Crazy Rich Caucasians: The Class Farce
In the beginning, school taught me a lot about class. When I left, I soon saw it was class that taught me a lot about school.
I’m a poet. I’m working class. When I was a boy, I often tried to hide who I was. I tried so hard not to be that working-class child that grew up going to his grandparents’ house in East Northants — who knew people that grew up in the Spring Boroughs and Kingsthorpe. I’m a poet. I’ve always been speaking with different voices and tongues, meandering through the multitudes of Northamptonian landscapes this county has to offer. In the eyes of Caribbean expectations. The expectations of West Englian families, from those that grew up in the hulls of UK Garage, dance hall and Portobello Road market and Handsworth Revolution, breaking their backs to send me to school. My education with affluence is part of my identity and it goes to toe-to-toe with being able to talk to Joe and Jane Bloggs. My ability to talk to Caribbean barbers, the Pakistani shop owner, the geeks, the school sports junkies and then the million-pound babies all in the same afternoon. Skills!
As a child growing up in the 2000s, I remember being bullied by the spawns of those millionaires. Their £50-notes at my throat. Years later those notes were giving me paper cuts by the BBC, giving platforms to racists. Danny Baker comparing the child of Meghan and Harry to a monkey. When I first saw that on Twitter, I thought it was a joke… until I saw Afua Hirsch on The Pledge having to defend herself, being verbally mobbed by a panel of white panellists, having to explain why something so brazenly blatant, is racist.
Watching Question Time, I see the children of my youth. People that spout racism (coded) while drinking a glass of water. I feel so helplessly cornered, with those flashbacks to the super-rich White kids that would take £200 on a trip to town. Not just rich, crazy super-rich. In airports I feel cornered by security. Heathrow post-9/11, Birmingham International post-Lee Rigby or Manchester after Arianna Grande’s concert — in a nation where any person with brown skin is a threat to society, untrustworthy and unwanted.
As a minority, be it from race or class, you learn to expect nothing from everyone. You work twice as hard for half as much. The chips on your shoulders are swapped for lead weights. Those weights are news headlines, and Trump’s America meandering behind you like student loans. At school, I was called poor. I was called wog. They asked if my relatives lived in huts.
I’ve never been to Africa or seen a hut. No member of my family has ever been to Africa or seen a hut. Thanks mainstream media! Grand job.
One of the reasons I became a poet was to write about class and racial prejudices in a way Mr and Mrs Bloggs could understand, to combat the prejudice of the super-rich. To be the Ororo Monroe to their Senator Kelly. Whilst I had Blake, Wordsworth and Tennyson rammed down my throat, I didn’t find Benjamin Zephaniah or Grace Nichols until I was teenager. One of the other reasons was to be the person I needed when I was eight years old. I wanted to be one more brown face in an underrepresented industry. If the X-Men could have Storm and Jubilee, perhaps there was still hope for arts.
Representation works in stages. I soon saw this would be a long trip and I better sit tight. For me, it started with drug dealers and murderers but then you get the funny man and the fool — you get the prostitutes. Negative stereotypes. And it’s only recently, we had Wakanda, Luke Cage and Viola Davis’ blood, snot and sweat, tears filling frames. Though, we are no better represented, than our mugshots on TV and the front pages of newspapers. Poor Black teens said to have killed the daughter of a super-rich White man.
“Can’t you write something positive?” people say. Don’t you get bored about writing about Black people? Can you shut up Black actors on British television?
These questions hurt, since it shows me they don’t seem to notice the number of White faces in correlation to those of people of colour on screen but also on the pages of young adult literature. It shows that the naysayers don’t quite realise the necessity of diverse stories.
That the cop out of “such and such stories don’t sell” won’t fly in 2019.
Yet, for Black people in arts, is there a clear corridor to success? I have had some wins and that has come from networking and playing the bureaucratic ballgame of the industry. I love poetry but I couldn’t be just a poet. I had to be the journalist. I had to be the guy that can lecture children on Black British history. The guy who will talk to radio hosts about race. I had to be divisive and controversial when I just wanted to be one of those artsy blokes, innit?
The stories that I want to tell are currently sitting in notebooks and word documents. Pages of poems and prose, even partial screenplays. There are champions for the cause who I have grown to admire. People that weren’t around when I was eight years old. No role models on my school syllabuses, unless you counted Wilberforce who my schoolteachers loved to attach with the tag of “ending the Slave Trade,” like he did it singlehandedly. Please.
I didn’t know the full extent of the Black presence in Britain. That costume period dramas had been whitewashed, that a Black boy could play Oliver Twist, that there’s no good reason why mixed-heritage women couldn’t play Catherine Earnshaw or Elizabeth Bennet. And this ties into the great British myth that the UK tells, planting seeds all over the world. Britain is a dancing multiracialism and that’s how it’s been for nearly two thousand years.
I saw the pitfalls of growing up Black and working class going to fee-paying schools. It taught me a lot about the elite— the indulgence, the grander —
the unhappiness that comes hand-in-hand with wanting for nothing and not understanding the idea of ‘you don’t know how good you’ve got it until it’s gone.’
