Let’s try it like this: I made a visit to England recently. It was January and not yet as cold as it would be. The English cold is a different cold. It comes with dampness and secrecy. It was awhile since I’d been there (2 years) and a lot can happen if you’re not watching.
The Visit
By Edgar Nkosi White
(for my daughter, Nicole)
Let’s try it like this: I made a visit to England recently. It was January and not yet as cold as it would be. The English cold is a different cold. It comes with dampness and secrecy. It was awhile since I’d been there (2 years) and a lot can happen if you’re not watching.
First you have to understand that going from New York to London is like traveling from one plantation to another. The accents may be different, drivers may drive on the left side instead of the right but, basically, you’re still very much on a plantation, especially since 9/11. There’s always someone watching you and you’re constantly being photographed.
Expect to be photographed at least 500 times a day. From the moment you leave your apartment until you return.
Subway, buses, even on streets there are cameras so if you always wanted to be a movie star London is ideal.
It had started long before 9/11. There was the problem of the Irish and a little organization called the IRA (Irish Republican Army) who made it clear that they’d love nothing better than to stick something up the Prime Minister’s loins. They came remarkably close with Maggie Thatcher. However, someone else used her bathroom before she did and ended up three floors below. They did manage to get Lord Mountbatten of India. So England learned to take security seriously.
Now Arthur Ashe, the former black tennis star, had a habit of always visiting the cemetery first whenever he found himself in the World. Well, with me, it’s not cemeteries, but prisons. I always check prisons because I’ve found that the way a society deals with its prisons will tell you all you need to know about its humanity.
What I found this time is that England is bursting at the seams because of its own abundance of prisoners. Suddenly for the first time they have more prisoners than places to put them. They’ve lately taken to using ships and making prisons of them. There are currently 80,000 prisoners in Britain whereof the Irish made the largest percentage. That honor has now been taken over by the black population.
Do you see why I say it’s very much like moving from one plantation to another?
The same statistics are in America. The only difference being that while Britain deals with 80,000 America deals with 2 million, the highest number in the so-called free world. Britain has the largest prison population in Western Europe.
Let me say this about prisons. All prisons have the same smell. Sweat and sex. Now they make a great effort to disinfect this ever-constant smell but they always fail. The problem of all prisoners is how to pass time without time passing you.
I don’t care whether we’re talking about Sing Sing prison in New York State, or Wormwood Scrubbs or Holloway Prison in London where the last woman prisoner was executed. The same smell prevails. The guards take it home in their clothes.
What’s interesting is that America and Britain agree that prison is the answer and that blacks are the great problem. In this they agree as much as they do on the Iraq War.
Another thing which the two nations have in common is the fact that a very tiny percentage of the truly wealthy are in control of the society but whereas in America they burning issues is “race” in Britain there is a term called “class” which is never used in America. That is because in Britain there is still a concept of royalty and dynasty.
England has a queen, or more properly ‘The Queen,” her royal majesty (may Peace be unto her.) The people would genuinely like to believe that she only sleeps at night after agonizing about the fate of her subjects (citizens.) Of course, this would presumably include the prison population. The question becomes just how in touch with reality is she? Considering the fact that neither the queen (Peace be unto her) nor any member of her family have ever touched money. Has never, in fact, had to touch it. Money, after all, is filthy lucre. Why, therefore, should she have to touch it? Isn’t it enough that her face illuminates all currency?
What is even more interesting is the fact that it is her black (Caribbean subjects) more than any others who follow the royal family, closer even than their own. I know this because even my middle name of “Charles” was named after the Prince.
So you see, I’m writing what I know to be fact. Now although there are more blacks in prison both in America and Britain does not mean we are the most feared. No, that distinction goes to the Islamic community. The Arab and East Indians from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Yemen.
How did this all come about? How did these Asians get there in the first place? Well, in the 1950s, England went in search of Caribbean workers. They sent notices to all their colonies in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and Anguilla begging potential laborers to come The War and left a serious shortage in nurses, transport, workers, and construction.
The problem started some ten years later when the Blacks began trying to join labor unions and started demanding better wages and housing conditions.
The answer to this problem was the East Indian. Whereas blacks would demand, Asians demanded nothing and were only too glad to work for a fraction of the pay.
The Asian antidote to black power had happened before in the Caribbean just after Emancipation (1850s). As soon as blacks were freed from the plantation they asked for a living wage to cut the sugar cane which would become sugar, rum and molasses. In order to keep the profits, Indians were imported in and although many died in record numbers, the replacement factor was still cheaper than using black labor.
It was in fact the East Indians who first brought “ganja” or marijuana to the Caribbean. Not as a source of pleasure but simply as an aid to work yet harder, the same way that ‘coca’ peons are used for labor in South America.
