“I want poor kids, black boys in particular, to read Natives and understand that they have to get the most out of school. That doesn’t mean everyone else hasn’t got something to learn from Natives, because it’s also about how we find ourselves in world history.”
“I was one of the smartest kids in the class,” he says. “But I was put in a special needs group because of a teacher who thought I was too bright for a working class brown boy. Fortunately, my mum was already sending me to Pan-African society on Saturdays, so I’d learned to be prepared for this kind of discrimination. I had this armoury that could pick up on it and nip it in the bud and keep me in school.”
When he gives workshops in schools today, does Akala get the impression things are better for working class BAME children than they were 30 years ago?
“Yes and no. I still see what I call ‘the violence of low expectations.’ The worst thing you can do is tell poor black kids that it’s ok to fail. The right-wing press loves to play class against race. There’s a racial nationalism in this country that’s a legacy of the British Empire. When black children do well at school, instead of celebrating that, the press says: ‘White working class kids are being left behind.’ But black boys on free school meals fail at the same rate as white boys on free school meals.”
Street survival
As a teenager, Akala carried a knife to protect himself. He recounts vividly the violence he witnessed and the – frightening in different ways – experience of being stopped and searched by police.
One of his book’s most moving scenes describes his “epiphany” at 25, when he realised he had survived his upbringing: “There is no ceremony,” he writes, “nobody congratulates you, you just wake up one day and it’s over.”
