Last Saturday Night in Peckham or Gentrification and Race Relations in Modern Day Metropolitan Britain

(read the abridged version here)

‘Mate - have you got anything? Can you sort me out?’

***UPDATE***
A Moving Image: A Film about Gentrification, which inspired this blog, has it's UK premiere at the Vue Cinema West End this Sat 8 October, with futher screenigns in Brixton on Fri 14(Sold out) and the Hackney Picturehouse on Sun 16. Get tickets here http://ow.ly/u49Z304suO6

Peckham Springs

Last Saturday night in Peckham (14 May) I was greeted with these words as I exited the Peckham Car Park next to the Cinema by a white man in his early 20s with two friends: another white guy and a white girl in the same age range. As I walked away shaking my head, I heard her say ’If you get battered…’

The old adage came to mind ‘If I had a penny for every time..’. In this case if I had money for every time a white person asked me to sell them drugs I’d be ... Jay-Z or under the jail most likely.

A few weeks before I had a (very short) debate on Facebook with an artist of mixed Middle Eastern and English descent who was adamant that gentrification has nothing to do with race. He recounted the conventional wisdom that artists move into an area make it ‘cool’ and then the yuppies follow and so on and so forth - it’s not about race, it’s about class. I questioned what the colour of these artists is. The night prior to the incident mentioned above I saw a private screening of an upcoming film I’m in called ‘A Moving Image: A film about gentrification' so I also have an aesthetic vested interest in the subject. In that film (of which I had seen no sneak peaks or rushes prior to the screening so it was fresh), there is a very short segment where a black artist in Berlin recounts the aforementioned narrative and seemingly answers the question I posed saying ‘artists like me’

The film raises many questions about this very prescient issue, which is why I agreed to be part of it and that’s the point of it - to make one question. And therefore I do question that thought in artists ‘of colour’, the centrepiece of the film, of whether such artists can be gentrifiers. I believe that in Western countries it’s really not such artists that make these inner city areas ‘cool’ in this context. Sure we make ‘cool’ art but the cool here isn't that type of cool. It is 'cool' as in acceptable, palatable, safe. Also the class question in gentrification is something I have wanted to address for years now publicly. Race and class exist as separate entities but may coalesce in a Venn Diagram-seque way due to politics and prejudice. The existence of racism is what actually has injected entire races/cultures into an ‘underclass'. I’m sorry to break it to those questioning artists of colour but your colour trumps (no pun intended) your class.

(...a vested interest)  

A simpler way of demonstrating this is to ask the following question: ‘If all the artists moving into these areas were black would the white middle/upper class be moving in there?’. Be honest with yourself when you answer. Also this premise presupposes that the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants of the inner city don’t have the capabilities to be artists. Maybe they only know how to use sticks and stones and have just discovered fire too. Remember people were making Graffiti Art and Hip-Hop music long before it was considered mainstream - in these same areas. Even when it became cool there wasn't a huge influx of middle class yuppies moving in. If 'Art' indeed makes these areas cool why didn't these middle move in then. The fact is that the people who are actually doing the gentrifying need their pioneers to look like them to feel safe. Being a black artist and wondering if you’re part of the problem If anything that points to the type of colonial mentality that Fela Kuti sang about. Example: a friend I’ve known for over two decades, who literally grew up in a ‘hood’ in North London, asked me if I thought he was part of the problem because he had moved to Brixton. He apparently supposed that because he had a ‘decent’ job and worked in the arts and had mobility (geographical at least) that these attributes made him a ‘gentrifier’. He seemingly forgot that all the time I have known him as an adult he’s: had a job, moved to different areas, some more 'hood' than others and never thought this way before. It’s amazing what the power of suggestion can do.

