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A review by juliston
Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
4.25
You can't talk about racism and white privilege without talking about class, and this book does an excellent job of dissecting some of the issues surrounding the myths that pit the 'white working class' against people of colour.
(An aside, for those that think they're 'not racist but what about poor white people': if you genuinely cared about poor people you'd stop voting for Tory governments)
This is a hard book! Not just hard to do the learning as a white person raised by one parent who was raised white and privileged in apartheid south Africa and one who attended some of the most exclusive educational establishments in the country. Not just hard to be faced with some pretty difficult to swallow gaps being filled in in British, evidently very racist, history but also genuinely a hard book to read.
I don't mean it's badly written, it isnt at all. The prose is engaging and easy to follow, but fuck me this guy is so much cleverer than me. I am by my own admission very smart, very good at reading and have nearly a decade of higher education under my belt, and I'm still having to look up words from this book. I'm having to look up a lot of dates for historical events too. To be fair, that probably stems from my own abysmal knowledge of world history. When I was supposed to be learning history in school I was a lot more interested in shrinking my body and learning to smoke cigarettes (both pasttimes I thankfully rarely indulge in now) and I have never really bothered to rectify these gaping holes in my knowledge.
Reading Natives was an active process of learning for me. It is a fantastic, eye opening book. Both packed with an incredible amount of historical information (there are 30 full pages of references and notes at the end) and also deeply personal and moving. I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for some additional perspective on their British history, for anyone that thinks British people are white by default, or for anyone that thinks white privilege doesn't apply to poor people.
(An aside, for those that think they're 'not racist but what about poor white people': if you genuinely cared about poor people you'd stop voting for Tory governments)
This is a hard book! Not just hard to do the learning as a white person raised by one parent who was raised white and privileged in apartheid south Africa and one who attended some of the most exclusive educational establishments in the country. Not just hard to be faced with some pretty difficult to swallow gaps being filled in in British, evidently very racist, history but also genuinely a hard book to read.
I don't mean it's badly written, it isnt at all. The prose is engaging and easy to follow, but fuck me this guy is so much cleverer than me. I am by my own admission very smart, very good at reading and have nearly a decade of higher education under my belt, and I'm still having to look up words from this book. I'm having to look up a lot of dates for historical events too. To be fair, that probably stems from my own abysmal knowledge of world history. When I was supposed to be learning history in school I was a lot more interested in shrinking my body and learning to smoke cigarettes (both pasttimes I thankfully rarely indulge in now) and I have never really bothered to rectify these gaping holes in my knowledge.
Reading Natives was an active process of learning for me. It is a fantastic, eye opening book. Both packed with an incredible amount of historical information (there are 30 full pages of references and notes at the end) and also deeply personal and moving. I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for some additional perspective on their British history, for anyone that thinks British people are white by default, or for anyone that thinks white privilege doesn't apply to poor people.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism