John Barnes: The banana skins don’t come for everyone equally

In today’s Britain, it is easy to forget that we are all the children of our imperial past. I was born in Jamaica, to a Jamaican mother and a Trinidadian father. Mine was a politically elite household – my father was a colonel in the British army, who trained at Sandhurst with Andrew Parker Bowles, the Queen Consort’s ex-husband.

A quintessential child of the empire, descended from two former colonies, I was brought up to believe in a Churchillian attitude toward Britain’s past. Black and from the Caribbean, I was raised to believe in the glory of an empire where the sun never set.

Moving from Jamaica to the UK at the age of 12, I grew up with an intimate understanding of racial hierarchy. My world was one of John Wayne films on the one hand – and Tarzan on the other. The uncivilised (and often unclothed) African savage appeared constantly in the background of my cultural consciousness.

Yet as a young Jamaican, I never thought of myself as African, or as having African heritage. Like most people, I didn’t understand how we’d all been conditioned to think negatively about “Blackness”. Even as Black people ourselves.

As I’ve gotten older, I have begun to grapple with the reality of the histories that my life has embodied. In my book published last year – The Uncomfortable Truth About Racism – I wrote about the personal prejudices, not only racial but relating to class (especially against working-class Jamaicans), that I held as a child.

As a footballer, I experienced these intersections between race and class acutely. Playing at the highest level here in England, one can cultivate a celebrity status that seems to elevate you out of the negative space of Blackness as a perceived identity.

When it’s going well, when you’re performing, you’re a superstar – the discrimination melts into the background. When you play badly, when you miss a penalty – as we saw with our team at Euro 2020 – racism rears its ugly head. In one moment, a kid from Jamaica can be a celebrated symbol of an English city; in another, we can be told that we do not even have the right to be here.

Even so, the banana skins don’t come for everyone equally. Famous Black people go through racist incidents – but when a banana is thrown onto the field because John Barnes is playing, straight after that game I can go to a microphone and have my voice heard. When I go out, I can go to the front of the queue at restaurants or clubs, while working-class people cannot. Class means I can look after myself, and I can protect my family from the sharpest edges of racism.

Most Black people aren’t this lucky. They are faced with structural racism; invisible banana skins thrown at them every day of their lives. People who do not have the privileges I have, without the benefits of class or wealth to inoculate them, are always faced with the unspoken logics and structures of racial hierarchy.

This is why representation at the top is not enough. In Britain today we now have Rishi Sunak in No 10 Downing Street. The first non-white prime minister of the United Kingdom – but what will that do for most non-white people in this country? Obama was the first Black president of the United States, yet he did little to tackle the rampant inequality and structural racism in American society.

Many people like to talk about trickle-down economics: a concept that has never actually worked. The same goes for trickle-down anti-racism, which imagines that if we give Black people more positions at the top, we can expect it to benefit everyday people of colour. But nothing changes when we root our politics in a vacuum of identity alone.

Putting Black people, women, LGBT+ people into positions of power is not a magic, one-stop-shop solution. We have to create an environment from below to empower people – all people. A culture that enables the voices of the marginalised, whatever their circumstances.

The only way to do this is to learn from our past – to understand how we arrived at this moment. Structures of racial domination and class oppression have been part of British society for hundreds of years, and today they underpin the world we all live in. In Boomerang, a new short film for openDemocracy, I discuss with academic and author Kojo Koram the role of empire and colonialism in shaping the Britain we live in today.

For me, colonialism is the real reason why, ideologically, racism and its legacy exist today. We know this country was built on the industrial revolution, a revolution predicated partly on the stolen resources of slavery. But when we think of our past, it was through the structure of colonial domination that the concept of Black people being inferior was normalised.

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To colonise the globe, the concept of racial inferiority had to be invented and disseminated. To plunder a country, that country had to be relegated on the moral ladder. The “civilising” mission of colonialism necessitated a story, a mythology, of superiority – one that we are still suffering from today. It taught us that, in the society we live in, some people must always be discriminated against in order for the rest to have more.

That blueprint still underpins our world. Yet we like to think of the empire as something that happened “over there”, in an era that is now long gone. Moving forward, and creating a world that is actually free from racial and class domination, means reckoning with our past – even if you think it has nothing to do with you in the here and now.

Next time you listen to the back and forth of culture-war politics on the radio, it is important to remember: here in Britain, we are all the children of empire.