkinson. He was tasered to death literally last week, just before, just before I left.
Speaker A
us who came from the caribbean so if you're from jamaica when slavery ended in jamaica there was no kkk only a suicidal nut job of a white man would have started a kkk in jamaica where they were like one percent of the
Speaker A
Well, I remember you mentioned in one of your interviews that there was a situation in the UK where a group of white policemen beat a black man to death and actually pissed on the body.
Speaker A
in the intermediate century does that make sense so they came with a certain idealism for the british empire and a certain admiration but they hadn't experienced a lot of what african-americans experienced in that whole intervening century we got some of it but there were not
Speaker A
Yeah, so that was David Oluwale. That was way back in 1969, actually. That was the first and only time to my knowledge that the police had been put on trial to the public and they were found guilty. And so they got a few years in jail. When
Speaker A
drive-bys on 12-year-old children in the uk there is police brutality people are getting killed but i think to make a kind of apples for apple's comparison with the black american situation because we can relate to it would be a
Speaker A
they were charged, very quickly the British establishment realized as much as race was an issue in Britain, if we abuse certain parts of the community this virulently, I think they were hoping, like in the southern states back in the day when
Speaker A
of all the developed rich countries in the world but in a weird way black culture because of that has a lot more respect um there's a lot more opportunities in some ways than there is in in the uk in fact
Speaker A
people could just get away with doing anything they wanted to black folk, out here maybe that was their model. But it didn't. They were convicted. So from then on, they invented a new system where basically the police decide
Speaker A
roles that they can get here so it's a weird contradiction to me there's no black middle class in the uk whereas i've been to neighborhoods in in in in la or elsewhere it's a middle that is strange for us like it's a middle class
Speaker A
which police they will and won't prosecute themselves. So even when the police are found guilty of killing someone, which has happened, unlawful killing verdicts are passed, the police independent police complaints commission, which is run by former police, get to decide whether police
Speaker A
and you said where's the black neighborhoods all of the neighborhoods i could point you to are are hoods they're working class neighborhoods so yeah there's individual black people who are doing i'm doing okay i can hardly say i grew up
Speaker A
are or are not prosecuted, which of course you can imagine has led to the predictable result that even when verdicts of unlawful killing have gone through, police have not been prosecuted. And most of the riots we've had in the UK over
Speaker A
there's no harlem there's no heart right you know right in harlem you had that division of the the poor part but then you had the harlem renaissance you had all of there isn't that um and so in a weird
Speaker A
the last kind of 30 years, including all the ones in the 80s that I was telling you about, there was one in the area not far from where I grew up called Tottenham in the early 80s, and a police officer
Speaker A
worse for those for those that know it so the uk the the the extremes are not as broad if if that makes sense if i can make that crucial comparison well you started out rapping with an american accent yeah that was when i was
Speaker A
was actually killed during that riot because the dude, I know that his grandmother died during a police raid. Some would say the police killed him the week before. Killed her, sorry. The week before, a woman called Sherry Gross was shot in
Speaker A
um when i was about 13 this time wu-tang forever was the that was the in the uk because i know that album wasn't that hugely as well received here as 46 chambers but in the uk that was the album that everyone loved from the
Speaker A
the back, so these are the, by the police and paralyzed. These are the incidents that have formed the relationship of the black community in Britain with the police. For example, we had a set of laws in the early 70s
Speaker A
was a child right and my sister just held me up one day and was like yo fam like you need to find your own voice like you're not american like stop it and actually i'm blessed for that conversation because there were at that
Speaker A
and early 80s called the SUS laws. These were, this was a resurrection of Britain's 19th-century vagrancy laws, and they meant you could be arrested on suspicion of committing a crime. So they
Speaker A
rapper people would just think he was an idiot like it's become so unex and actually it's really been a sea change where when i was a child if i was in school when you asked us who our favorite rappers were i work in
Speaker A
schools quite a lot i got a company that does education work in schools right when i was when i was a you if you asked any teenagers who were your favorite rappers all the top ten would have been american
Speaker A
now if i go into a school and i say who are your favorite mcs it would be surprising if more than two of the top ten were from here like right like if if if you voted for a
Speaker A
whole class in the uk at least eight or nine of them would be ukmc's now which is a unique kind of shift in the same way that in the early 90s you had a shift from new york to the west coast
Speaker A
and part of why that shift occurred was because the west coast dudes didn't try and be like they were from new york they weren't rapping about timberland boots and snow in the winter and housing projects they were rapping about khakis
Speaker A
and low riders and everything was getting gang-banging and everything was going on in the west coast so it was like a new flavor um in many ways in the uk we finally found i think a voice that obviously is influenced by america is