Yasmeen Khan - Talk Radio

Sidebar: Interestingly that Friday, earlier in the evening, before I had gone to see the private screening, I was listening to a radio show on which one of my band SABATTA’s songs was about to be played. The presenter, Yasmeen Khan, (a broadcaster on the BBC and also Talk Radio, the station which the show was on) who is a British Muslim was doing a piece called ‘Everyday Muslims'. The point of the bit was to give examples of everyday British life experienced as a Muslim. It was designed to highlight situations that are anything but the extreme, it was meant to be uncontroversial.

No sooner had she announced the segment than her timeline with ablaze with highly incendiary negative comments. One in particular affected her, the content of which was ‘bloody Muslims if u love the dam things so much goto Syria’. The very next day the incident I mentioned at the beginning of this piece happened.

The relevance of this occurrence is really it's timing and what it says about the general temperature of our society as regards race and culture in a debate where issues of class are meant to be the prevailing factor in attitudes towards communities and where some would claim ethnicity is no longer seen.

Funny Vibe

I probably should expound on what happened in Peckham and the context. I was trying to find ‘Frank’s Cafe’ a hip spot where ironically enough a black artist I knew who was returning from Berlin, was having a get together. I’d never been to Frank’s before though I had heard about it. It’s at the top of the Car Park supposedly. I can't say for sure because I never found it, the top level was blocked off. I could see chairs through the barrier that prevented entry to that uppermost level so I assumed that was the place.

As I reached the 5th floor (the top floor is the 6th) I saw a young white couple coming down from the top of that level. I asked - 'Do you know where Frank’s is?’ I asked in my most non-threatening voice (you'll understand why momentarily). They responded that they were looking for Frank's too and the girl remarked she had been there before but couldn’t remember how to get there. We talked about it a little, wandered half way over to the other side of that floor of the Car Park, then we all began leaving because it was obvious (or seemed obvious) that there was nothing at the other end of the floor. As we all approached the exit, the man of the couple said ‘After you’ to me, which was ostensibly polite but was in fact the culmination of that 'Funny Vibe' I had had felt since our meeting. The vibe that black men in particular know. The one you get while noncommittally browsing through a shop only to be followed by security, or if you're walking behind a white woman on a street in the evening or you happen to share an elevator. I knew this was the case because the couple were actually closer to the exit than me and stopped to let me pass.

To escape this definite feeling of ‘cautionary discomfort’ I hurried down the steps - to be non-threatening. Eventually after going around the building a few times searching an entrance that would lead me to Frank's and finding none I returned to where I had originally entered. I went back up to the 5th floor and found the entrance to the 6th floor which, as I say, was blocked. It was upon returning to ground level that I was confronted with the scene I started this post with. I should add that immediately prior to exiting the Car Park another black man entered with a somewhat quizzical look, one I recognised the probable cause of as I exited. A little while later I actually bumped into that same white couple on the high street and they were actually quite friendly with the 'vibe' having somewhat dissipated. I suppose sometimes you just have to stop and take a breath...

Now again, the idea that gentrification is a purely a ‘class’ issue is proven unlikely in this case because the individual who approached me actually had no idea what my background was class-wise, his assumptions were simply based upon my complexion. Some might argue that my colour coupled with my geographic location was what in fact contributed to this profiling. To some extent it felt like that element was indeed there: ‘well if you’re black and you are in this area you must sell drugs’ and sadly I can see how black artists who want this to be a class issue might actually cling to this equally pernicious outlook as a lifeline - after all none of us want to be prejudged only based on our skin colour, particularly when that judgement puts us at the bottom of the heap. If we as black artists exist within an environment which is overwhelmingly white but actually welcoming - i.e. in our own particular artistic, academic or other environments, we perhaps feel the benefits of a maybe unconscious insulation. Sure, the only other black people we might see day-to-day in our professional lives might be security or the cleaning staff but after all are we not in a different class entirely; an artistic or academic class; classism presumably being perfectly acceptable? So with that being the case if we’re not with our white friends/colleagues/peers and we happen to be in a ‘black’ area then maybe it’s forgivable even understandable that a strange white person should ask us for drugs - it’s really just down to the area we’re in.

