In times past, people in these islands went to great lengths to conceal that their ancestors were “lowborn”, or non-prestigious foreign, or, worse yet, unknown. Social climbers would frequently change their names to something more aristocratic and perhaps pay some impoverished scholar to fake them up a coat of arms and insert a fictional ancestor or two into the historical record. Then along came steam engines and trousers and we moved to saying that a man or woman should be judged on their own deeds, never mind who their ancestors were. I thought we all agreed this was a good change.
So why have we gone back to acting as if having upper class ancestors who lived here is an important component of a modern British person’s status if that person happens to be black – so important that it needs to be lied about?
BBC Told To Avoid “Clunky” Color-Blind Casting & “Preachy” Anti-Colonial Storylines In Drama Series
The BBC has been urged to rethink color-blind casting “tokenism” and “preachy” storylines about the UK’s colonial history in scripted series, according to a major study commissioned by the broadcaster.
Conducted by former BAFTA chair Anne Morrison and ex-Ofcom executive Chris Banatvala, the thematic review of “portrayal and representation” across BBC output found that “clunky” depictions of race can cause more harm than good.
The 80-page report revealed audience complaints about Doctor Who casting Nathaniel Curtis as Sir Isaac Newton in the 60th anniversary special “Wild Blue Yonder,” as well as the 2023 Agatha Christie series Murder Is Easy, which featured an allegory on colonialism.
The review noted that color-blind casting was a matter of controversy for commentators and some viewers. Urging commissioners to “consider their choices carefully,” the report said that good intentions to increase diversity can lead to inauthentic outcomes — outcomes that can sometimes be damaging to the communities they are attempting to serve.
“In depicting an anachronistic historical world in which people of colour are able to rise to the top of society as scientists, artists, courtiers and Lords of the Realm, there may be the unintended consequence of erasing the past exclusion and oppression of ethnic minorities and breeding complacency about their former opportunities,” the review said.
“What needs to be avoided is ethnic diversity which looks forced and tick box, and we found our interviewees of colour as emphatic on this point as those who were white.”
Good.
However, the writers of this review made an argument in defence of the black Newton that shows they don’t understand science fiction:
Though Doctor Who was referenced, the report raised an eyebrow about the specific concerns regarding Curtis, saying that a mixed-race Newton “seems much less of a stretch” in a universe in which the central character is a time-travelling extra-terrestrial, who regenerates into different actors.
It doesn’t work that way. In a genre such as opera that makes no attempt at realism (read a plot summary of The Love of Three Oranges sometime), or in much of Shakespeare, the extra degree of divergence from reality involved in having the passionate soliloquy in which a nominally European character pours out his heart in rhyming couplets be delivered by a black performer really is trivial, but the whole point of science fiction is that the premise can be as wacky as you like, but the consequences of that premise are worked through with rigour.
OK, maybe not with rigour in the case of Dr Who, but certainly with an attempt at naturalism.
I have no complaints about the acknowledged alternative universe of Bridgerton. (“The series is set during the early 19th century in an alternative London Regency era, in which George III established racial equality and granted aristocratic titles to people of color due to the African heritage of his wife, Queen Charlotte.”) With all the dystopian alternate timelines out there, it makes a nice change. In a similar way, the Doctor meeting the black Newton of a Bridgertonesque timeline wouldn’t have bothered anyone. Five seconds of script and the word “quantum” would have been enough to avoid the collective national wince when viewers realised they were having that line of false history pushed at them again.
Sometimes the Twitter and YouTube algorithms send me grainy film clips of life in Britain many decades ago; street scenes with policemen directing traffic, workers leaving factories, and the like. One notices several differences from the present. Working class women are wrapped in shawls. Every adult male, however poor, is wearing a hat. And, of course, everyone in sight is white. There is no logical reason why knowledge of this obvious historical truth – the fact that the vast majority of British people were white as late at the 1960s – should cause hostility to present-day black British people, but these days the comments to those historical clips quickly fill up with variations on the words “Notice anything?” I notice that human beings dislike being lied to.
As I said in a post called The Great Retcon,
This desperate retconning of the odd Phoenician, Libyan or Egyptian who turned up in British history as “black”, and the whole trend to exaggerate the number of black people in British history, has two effects, both of which increase racism. White people from the majority population resent seeing the history of their ancestors falsified and even erased, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, did when he said that “This city was built by migrants.” For black people, and indeed anyone of any colour whose ancestors did not come from these islands, it cements the idea that a person cannot truly be Welsh or British unless they can point to examples of people with enough genes in common with them having lived in those places centuries ago.
Opera is perhaps the best or the even only example of genuinely colour-blind casting, as it is overwhelmingly the voice which counts. I have seen a Korean tenor playing an Italian, a Tongan traviata and Eastern Europeans playing the leads in a Chinese production of Turandot.