Speaker A
obviously influenced by jamaica but it is very specific to our and even within the uk the dudes from manchester uh rap differently from the dudes from london and so we've started to really develop for the first time a viable
Speaker A
scene where there's probably 20 30 ukmc's who can tour viably who people pay for who can sell decent shows etc outside of the mainstream and the internet has been a huge part of making that possible well yeah i mean it's
Speaker A
interesting that you mentioned how big wu-tang was because like i'm a big fan of the section boys yeah and and they kind of remind me of wu-tang yes so before the section boys there was or before any of the
Speaker A
grime crews that we know now road deep who dizzy rascal came out of and why they came out there was a crew called the solid crew so they're so solid were like the who my sister worked with quite a
Speaker A
bit they were like the cusp between garage and grime and it was like 100 are so solid but the main group was like 20 of them and you could see very clearly even though it was uk dance music that wu tang
Speaker A
influence was was there um and britain it's interesting the way britain reacted to them i mean a couple dudes got shot at one of their concerts they were banned from touring forever as if it was their fault and that's
Speaker A
happened with a few eyes not the dudes who did it should be caught like they were banned from touring forever and ever and ever which is one of the reasons they never became quite as big as they could have become at that
Speaker A
stage they were already huge they had number ones etc um but yeah so that wu-tang influence that crew influence that hood energy really was something that i think a lot of us even the younger generation might not realize a lot of it
Speaker A
comes back to woo if that makes sense because they might like if you are sexual boys their inspirations will probably roll deep or probably so solid they probably know who now but they're too young for their main inspirations growing up to have been but
Speaker A
we had i can't i literally can't describe to you how popular wu-tang were in the uk in that period like it's it's they were the first rap group that actually also went beyond just the black community in the sense
Speaker A
that all the kids my school was very mixed right all the kids that listen to heavy metal or listen to oasis and blur wu was like the first rap group that got all those kids in as well and i think it
Speaker A
was because of the way they use language because of the fact they rap like no one else they rap like this old kind of almost shakespearean english yet you knew they were all from the hood you knew they'd all been through what
Speaker A
they've been through they weren't trying to be something they weren't but they had such a level of lyricism and then the production was hip-hop but it was like alternative music at the same time the woo just penetrated to a level that
Speaker A
just is i've never seen that repeated really for a group that didn't even have hooks half the time it's not like they didn't try to cater to the mainstream they made the most authentically uh underground music but were in the uk
Speaker A
they were easily the biggest rap group of that period well you know you just mentioned shakespeare tell me about the whole black shakespeare thing that you came up with yeah so i wrote a song called shakespeare about uh 2005
Speaker A
um which is actually like a was the only song of mine that's actually been played on mainstream radio in the uk like in the daytime so i get some plays but usually because of my political content and stuff it
Speaker A
it's in the evenings and stuff like that you can rap about loads of other stuff but if you rap about politics there's still a sense that oh it's not radio friendly or whatever but it doesn't matter because we're able to talk viably
Speaker A
but we've with shakespeare because of that song i was on radio a year later and i was challenged by a radio dj he gave me uh a list of 27 shakespeare plays to put in a freestyle and he gave me like 10
Speaker A
minutes luckily i did it otherwise it even kind of embarrassing but then we made a song out of that and during that whole time see one of the things i'd always admired about hip-hop i saw krs-1 give a lecture when i was i
Speaker A
might have been seven or eight or whatever it was when he was doing the whole entertainment thing i remember at this time as i said my i don't know if i mentioned my stepdad was a stage manager of
Speaker A
london's leading kind of african caribbean theater so i saw angela davis talk that i was exposed to a lot of cultural stuff so i always wanted to use hip-hop also as a force for education because for me part of what kept me in school was
Speaker A
wu-tang like reading wu-tang lyrics was literally i wrote out all 28 the lyrics all 28 tracks on wu-tang forever by hand with annotations and i went and did research remember this is before internet was that was that common in schools right um so i
Speaker A
always wanted to use the power of hip-hop as a force for knowledge and for self-knowledge and so what we did was we started a company called the hip-hop shakespeare company which in the uk and in many english most
Speaker A
english-speaking countries and even non-english speaking countries you have to study shakespeare it becomes part of the curriculum and for a lot of people like in the uk shakespeare's become the ultimate symbol of kind of class and race intimidation he's like the ultimate
Speaker A
symbol of what symbolizes britain's kind of white greatness almost um and even in the colonies he was often used in that way you know imposed as like a this is what shows that we are smarter than the entire rest
Speaker A
of the world but the fact of the matter is in shakespeare's time 92 percent of his audience was illiterate he was outside of the city on the south side with the bear baiting and the prostitution even though he was kind of
Speaker A
