In his book Black, Listed, Jeffrey Boakye explains how, ‘coming from poverty makes you feel blacker, because poverty is such an indelible marker of the black experience’.
As a black person I can most definitely feel this, but not because I’ve experienced any kind of poverty. In my own case it’s more so an absence of poverty, and how this has made me feel strangely privileged, and less black because of it.
Despite my relative privilege there has always been a part of me that’s wanted to shun it away. I remember being 16 years old and my dad giving me a ten pound note. I was grateful, but I still remember the expression on my friends face that told me I was a silver spooned brat.
This friend of mine had no father to give him anything. I understood. Yet the shame that this money gave to me made me resent it. I now look back and think, god damn, ten pounds! Ten pounds was all it took to kick start a life of shameful feeling and isolation. Is that how poor we were?
If poverty is the indelible marker of being black, then is wealth the indelible marker of being white, or at least of being something else?
What’s interesting is that I’ve only been able to put this into context since I’ve stepped into the wider world and have met people who bear inheritance to thousands, even millions of pounds.
What’s even more interesting is when this person happens to be black. Because of what black represents, black people who possess wealth are distanced from blackness by virtue of the very concept itself.
S.I. Martin’s Incomparable World goes some distance to show this issue at work. The novel is set in London during a time when slavery is coming to an end and the main protagonists all share something in common; they are all poor and destitute.
There is however another class of blacks present in the story. Free-born teacher Charlotte Tell, and real-life slave turned abolitionist, Ignacious Sancho, represent the wealthier and more refined blacks, who possess education, employment and, in the latter’s case, property.
We feel throughout the story that these individuals go far in their position to represent black people however are not actually of the people. In a very subdued manner, what the novel shows is how, though black, these privileged individuals are not tied to blackness in the same way as the destituted poor.
This is deeply problematic. I wonder whether as black people we can be comfortable with privilege without it isolating us from blackness. And whilst the idea of ‘black excellence’ is helping to change the narrative, we are not yet there in spirit.
I think about a black woman who once told me with hesitation and shame that she went to Cambridge University. I think about a black man who, responding to my nosiness, told me that he lived ‘round about Camden’, only to find out that he lived on one of the wealthiest streets in Hampstead. I think about my fear of telling black people I went to a private school. Most of all I think about that ten pound note.
Margin Page.
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
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