So, really, to serve the cause of The Struggle For Equality, we need to kick blacks out of university, out of the professions, and out of polite society, and treat them like slaves, so that we never ever forget that they once couldn’t go to university, join a profession, or enter polite society.
Seems harsh.
No.
In reality it was more the over way round – people whose ancestors were English sometimes changed their names (when they got wealthy enough to buy land) to pretend they had Norman-French ancestry – to sound more aristocratic.
Jumping forward to the time of George III – there was “racial equality” in that there were no racial laws in England, but this hardly mattered as there were very few black people here. There were a few slaves up to Mansfield Judgement of 1772 (which did not “make slavery illegal” – it already was illegal, under natural law – natural justice, as understood by legal judgments going back almost 700 years – yes almost 700 years BEFORE 1772, but these judgments were not properly enforced over time), but they were a tiny group.
And NO – Queen Charlotte did not have black ancestors. North Africans whether Arab or Berber (the Berbers came from Europe – many thousands of years ago) were not black. A distant ancestor who was a Muslim is nothing to do with being black – Mohammed is described in the sources as a pale man, and he said some horrible things about black people. There was a massive importation of black slaves into Islamic lands – but the male slaves were normally castrated, and if female black slaves had children (after being raped) the babies were normally (although not always) killed at birth – the Ottoman Empire carried on these practices into the 19th century.
By the way there were no Vitamin D tablets in those days – so if you want to show black people in cold and dark Britain you should show them suffering from rickets and other diseases, they might just about get away with living in London and other coastal towns, if they had oily fish in their diet, but further north would be a problem.
Many white people, who did not have a lot of oily fish (and so on) in their diet, suffered from lack of Vitamin D – black people would suffer far more on this cold and dark island.
Nature is not egalitarian – it does not think race is a social construct. Hence, for example, all those television messages “1 in 8 white men get prostrate cancer, 1 in 4 black men”.
My great grandfather was a migrant into London.
Was he black or brown? No he was not.
Did he “build London”? No he did not.
Neither my Jewish or my Irish ancestors were in the building trade. As for Anglo Saxon ancestors – well “Ethel Draper” is a pretty Anglo Saxon name, but I doubt that any of that family were builders.
“Irish” needs to be qualified – “Power” (the name of grandfather James Power) is a Norman name, just as Burke and Nagle are (in ancestry) Norman names. Still Martin McGuinness (Scottish name) and Jerry Adams (whose ancestor, Colonel John Adams, came from Lincolnshire, a few miles down the road from here, back in the day) both passed themselves off as pure Irish – and shot people and planted bombs on this basis (the British establishment winked at their activities as it had long wanted to “get rid of Ulster” – the intelligence services had long infiltrated the terrorist groups, “the troubles” could have been ended at any time, but London wanted treachery, a “political settlement” – hence the Belfast sell-out, which people who want to “get rid of Ulster” call “the Good Friday agreement”).
Black or brown people – not common in London even when I was born (1965) so the idea that they “came to help Britain after World War II” is largely nonsense.
“Came to help the NHS” – very few black nurses (although there were some) even as late as the 1960s – those who came to train in Britain were supposed to go home (Irish nurses who came in the 1950s were more likely to stay – but there were not vast numbers of them either).
London, within living memory, was a largely ENGLISH city – after all it is the capitol of England.
One should also remember that the establishment do not just want to take the cities away from the English, and the Welsh and the Scots, they have made it clear that they wish to take rural areas as well – and will use government power (government spending, and continued propaganda and indoctrination campaigns) to achieve this objective.
Paul, I did think of getting into the fact that our aristocracy is mostly Norman-French as an exception to my claim that “foreign” names lacked prestige, but the digression got too lengthy. When I talked about people changing their names to sound less foreign, I was more thinking of a much later era.
As you know, the concept of foreign-ness had a different meaning a thousand years ago (when it was commonplace for a king or a lord’s domain to comprise pockets scattered all over Europe) to what it had four or five hundred years ago when the concept of nation-states was becoming dominant.
If I can think of a quick way to phrase the point you make, I may put something in. UPDATE: I changed “foreign” to “non-prestigious foreign”.
Colour blind casting: when we see ‘Denzel Washington as Adolf Hitler’ we are more likely to belive that colour blind casting has arrived.
Maybe ‘Tom Hanks as Nelson Mandela’ too.
It’s not just lying though, is it? It’s the outright propaganda. It’s the Orwellian rewriting of history and attempting to deny, dissemble, hide or even destroy the evidence because it goes against the narrative that the leftists wish to push to enable their continued invasion of these islands with people from vastly different cultures who come here not to integrate and prosper, but to conquer and steal.