in there with the establishment theater was still seen as kind of subversive and so one of the things i wanted to do was take this kind of elitist symbol and subvert it and say well then a minute and it's very conceivable to me you can
Speaker A
already see it there's been books written abomatic there's been books written about two pack two packs taught here and so three four hundred years from now who will be seen as the most popular poets of this era without question it will be probably
Speaker A
african-american hypocrites it'll be nars it'll be wu-tang it'll be saul williams it'll be lauryn hill those people will be look but it sounds absurd to some people today but shakespeare was not even during his time the top guy
Speaker A
you had christopher marlow and certain other dudes who had the right education um and so i wanted to really use the power of hip-hop the rhythm the musicality um to inspire kind of a new generation educationally but also to look at
Speaker A
what is the future of british culture shakespeare is this ultimate symbol but london is very different now to it was 50 years ago or even 100 years ago how can we reinterpret shakespeare's work which he is a genius let's be clear
Speaker A
for all of the all of the kind of intimidation and and class snobbery aside shakespeare wrote some great stories and some incredible characters and so for me because i grew up listening to chuck d or grew up listening to cairous
Speaker A
i was never really anchors my my mum to be fair even though we grew up quite quite on and off welfare we were poor i always had a very strong educational push in my family because it is saturday school and all that so i
Speaker A
wasn't intimidated by shakespeare and other stuff when i got to school and so i always wanted to try and pass that on and so that's why we started that company for very dope very dope because i i think a
Speaker A
lot of a lot of urban kids you know grow up and and just they he they obviously know that the name shakespeare but there's a language barrier of course you know i'm saying like unless you know like i was in ap classes and i took
Speaker A
shakespeare classes and they had to explain what some of this stuff meant but like you know you give a shakespeare book to to an average inner city kid that they're not going to know what to do with it
Speaker A
yeah a million percent but i think a lot of that is because of the laziness of the way stuff is taught and some of it's deliberate like in the uk and to a degree out here but because i
Speaker A
know more about the uk system we have really a 200 year old education system that was designed to create people to do specific things to go and work in factories we don't have those factories anymore what does a creative education look like
Speaker A
shakespeare's work was performed it's performance poetry so getting kids to sit down and read it before there's over 100 songs in shakespeare's plays most people don't even know that it was sung during his time right so getting kids to
Speaker A
sit down if you made me sit down and read bob marley lyrics or even better wu-tang lyrics because then them shits are complicated as [ __ ] right so if you make me sit down and read 12 jewels by the rizzo the pre-existence of
Speaker A
a mathematical biochemical equations a manner if i had to sit down and read that i don't know what the [ __ ] is this guy talking about if i was 12. i didn't know what biochemical equations were when i was 12
Speaker A
right but hearing the rhythm of it and hearing it performed by the rzr all of a sudden sparked my interest so it's the same sort of thing where if you see something performed and performed well my my the year i took my high school
Speaker A
exit exam was the year that basler and romeo and juliet came out and it was a similar thing where that wasn't punishment before that watching any film about shakespeare was ah really miss like whereas that film came out and everyone got it because of how
Speaker A
well done it was and i think it's a similar thing where of course it's difficult any high-level lyricism or po if you made kids sit down and read saul williams you know really and truly said the shotgun to the head that [ __ ]
Speaker A
is complicated but actually watching saul perform it gives you a certain degree of understanding here and it gives you a certain degree of understanding so this isn't specific to shakespeare anything is intellectually challenging there's a fun way to teach it or there's
Speaker A
a way to teach it to make people people feel stupid you can i saw a clip actually of an african-american brother with his baby on it's on youtube right where he's taught his two-year-old son the entire periodic table
Speaker A
using uh cereal so he uses different cereal grains and he'll he'll group them in certain ways and say son what's that and his son will be like plutonium aluminium based on how many so you can find a way in the uk we have a similar
Speaker A
family family called the mafidons who are a nigerian immigrant family the dad taught his children maths games they took their high school exit exams all four of his children at age six they're the youngest people in britain ever to do so
Speaker A
but part of that is because he made maths a game rather than punishment so i think there's a lot of tricks we're missing in terms of the kind of value of rhythm the value of song to memorizing things and to teaching and
Speaker A
i think just in general we have a education system that's dictatorial the teacher rather than saying you know i don't know everything let's work together and figure out is we still have a system that says you know i
Speaker A
know everything you're a student you should listen to me and i know when i was going school i was a straight a student my whole life but i hated school because of that in because of that situation partly because
Speaker A
a lot of teachers couldn't cope with the fact that a kid from it was on free school dinners you know so that obviously means you're from a poor family and brown to boot was top of the class some people