You're black - you know where to get drugs

Linton Kwesi Johnson - Sonny's Lettah (Anti-sus Poem)

However I’m going to have to shoot down that myth also with another true story. About this time last year I attended the opening of an Art Exhibition through a person I was working with musically at the time, his friend was curating the exhibition. Let's call this curator 'Hector' (not his name). One of the artists was a posh white gentleman, let's call him Timothy. Timothy was holding forth after the show (or attempting to) and began by detailing how he was living in Battersea or Clapham or somewhere 'hood-ish' he couldn't quite decide in a ...flat, you know just making his work 'bruv'. I don't think he actually said 'bruv' but he definitely was giving his best 'down with the kids' effort. Anyway after this the Hector, two other female curators, this 'dude' and I ended up at a private members club in Soho. While we were there, and as the drinks began to take hold, a couple of these upper class members of the art world began to loosen their tongues: 'In vino veritas', as the saying goes and one of the female curators asked, (let's call her Philomena), with no hint of irony upon hearing that I have family in Scotland and spent time at school up there: ‘Is your mother - black, black?’ You know - fully black?’ She was very intrigued.

Mary Sclessor commemorative £10 note showing the Aberdonion Missionary  
in Nigeria: with the 'black blacks'

But Timothy, outdid that remark by stating to me: ’You’re black - you must know where we can get some drugs.'. Now maybe I would have been apologist and tried to convince myself this was merely some type of really bad, crass humour (I’m lying, I wouldn't have done that) had I not heard him earlier saying to Hector ‘I’m dying for some coke’, several times on the way to the club.

Now let me add in an observation here. This artistic phalanx at the Art opening and Private Member's club were literally at least a class above the group of people I met outside of Peckham Car Park. How do I know - well I’ve got a varied background? Also the folks I met outside the car park were from up North with regional accents that illustrated this. Really posh people, whichever part of the UK they hail from, do not have regional accents. So I’m afraid the distinction in their class also made no difference to their perceptions of what the defining aspects of an adult black male are - i.e. me. The Art Galleries in Soho are not inner city,'hood' or ghetto. Whether I was seen as a ‘native’ in a hood area or I was in a well-to-do locale the analysis of me by these two different classes of white people was the same. I might deduce not assume that the folks I met in Peckham were students this doesn't necessarily mean that they were from very privileged backgrounds, nowadays there are more universities than you can shake a stick at, but those at the Art Gallery definitely were.

No one called Asian communities in Bradford and Leeds 'gentrification'

You see the race element unfortunately does seep into these issues. I’ve been having discussions about gentrification with a number of friends from different backgrounds over the last few years, I live in Elephant and Castle, it’s one of the biggest topics on everyone's lips. But the race topic hasn't come up in all those discussions - until now. Why is race a definitive part of this is debate? Because race speaks to culture and heritage and these two ideals hang in the balance when gentrification occurs. The era in which such a phenomenon is happening also has an impact, though possibly not in a way one might hope. In other words one might hope things would get much better over time. The time element is more about semantics I believe, than actually concrete changes in attitude. For instance in less ‘PC’ times when the situation was working in reverse there was something called ‘white flight’. The cognoscenti wasn't pulling any punches about white people moving out of inner city areas to the suburbs as black people moved in (anyone remember when the white middle class hanging out in the 'hood' was called slumming it, no?). Now decades later we have Middle England, Middle America, (I don't know what they call it Germany, etc.) involved in what I suppose would have been called a ‘white invasion' but is now more amiably given the title gentrification. The ‘class’ debate is a red herring because obviously you can't buy property if you don't have the money to afford it, that automatically puts you within a class I suppose. But hasn't anyone noticed that when Asians communities moved into East London or Bradford and bought up properties or Mosques were erected no one ever called it gentrification. Furthermore when black people mainly from the Caribbean came over in the 'Windrush' and bought properties that they may now have sold to the estate agents who are the engines of the gentrification, the entry of these people was not called Gentrification either - It's not simply about the movement of people.