So you see the East Indians have always been used as the answer to the black problem.
Try, therefore, to imagine Britain superpower when she woke up one day to discover that the children of these immigrants who were now citizens would become their greatest threat. For some reason, the Asian youth in Britain are not as accepting of racism as their parents were. And the great questions now to the Home Secretary John Reid, is, Where do you deport natural born British citizens to?
Now everywhere you look in London you see the doors of the mosque open wide as women’s eyes. Now British Asians are also making a sizeable percentage of the prison population. Not all is treason. There is a great deal of white collar crime (creative bookkeeping by accounts). There is also smuggling. The financial rewards of drug trafficking from Pakistan and Afghanistan are just too much to ignore.
Since the war started, drugs are up tenfold and of course no one has stopped to check the relationship of the Afghan War and the breakdown of the former Soviet Union. How much heroin reached the streets of Russia?
But let us go and visit. A thought came to me while I was there. What would have happened had my mother decided to raise me in England instead of the South Bronx? What would have happened had she been hypnotized by “fish and chips”?
But fortunately she chose the American factories instead of the royal ones. She chose Hollywood complete with Elizabeth Taylor (born in Britain, raised in the U.S.) and Natalie Wood (Splendor in the Grass, although she too was born in Russia and raised in the U.S.) and finally, her favorite fantasy of all, Audrey Hepburn’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (Hepburn was born in Holland and starved her way to America.)
So because my mother loved movies so much, she came to America and the “South Bronx” instead and I grew up around the corner from Colin Powell pre-Iraq. So you see how stars move. Had she made another stop, I would have seen the world very differently.
Rhythm is the one thing which Britain doesn’t have. Rhythm comes from reality and the British black and the American move very differently, even if we share the same cell.
If you really look clearly you see that the issue of slavery still plays a larger part in the nature of the prison system. America has found a means of making a very nice profit from slavery. She has found that if you privatize there’s always money to be made in containment or ‘securities’ as it is labeled innocuously on the Stock Exchange.
The inmates constitute a cheap labor force and it’s for this reason that the prison guards can laughingly say, “This prison is not just for you, but your children and grandchildren too.”
Even the conjugal visits which are no allowed provide for a breeding ground for future generations of incarcerated.
It was Foucault, a Frenchman, and one of the last great intellectuals of that generation that included Camus, Sartre, and the black Fanon (Wretched of the Earth) was the first to draw a parallel between prisons – asylums and prostitution. He saw that the penal institution is one sure way to weed out any dissent or potential revolutionaries.
It’s interesting to me that the prisoners in Britain do not make the same demands for books and legal libraries which they do in America. In Britain, most of the time is spent in a mentor-like situation where older prisoners teach younger ones how to be better thieves and commit larger crimes. To be in prison is called “doing bird.”
The most beautiful phrase in the English language is: Awaiting her Majesty’s pleasure, meaning imprisonment. There is little push for GED equivalency exams or any form of preparation for release into the workforce.
I think that a lot of this has to do with the fact that there is no tradition of prison dissent as there is in America.
There is no Malcolm X, nor Soledad brothers. Somehow, no Mamia Abu Jamal who somehow manages to get his prison writings published and broadcast.
Britain is merely concerned with containment not rehabilitation or education. While I was there, several child molesters were set free to do as they would simply there was just no space to keep them. This despite the fact that one man’s own wife had reported him.
I’ve watched the Mayor of London (Ken Livingston) grow in wisdom over the years. He was once known as “Red Ken” the Communist. He has adopted an ingenious scheme whereby any driver wishing to drive in the Center of London must pay a tax of approximately the equivalent of $15 US for the privilege of driving during peak hours. Next, he raised the bus and subway (Tube, as they call it) fares so that it can cost as much as $10 to travel a single stop. As a result, London is a very costly city for travel. And so people walk almost everywhere to avoid transport as much as possible. Either they walk or ride bikes. The result is a) much less congestion, and b) very few fat people in London as compared to New York.
The women especially practically fly through the streets. They are in remarkable physical condition – what they call “fit.” A word of caution: beware young mothers pushing baby prams through the streets. They are lethal and you are much more likely to be run over by a woman with a baby carriage than by a car.
Next, the influence of Islam on London is massive. Every fifth woman you’ll see is wearing at least a head dress, a “hijab.” The young ones are very fashion conscious. They can be seen working as checkout girls in department stores. Believe it or not, some Muslim women have even joined the police force which makes for an interesting contradiction since on the one hand, Britain is very frightened of what she calls the “new enemy within” and yet on the other she maintains a strict policy of inclusion. As I say, the doors of the Mosque open wide as the eyes of women.