Speaker A
couldn't cope with that then you have this system where it's you listen to me you do as i say but what if you're wrong what if you're chatting [ __ ] do i mean and that happened in school so
Speaker A
i think that uh i think we still have a big challenge of how we're gonna educate in the 21st century there are so many shows on television that show the modern black woman as strong confident and flawless but
Speaker A
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insecure incorporates the music of both indie and established artists of color touches on a variety of social and racial issues and relate to the contemporary black experience she's gone from awkward black girl to insecure issa rae has been showing us to laugh
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since her early days on youtube and we can't wait for you to show how she's upped her game for hbo and if you know anything about issa rae you know she'll have you laughing from beginning to end so tune in sunday october 9th at 10 30
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eastern and pacific for the entire premiere of insecure exclusively on hbo now you refer to hip-hop as a modern-day minstrel show i did i did that was in a very specific context but go but go ahead continue well explain that yeah so i think
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there's there's a there's a way in which hip-hop has been used a particular type of hip-hop um to promote a particular image of blackness over and above others so you can as i think bravo ali's got a very good talk on this when he talks
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about colonial consumption versus you know engaging with an art in a productive way where there's a certain type of behavior that is rewarded by the mainstream white predominantly white society so you can rap about murdering [ __ ] you can rap about
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materialism and then you'll be you're all black people will be blamed for that conduct but then if you question those things so for example dead president's album when dead president let's get free came out from my understanding they put a sticker
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over the cover right because they didn't want to show kids with guns in soweto rising up against apartheid i read about this in mk ascent it's bigger than hip-hop or when uh when most death makes a song called
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the rapes over and talks about corporate control of hip-hop and calls that kind of stuff out the song's taken off his album without his notice and we all know the problems most has had since so to me there's this
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american racism is has always been and must necessarily always be underpinned by controlling the image of blackness by controlling the image of black people and by creating a one-dimensional image that's not that there are none of these behaviors in the black community but
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where there are exceptional behaviors they're never blamed on blackness so if you go to harvard that's not because you're black if you're the youngest person to take gcses ever in britain which happened then the whole family is black no one's going to say it's because
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you're black but when you get stabbed at 12 years old it's because you're black so i think there's a certain degree of uh negative stereotypical um images of blackness that have been promoted and elevated within hip-hop and it's only when you
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travel the world i think even for a lot of black americans i don't know if there's the realization unless you're fortunate enough to travel a lot how wide spread it is like i'll go to australia and a dude who's not even
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black will feel fine to say to me yo what up my [ __ ] because as far as they're concerned a all black people from the west so if you're not visibly quite unquote african then you will call each other [ __ ]
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there's that assumption that we're all cool with that these are things i've experienced i'll go to ghana and nigeria same thing and i'm like do you even know what that word means and actually a lot of people who say it
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have no idea what it means we got to situation in the uk recently where there's been this whole debate because now you had a white rapper say the word [ __ ] and so there's this influence of of a
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culture yet when black american rappers tried to explain the origins of these words and and the connection between white power exploitation and what's going on in the hood they don't seem to be given the same degree of mainstream
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exposure so that's what i was calling out there well when you talk about the n-word yeah in the u.s versus the uk and you talk about you know this is this is one of the most loaded words in in america would you say the same
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thing in the uk because you you mentioned that that white rappers in the uk no no not white rappers in general one white rapper um did it because in general white rappers in the uk still know you could get yourself in
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trouble you know if you overstep the mark still the the as much as there's confusion in the black community and a lack of consciousness in some ways there's certain marks that if you cross them it could be the end of your career
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or someone might harm you because there's still that word is still a very loaded word in the uk when our grandparents came to england what were people writing graffiti on their walls when people were people used to put fire bombs for a lot of african