I’ve been going out in Peckham and Brixton for years. if you got out now the nightlife in these areas is predominately white. Brixton was always quite mixed but in contrast in Peckham, which was conversely very black there's now almost a complete white-out. The landscape is almost unrecognisable. Sure, you still see lots of black people in the daytime but at night its not the same. Again there are black people around but mainly doing security. And it seems that if you're not ‘accompanied’ by white people apparently you're expected to be selling drugs.

The Venn Diagram we call society

As I said earlier I haven’t necessarily shared these thoughts on the racial dynamic with a lot of people I know with good reason. All, not some of my best friends are from different complexions and social backgrounds. I've had black, white and mixed-race girlfriends. I'm loathe to reduce things into black and white because honestly my favourite race is human. But as a human being I also get fatigued by being reduced myself to a stereotype because of the colour that some people of another colour see when they see me and what attributes they imbue that colour with. Clearly in the UK at least, inner cities weren't originally populated by migrants from Asia or Africa. You might look to Vikings, Normans and Huguenots for that. There was a huge influx of Polish people after the Second World War and more recently again with freedom of movement within the EU, along with Romanians, Russians, Latvians, Serbs, etc. Originally white working class areas in East End London such as Hoxton, which had retained some of this population, were among the first areas to ‘fall’ to gentrification, other areas of the capital are just as vulnerable to this phenomenon in many ways. Businesses such as music studios, which serve people of all backgrounds have been dying in droves for years, the same goes for music venues. About a year to 18 months ago I had a drink in the Peckham Wetherspoons with a Peckham native of Nigerian heritage, she was born and raised in the area and I recall us seeing two groups of white people inside. We both noticed the difference in the groups: one group were the locals and the other new arrivals. The difference was marked by clothes, attitude, accents and distance: they literally congregated at opposite sides of the pub. However ultimately those differences are not as marked to the naked eye as skin colour and the assumptions that come with it regardless of apparel and demeanour.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

These are the issues that emanate from having a ruling class that is dominated by a particular race/culture and background and it's history of global control and subjugation. People traditionally talk about white middle class men as the culprit, 'the man'. The truth is there are a lot more white middle class women in power positions now as well and they often hold the same attitudes, sex really is not as definitive of race regarding this and after all every race includes the same two sexes. The challenge if you are an enlightened human being who happens to be of the Caucasian persuasion is how you engage peers are not so enlightened. You are by default identified with this elite and share the same invisibility of belonging - similar to a Muslim woman in a burka or a Hasidic man in his attire. When Philomena asked if my mother was ‘Black black?’ none of the party I was with offered a retort or showed any semblance of recognition of the inappropriateness of the comment. When Timothy said ’You should know where the drugs are’ there was only a small sigh of surprise and that issued from the other the female curator, let's call her Jemima, who happened to be half-Thai but that was all. I’ve seen these situations before. To survive people who are not fully 'other' (maybe they are mixed race or they are white but Polish and have a 'strange' surname) blend in try to be invisible and hope that the negative attention won’t be turned on them. I could see that was a strategy Jemima was very accustomed to. However by not addressing this behaviour, those people in the same 'club' as the perpetrators actually collude with them. It actually really pains me to discuss these issues but these are my experiences and they are not ‘historical’. The occurrences I am retelling all have happened in the last 12-18 months  - the most recent ones, at the time I began writing this, in the last week. It brings to mind another oft quoted and little executed adage by Niemöller 'First they came for...'