It’s an almost-immortality. When I left, it was the two classes bouncing off one another that allowed me to understand school. Many parents were self-made. The teachers were like me. But many parents also came from old money. And it showed me that I was in an interrogation room day in and day out. When shit went down, teachers came knocking at my door. Yet, I was too marketable to expel. These working-class teachers had become part of the system, tangled in the strings of those that owned them, that paid their wages.
In 2018, I watched Crazy Rich Asians and that’s the kind of indulgence many of my colleagues’ parents led, and went on to lead themselves (from what I hear). The crazy rich, driving Jaguars, Lambos and Porsches whilst throwing a half-smoked cigar out of the window partying like it was 1999. And even at the airports of the UK, with a British passport, security likes to play twenty questions. They want to play games like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and you can bet if I was a millionaire I wouldn’t be treated like that. Yet, race discrimination sees threw the zeroes of your bank account, doesn’t it?
I began my schooling by just being a person, anything else but the working-class Black boy. I went to the school library, and Central Library in Northampton, where there were so many great stories. I wondered if the librarians knew any writers like me, people I know, or members of my family. Black writers. Asian writers. Writers of colour. Novels about the poor that aren’t by Charles Dickens. Heck, anyone still alive. Contemporary writing like your Malorie Blackmans, Zadie Smiths or Andrea Levys.
When the librarian asks, why does their skin colour matter? Why does their social standing matter? I don’t answer. I demand the collective works of Malorie Blackman. I demand books by Zadie Smith like White Teeth. Where were these books at school? Where were the American writers at school? Where were the women of colour? Where were the poets of the Harlem Renaissance? Where was Gwendoline Brooks and Langston Hughes?
I’m a poet because I have to be, something my family condones. It’s a doorway to the past, present and the future. I’m a poet because I live inside my own head. I live on the streets and in the valleys and it’s full of trees and grass. I write about class. My poetry is August Wilson, James Baldwin and the films of Ken Loach. It’s How Green Was My Valley and the stories of Andrea Levy and my childhood — immigration, identity, and sticking it to the bourgeoisie.
I poet. (Yes, I made a verb out of poet) because it allows me to cut through the super super-rich. Crazy stupid rich! It allows me to cut racism down to its bones. It allows me think without boxes. If the teachers that called me into their offices because I struggled to get a C could see me now, I think they’d have a heart attack. That I’m a writer (unpublished as of yet) but people say I’m good. That I could be an author one day and I decide to write about Black Britain because it’s what I know, as well as class, personal columns and arts reviews — they are what I know. That the stories with White children in faraway lands in a different times that we’d read at school are foreign to me. I enjoyed The Famous Five but they were foreign. School was Victorian girls, with names like Alice that sit depressed… who the fuck are they? More White girls, more White boys, rich as shit whose parents never struggled a day in their lives. What about the Black and brown people that played out on the estate? What about the mad dash to the shop owned by Nadia that nice Indian lady who gives you that little pack of chocolate buttons and a pretty smile?
I think about that little boy, little old me who went to university despite tanking most exams he ever took. How did I get onto a degree with other writers? How did I become a figure in my local arts scene full of other artists and creatives like me? How did I survive the world of the super-rich and find solace with the poor, the working-class families and friends I have now?
Truth is, I never left. In my time with the White elite, I saw how easily I could comment on race. How easily I could talk about class and fetishism. And in that, I saw I didn’t have to write about only me — I could be a critic of society.
Film criticism. Theatre. Travel writing. Journalism. Crazy rich Caucasians. And all those White people. Become known as the writer that writes about race.
The writer with divisive opinions. The man with witty hottakes about the latest films and theatre shows and one that doesn’t always like what’s popular. No hard feelings, Avengers Endgame and Game of Thrones (2015–2019) A multifaceted writer wearing double-glazed glasses like a librarian, who sits in the bath with a pint and a cigarette (I joke) because I am a human being who likes the same things as everybody else. I’ve never smoked anything in my life!
When your lecturer gives more words than what is required for a simply I didn’t understand your work, please explain — it shows that not everyone will get your work and not everyone has to like it. And many won’t like it because they don’t understand it. My stories of history, identity and diaspora garner interest from all types of people but they are written for the Black and brown people. People say when’s your novel coming? “Novel” is a whisper from Satan. When I hear novel, I see Pablo Escobar on the Kettering Road smoking a joint.
Until one day in the future when I might get that book deal and Pablo Escobar with a spliff is suddenly my best friend, speaking with the devil!
I tell myself that the super-rich made this poet. They made this blogger. This, dare I say, journalist? Think about the hundreds of poems written out of love saved on my hard drive. Count the number of spoken word performances since October 2016, when I was told what a “proper poem” was. Ask myself why I focus on diverse stories, diverse poems, diverse histories. Think about why I connect so deeply to the plight of oppressed peoples, irrespective of colour, as the media ride their propaganda train against good people. Their hatred, in referring to human beings as cockroaches — refugees, aliens, super-predators, interlopers, foreigners — has anything changed?
Why do I make posts on Facebook about this stuff? Why do I tweet against May’s hostile environment, the Windrush Scandal, and Danny Baker? Why do I discuss institutional bias, Brexit and Trump’s immigration camps?
I’ve posted more than ever since 2016. I’ve apologised for piercing the walls of the White fragility of friends. I’ve apologised for my education and privilege. I’ve apologised for speaking with the oober, crazy, stinking super-rich…