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caribbean and asian families litter boxes there was a famous uh case in 1981 where a party suspected racist arson attacked 14 people burned to left teenagers most people in the uk don't even know that happened they know about the alabama church
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bombing because the ironic thing that the uk does is on our school curriculums we teach often the african-american civil rights struggle which is great but they don't teach what happened in the uk when our grandparents came to the
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country where there was bus boycotts which there were where there was uh protests which there were where there was racial segregation which there was where there was police brutality which there was wasn't the same as america so that word
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is very very very loaded and the vast majority of black people in britain still wouldn't have their white friends called them that word even friends i mean my mum's right and i always say to people this is my confusion when
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when white people get their knickers in a twist and say oh well why can't we say it that's reverse racism i i don't understand how but i would say well my mom is why i love my mom i would kill or die for my mom my mom
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has no desire to call me her [ __ ] son so i'm confused why there's this desire to be like i need to say it like if you want to get shot by the police too and you want all the oppression that
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has gone with it i'm not telling black americans what to do and what not to do i used to use the word a lot i decided at a certain point not to that's a personal decision i don't tell my young brothers in the uk
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what to do and what not to do i just point out the contradictions i give them this example so when i came up because of the environment i came up in and because of the things that experience i used to use that word a lot more and i
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used to use it in a violent context quite a bit right i just always say to my young brothers my mom's white my dad's black if i rapped about murdering crackers and honkies even though my white family's poor
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they come from the equivalent of a hood in in white parlance if you go to glasgow i'm half scottish glasgow is actually for about 10-15 years it's not anymore but was the most violent city in the uk kids stab each other up there they get
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shot there's white and white crime if i rapped about murdering crackers and honkies what would your reaction be and without exception all the young black dudes ask the question to go no that'll be racist fam so i'm not telling you what to do i'm
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just asking why and the thing is a lot of our our use of that word we can't deny it is heavily just influenced from the states like caribbean music doesn't use that word west african music didn't use that word
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we're not from america we're from the caribbean and we're from west africa the black community in the uk in our cultures there's no you can't point to a reggae song there might be a few dancing songs on on
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the periphery yeah i mean it's interesting because because i remember hearing a beanie man song and he used the n-word and it just sounded so odd just sounds so out of place for him to say it even the way he pronounced it was like
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so unnatural it's completely even the way so the way they pronounce it in jamaica they would say you nego they wouldn't even say [ __ ] they actually say nega right and part of the reason and but even then it's still
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seen as an insult it's not like it never became a term of endearment or term of common struggle in the caribbean because as i said when slavery ended in the caribbean there were no white folks left they were like
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up in the hills in their mansions away from everyone else so there wasn't that sense of my grand grew up everyone she grew up with was black there was a couple light-skinned people that were remnants of kind of slave rape
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or whatever else or integration yeah we have some syrians some lebanese some chinese some indian but when 95 percent of the people are black and you're in a rural kind of setting in the caribbean and you don't have the kkk and all of that to go with
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it the consciousness evolves very differently and in addition to that slavery in the caribbean was well the majority of the slavery happened in the caribbean and latin america which is one of the interesting things because of hollywood and because of the
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african-american community's massive cultural impact on the world most people have come to understand racialized slavery through the lens of america but i mean more enslaved africans were taken to the tiny caribbean island of martinique than they were brought to the united
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states you know almost 90 percent of the slavery happened in the caribbean and brazil so it's really wait wait wait wait hold on you're telling me that there more more africans became slaves in the caribbean than in the united states oh significant