The question is which of the two cities is the more liberal and humanitarian – London or New York? The answer can best be understood by history. In New York, on the day of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery in the South there were a series of lynchings right in the heart of Union Square. New York, as it turns out, was much in favor of slavery because it brought a lot of money through the city in the form of tourism and contraband. In other words, New York has always cared about New York first and foremost.
London had a very similar attitude regarding run-away slaves. Again, it has to be remembered that London, as New York, is a harbor city which means it is very good for smuggling both goods and human cargo. The East End of London for example has a unique history, both political and underground. It has always been a major center of crime. It was in the East End, for example, where most of the spectacular murders and robberies took place. Jack the Ripper and then the Kray Brothers and most spectacularly, the Great Train Robbery. At least one of the robbers is still alive and living in the East End.
And yet this is where Karl Marx lived and starved while writing the communist bible, Das Kapital which although many people still think it was written in Russia, was really written in the East End of London where his body is still buried. Here can be found your oldest Jewish community together with clothing factories and printing press and synagogues. Karl Marx himself was a Jew. The majority of London cabdrivers come from the East End and they have the most complete knowledge of the City of London. The test which they have to take is in fact called “The Knowledge.”
Likewise, New York has the Lower East Side with almost the identical mix of crime and politics. The three communities which live practically on top of each other are: Chinatown, Little Italy and the Orthodox Jewish community. Very close by was the African burial ground which was located in The Village. Now, the waterways of the harbor helped to smuggle blacks from the South to the so-called freedom of the North. If you could survive for six months without capture in New York you were considered free. So you see both cities were about economy first.
I made a visit. It was a good visit. I started first in Paris because I could not land in London due to fog. As a result of this, I got to see yet another city which has also had to deal with change, Paris.
Paris was at one time so exclusive that the only job a young black man could get was cleaning the streets. If you came from the French colonies of Algeria or Senegal or Chad, you ended up living Bidonville, a ghetto. Now in Paris these same jobs are being fought for not just by Africans but Whites as well. Both women and men would love to get a job as street cleaners. Last year there were major riots in Paris because the young Africans and Arabs have had enough of brutality and exclusion in jobs and housing. Fires always get the government’s attention.
So here then is the situation. You have two major empires who have fallen on hard times. Both England and France are no longer the mighty powers which they once were. They have both sucked their former colonies dry having taken everything from diamonds to uranium. Now after so-called independence those former children of the colonies have come to the mother country to drink some milk from her breast only to find them dry. There are no jobs. No welcome. There’s only resentment at having to be reminded of its once glorious past as compared to its present chaos. She would prefer her children go home. Be it to Senegal or Bangladesh. But what do you do when those children are born right there within the borders of your capital, be it France or England? The answer is, prison. Prison is the quick fix. Now of course America on the other hand has no colonies (except for Puerto Rico and Guam). All of her former slaves still live right here in America.
It is very clear that America does not like complexity in anything. It likes things simple. Nothing should be longer than an email. No discussion longer than 60 seconds (the length of a TV commercial.) Simple questions, simple answers – like: Why is America Rich? Because God loves us. Why is Africa poor? Because He doesn’t love them. Answer to the problem: let Africa become Christian and God will forgive them and give them back the gold, diamonds and uranium and then they’ll be rich too.
Only a very simple country could be led by a George Bush, a Caesar in chief, because not only do we get the leaders we deserve we also get the God we deserve as well.
Here’s another typical question. Why is democracy good? Democracy is good because we have it. But India is the largest democracy in the world and there are thousands of people who live and die in the streets. People who live in sewer pipes or else spend their entire life waiting for refuse to either drift ashore or else be thrown from trains.
And if a woman is raped by a solder, she will have no redress in a court of law because in India they deal not only with race and class but a third element too, “caste.” And usually caste determines class. If for example the woman in question happens to come from the top Brahman caste then the soldier in question can be tried and possibly castrated.
This is unusual however because the government usually want them to defend them from all those people in the streets. The last thing they want to see is revolution. By the way, Indians, like the Spanish prefer the knife to a gun as the weapon of choice because they find the knife more intimate and sexual. The bottom line is that democracy is all well and good when you are in control of the society and you have soldiers happily waiting to put down any display of defiance. Any excuse to bring back martial law. Democracy therefore is whatever you call it as long as you have the power.
America still has the highest prison population in the world. In Britain, the crucial date which the Home Secretary fears most is the year 2010 when the prison population is expected to top 150,000. I’ll have to make another visit and see. Britain has not yet learned from America how to make money from prison. She spends most of her time denying any history of slavery. Whereas America accepts its history and tries to make a theme park of it via Disney World of private prisons. Come visit.
Meanwhile I’m blessing my mother and thanking God I’m not “Awaiting Her Majesty’s Pleasure.”
America is reality. Reality is rhythm. And rhythm is rage.