To conclude, or to wrap up (for indeed I am not entirely sure there is in fact a satisfactory conclusion to all this) it seems to me that at the point in the Venn Diagram that we call society; where ownership, power, wealth, culture, race and faith might coalesce; our circles of belonging may sadly be moving further apart. In a world dominated by western Caucasian Eurocentric identity, where humanity is created in it’s image, everything else is considered as 'other'. The result being that those of us who are of 'other' remain still expected to validate and justify not only our right to rights but indeed our very existence. We remain subject to invisible yet tacitly understood and universally enforced 'pass laws'. The movement of people/s, the changing landscape of the environment due to trade, migration, technological advancement, changes in economic imperatives and progress are universal some might say and therefore to be expected. The difference with gentrification is that it is less a matter of course and more a matter of the ruling elite and section of society in represents, flexing it’s muscles saying ‘this is our world you just live in it'. Certainly with London serving apparently as the place for international oligarchs to deposit their cash in that antique bank called property, many across society are feeling the pinch if they are not part of this so called ‘1%’. As with many such points in time when the financial pressure is on this brings out aspects of human behaviour that are not necessarily our most virtuous. However what’s interesting about these particular junctures is that they also double as aspirational times (see Thatcherite Britain) and right now is no different in that sense. For all the complaints about the inequities in the world we live in, many would give their eye teeth to be part of that 1% and failing that the 20-30% below it and thus Middle England flocks to London accelerating the growth of those carbuncular high rise apartments on the skin of the metropolis (they've replaced dark satanic mills). Even those in staunch opposition to the rarefied few may share some of the same sentiments such as a wish not to pay tax. All this because ultimately the society we inhabit is about ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and the 1% is in fact the zenith of ‘Us'.

Shit rolls down hill and the natives of the city are at the bottom (I’m aware of the multitudes ironies of this statement) and no one wants the shit to land on them. Falling back on racial stereotypes, backed up by a lack of education and rights in those at the wrong end stick of those stereotypes is easy for those who are visually identified with the ruling class; even if their class and background is in fact the lower on paper. In other words if you are white and poor, or white and nouveau riche or just white and common or even foreign, play by the rules and your pigmentation will exclude you from the bottom far easier than if you didn't have it. Practice your accent and you won’t even stand out. You’ll be accepted and not just as a mascot but as a fully paid up member of ‘Us’. In this society a darker complexion will always identify a person with ‘them’; even at the highest level of society you will still be the exception to the rule.  And thus gentrification is it’s very own and perhaps the original ‘Reclaim the Streets’ movement - because it’s message is that the streets, all the streets belong to ‘Us’.

-----'A Moving Image' world premiered on June 5 at the Arclight Culver City as part of the LA Film Festival (one of MOVIEMAKER Magazine's 10 Films to look out for)

POST SCRIPTUM:

***UPDATE**** OCT 2016
The full version of the song below: (Sometimes These South London Streets Remind Me Of) Brooklyn' which features in the film, will be released on Mon 10 October via iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, TIDAL

SPOILER ALERT: In the film A Moving Image: A film about gentrification, my character sings an acoustic version one of my songs '(Sometimes These South London Streets Remind Me Of) Brooklyn' in the middle of Windrush Square in Brixton. This was written from my various sojourns in the New York between 2010 and 2012. In the ode I draw parallels between South London and Brooklyn and things that were happening in NYC then are now happening here in the UK's capital. I stayed variously in Flatbush, Crown Heights and Bushwick - the last of these in a warehouse with my then white artist girlfriend (I was going to write 'lady artist' but it's 2016). Did that make me a gentrifier? Well not according to the born and bred Brooklynites (of varying shades) from the first two areas I mentioned and beyond; nor the 'brothers' from the rest on NYC and Philly; nor the Bushwick indigenes (I wasn't the 'artist' who got punched in the face in street during a performance by one of the Bushwick 'homies'. But then I wasn't blocking the street while performing and and we looked kind of different) nor at any time I came in the contact with officialdom did I get that sense. I was always identified with my colour - I wasn't even mistaken as a Dominican. As one venue owner put it 'Black guy British accent'. Was he actually trying to say 'It's our world you just live in it' you decide?

All the streets belong to 'Us'