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anymore of course really yes i guess i i'm totally stunned right now i assume that most of the you know most of the africans came to the u.s just because of how how big it is yeah absolutely now but remember during
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slavery it wasn't the whole united states it was the 13 colonies on the eastern seaboard the middle was owned by the french french louisiana which they only sold as a result of the haitian revolution and the west coast was being contested
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with native americans and spanish and elsewhere so it's only those 13 colonies but you know about 80 to 90 of the slavery happened in the caribbean and brazil wow i'm completely stunned stunned right now i mean almost a million people were
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taken just to haiti yeah so we have this and because of the nature of slavery in the caribbean one of the interesting things was in the caribbean rebellions were higher than everywhere else a lot of people have invented some
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mythologies around this like jamaicans we like to believe this because the super slaves were dropped off in jamaica which is total [ __ ] it's just stuff jamaicans say to flatter ourselves what the reality was the sugar production which was much more
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concentrated in the caribbean was much more brutal and also people were brought in in the caribbean you would buy your enslaved africans in much larger groups so you might end up buying 15 euros which means they can all
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communicate in the same language which it just created a much more community solidarity and you can hear that a jamaican does not sound like an english person even african americans have a certain sound in their voice you can usually
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tell they still speak the same english that white americans speak often you have a bonus and you have influences whereas jamaican is pretty much a different language which is what the you know caribbean scholars are now arguing it's actually completely
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different languages but it's gone on so long now that there isn't that mutual intelligibility and that's because they're so they were able to hang on to so much more african culture because of the nature of slavery in the
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caribbean because they were the overwhelming majority because they didn't have this hundred years of terrorism afterwards and that created i would argue a different consciousness people in the caribbean were not are not any better than people in america itself they just had a different
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experience and therefore the outcome was was different a lot of people in the u.s and me included you know we heard about the brexit and you know it was it was painted as a negative thing as a racist thing and so
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forth but i don't fully understand it i think a lot of my viewers don't understand it either so from your point of view as a black person from the uk explain the significance of the brexit right so i actually wrote an article
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about this but um there are very valid reasons to criticize the eu yeah but britain for me is not the country that's in the position often to make these criticisms what do i mean by that so britain's been involved in more
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foreign wars than other powers within the eu in recent years we lock up our population about twice the rate that the germans do other countries in europe are closing prisons britain's opening more um we have one of the widest social
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inequalities in the whole of europe we have almost the lowest educational attainment in many ways britain is the america of europe not in a rude way but in the sense that america is a very divided socially racially unequal society britain is the closest
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to that often in europe and france but france is a bit a bit more complex and i don't know as much about french politics but uncertain many indices britain ranks the bottom of the barrel or close to the bottom of the
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barrel considering it's one of the powerhouses of european economics instead of focusing on the valid criticisms of the eu that they could have focused on uh whatever they felt that they may be the corporatocracy of the eu it's not like
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it was some but the problem was the people who were leading it were not in the things that are there to be criticized about the eu they don't have a problem with so instead of that they focused wholly
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on the issue of immigration which was completely stupid because the eu does not determine britain's law on immigration as was admitted once brexit was over so the whole tone of the debate came to be around the fear of black and brown
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immigrants coming through europe into the uk at this point of course thousands of them have been dying in the mediterranean year in year out trying to flee wars that britain has partly been involved in and france has partly been involved in
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so a lot of people in the uk saw very clearly that while there could have been a different campaign the way it played out was wholly almost entirely about immigration and as many people despite the fact that many
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scholars pointed out the immigration issue was irrelevant to the eu a whole bunch of other lies were told we were told that the 350 million spent on the eu could go on the nhs the day after the vote happened
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it was oh no sorry that money can't be spent on nhs sorry about that that was a mistake um so it really just whipped up a whole sense of further the day after the vote loads of people went to work and who
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were foreigners who were told now you know you need to get your passport and go home became a kind of it revamped a sort of virulent white nationalist anti-immigrant fervor in britain and what was sad is even a
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lot of black and asian people started engaging in ah but the foreigners blah blah blah but when you look at what the st stats bore out it's revealing 75 of black people voted to stay that's the highest of any ethnic group
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is that what because black people just love the eu because we're completely unaware of europe's relationship to africa no there's obviously something else going on if and then uh non-black people of color were the next group and then and even if you look by
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age the older people were much more likely to vote to leave younger people much more likely to vote to stay people who lived in multicultural areas almost exclusively voted to stay people who lived in wholly white areas almost exclusively voted to leave
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except for with the exception of scotland and northern ireland even though they don't have a lot of multiculturalism scotland particularly is socially a more progressive country in england the whole not one district in scotland voted to leave the whole of scotland
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voted to stay so you had all of these divisions that were exposed within british society while you have obvious exceptions to the rule you had some people that voted brexit because of their belief that there was a kind of socially progressive way to
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leave the eu which is nonsense really from where we are as a country now you had some people in the uh of every political persuasion vote everywhere but the general stats afterwards bore out what this was about 80
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of the people who voted to leave felt that immigration was a bad thing but i mean something like 75 71 of them on the lord ashcroft polls believe that the internet's a bad thing so i mean i don't know how seriously you can take
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that well right after the brexit passed uh the prime minister resigned right yeah exactly so the prime minister resigned the dude who led the campaign nigel farage resigned from his post as the head of ukip um and the former london mayor boris
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johnson also wouldn't take the reins and he was one of the leaders so basically everyone kicked up a fuss everyone said we need to leave maybe thinking it wasn't going to happen then once the vote went through everyone
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kind of jumped ship which says a lot about their confidence in the post-brexit future the prime minister to be fair to him i have millions of other criticisms of him but he was pro-staying in the eu that doesn't
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like i said there's a bad case for staying in the eu and lots of people who want to stay in the eu because it helps them exploit places in the global south better so i'm not saying like the eu's perfect it
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certainly is not i'm just saying at this point in british history the way the vote played out there was no way to have a socially responsible exit from the eu because the whole thing had been fought on the grounds of race
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and anyone who tells you different is lying the whole media campaign at the time was about funny brown people maybe coming in yeah i mean it's crazy i mean it's like obama just quitting mid-term it's not equivalent him
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quitting are are in the in the middle of a term after you know one of the most significant decisions in the country's history and now we have an unelected person in power in a democratic society surely if the prime minister resigns
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there should be another election but that's just you know me being idealistic um so british politics right now are very tumultuous very difficult very challenging there's a lot of divisions in the society and it is interesting in its own way to see how
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it's going to play out well is there i mean in the u.s there's a president a vice president or something you know if the president resigns or quits or or gets impeached nixon got the vice president steps in is
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there a vice prime minister i don't think so i don't know how they decided theresa may would be the person who replaced david cameron because i think the talk was boris johnson might be that person then there was a talk that michael gove
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might be that person and then it ended up being this woman theresa may how they came to that decision i didn't actually follow to be honest but she wasn't the vice prime minister yeah i mean i remember the stock market kind of
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trembled afterwards but then within about a week everything kind of went back to normal i mean is there really a massive effect of the brexit in the uk right now or not really no let's be clear we haven't exited the eu
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we've just made a vote the public referendum is just the public giving an indication to the government of what they'd like to do legally it's not legally binding until the government invokes this thing called article 51 we haven't actually
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left it eu we're still in the eu what we are is in this position of limbo where no one knows where we're in or out so a lot of business people it's hard for him to plan for the future or
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whatever else i don't think anyone credible was really saying if britain left the eu that britain was going to become you know one of the poorest countries in the world overnight some people came with this armageddon stuff that basically
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undermined what could have been a credible case britain is going to be all right britain owns enough stuff around the world that for now britain will maintain you know being a wealthy country a lot of centuries of exploitation
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some industrial uh pioneering and many other things britain is not going to become a poor country anytime soon however i do fear that if britain does fully leave in terms of if you look at britain and america's politics you know birds of a
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fever have been flocking together for a minute in terms of their foreign policy you know together a lot of the disasters of the last 10 or 15 years britain and america have been heavily engaging together obviously most notably in iraq
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and i i worry that if britain leaves the eu there's no counterweight in fact some of the major powers in the eu against iraq invasion most notably germany and france now of course they will be pro other invasions but
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i suppose the point is when you're in a council with a larger group of people you have to at least on surface pretend to take their opinions on count i know that doesn't always play out in the u.n america has veto
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power in the u.n so everyone else can think whatever they want to think we'll veto it anyway um so i think that i just i just think that it's the tone of the way the debate was fought that doesn't bode well for the future of
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the country particularly for people of color in the country and a lot of people i think a lot of what's happening now a lot in the uk which is interesting a lot of black and brown folks who have done well
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which there is quite a few there's just not a community of them that live in one place i just like you know i'm gonna go back to india i'm gonna go back to jamaica i'm gonna go back to ghana i don't feel
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welcome here and that there's a reverse brain drain almost where a lot of successful particularly in india you know as india is becoming more and more wealthy country a lot of indians are like why am i going to stay here where i'm
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made to feel like an immigrant even though i've been here you know 78 years even though my grandparents fought in both world wars for britain etc i just got back to india um and so that's an interesting way in which
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it's i think gonna harm britain that people are not even aware of where people are i'll just i'll just go home yes i grew up an adult in a single parent family been through a little bit of tragedy yes
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i was around drugs and violence before the day that i started secondary that's part of it not half of it get the picture the rest ain't necessary growing up got a little caught up but i ain't even half of my
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life i was also given the knowledge of self that is all we actually need to survive so if you saw me age nine reading malcolm just fine teachers still treated me stupid students that couldn't speak english to put me in groups with
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and the irony is some of the first man to give me schooling they were called gangsters but i already explained that we know what the truth is they used to say don't be like me yeah i got a name and don't
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on the street night time comes i can't sleep that's the part fake rappers don't speak we don't hit the road cause we're tugs don't come out and we want to sell drugs if we got the right guidance and love would we fight people
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just like us how could i knock the hustle to get back how do you think i ate as a child judge no one done many things wrong just don't boast about it in songs what do you think about the whole
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situation man my point of view man i really feel like they tried to paint a bad picture on my brother and try to make him look like like he was a hater uh it was some envy jealousy type [ __ ] you know i'm saying
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that actuality you know what i'm saying bruh been having this [ __ ] man he been in the condo i got my hat on and i had my coke bottles up under my hat and i'm sitting at the dinner table like an
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[ __ ] with the hat on knowing she going to tell me to take it off and i'm just sitting there just garping down you know in my zone she said take that goddamn hat off at the dinner tab i'm like come
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on mom coat everywhere [Music] [Music]
Topics:Akalabiracial UKracial uprisingspolice brutality UKCaribbean immigrantsmixed-race identity1980s UK racismblack history educationsystemic racism UKVlad TV interview