Despite the name, I’m a descendent of the ancient immigrants of this island. My ancestors were feudal serfs of French aristocrats from Carcassonne in Languedoc, yet along the way we’ve interbred with Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Celtic and goodness only knows which other inhabitants of this island (the genetic predisposition towards “Viking Finger” speaks more than any birth certificate or certificate of naturalisation ever could).
Yes, I am descendent of migrants.
Yes, my family has been in England, (pre-partition) Ireland and most recently Scotland for at least 700 years, maybe more.
Yes, I am British with diffuse roots that speak to the history of these islands far more than some “Johnny-come-lately” Miripuri immigrant who arrived in a Boeing 747 and whose claim to being British is a piece of paper.
I will not see that heritage erased for reasons of political correctness or to allow Sadiq Khan and his Islamic brethren replace me.
I would be a coward to do so and calling me a “Racist rightwing Nazi” doesn’t work on me, since they’ve been calling me that for decades.
I reserve the right to protect this land from invaders if the Government refuses to do so. I will do it through the legal political means that are open to me by voting through the ballot box.
…but if that fails, as we have been failed by the multiple cheeks of the Uniparty arse in recent decades, then civil war looms.
I don’t look forward to it, but I will not shy away from it if the need arises.
Somewhat related, on racially incongruous casting in period dramas:
Presumably, it’s somehow unfair that the Yorkshire moors of the eighteenth century, for instance, did not entirely resemble twenty-first century London. Where the proponents of such things tend to live.
A pernicious discourse which seemed to originate in Britain some time in the 90s or early 2000s was the importation of the American ‘nation of immigrants’ mythology* and applying it to Britain to justify mass immigration. Absurd claims are made that immigrants built Britain and so forth. In 1945 Britain was 99.9% white. Before the 1990s there had been waves of immigration, but they were (1) relatively controlled compared to what has happened since the 1990s and (2) were also very unpopular with much of the British population. The Jewish Eastern European immigration in the late 1800s/early 1900s triggered a backlash in the form of the 1905 Aliens Act and the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent immigration from the 1940s-1960s made Enoch Powell the most popular man amongst the British masses because he spoke out about it.
*I say mythology because I think the ‘nation of immigrants’ story about America has a lot of untruth to it, even if it is less absurd than applied to Britain
‘..these days the comments to those historical clips quickly fill up with variations on the words “Notice anything?”
To which I can always reply: ‘yes! Look how clean and free of litter and graffiti everywhere is!’
James Strong and others,
Many years ago I saw a version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar set in a modern African country. All the roles, except Mark Anthony if I recall correctly, were played by black actors. The dialogue was unchanged. It worked very well, emphasising the universality of the play’s portrayal of the assassination of a political leader and its consequences. Of course putting Shakespeare into different settings has been going on for ages. Back in the 1970s, the girls’ secondary school which I attended put on Shakespeare plays in which every character was played by a teenage girl and nobody batted an eyelid. And as we all know in Shakespeare’s own time the female roles were played by young men.
The point is that no one was ever expected to believe that Shakespeare was even trying to make an accurate depiction of history.
My ancestors arrived in England in open boats in 1066, landing on Pevensey beach, before proceeding to Senlac Hill for a bit of argy-bargy. And next thing you know, HAROLD REX INTERFECTUS EST. Can confirm there were no Afro-Saxons amongst the Fyrd or Huskarls when we rode them down.
You Anglo-Saxon oiks better not start bleating about “reparations”
Mayor Khan is quite correct to say that London was built by migrants. People came from all over the British isles to make new lives there. I believe it was already quite an important city even before a few hundred West Indian men arrived in 1948.
JohnK – your ironic way of writing (some might even say sarcasm) is well justified.
Natalie – people changing their names to sound less foreign is more a thing in the United States than the United Kingdom – and largely German names being changed.
Of course, the British Royal Family also did this – but it was far more common in the United States.
Perry – there were plenty of places in Sussex (they heavily forested) where the Normans could have been ambushed – rather than standing on an open hillside. But, of course, it is easy to be clever after the event.
The “Norman Yoke” was real, but it broke down in a generation – with Henry the First marrying a direct descendant of Alfred the Great and, from the very start of his reign, appealing to the English to help him against his older brothers. I am born in England, I had no part in the crimes of my father and older brothers (for example in the slaughter of the north England), I have sworn (in 1100) to obey the laws (which will confuse people who think that “the law” is the will of the state – for, in which case, Henry would have been swearing to obey himself), and, look, I am marrying an Anglo-Saxon.
Although Norman French was the language of the elite for another couple of generations, very irritating (to put the matter mildly) in such things as the law courts.
Alas, 1066 is far too long ago to take anything personally one way or the other.
Regarding Shakespeare, Natalie is right: it would indeed seem that the play really is the thing and it’s a testimony to the Immortal Bard that a talented cast from anywhere in any language and almost any sort of stage and costume setting can do the job.
The same is simply not so of something like Bridgerton or All Creatures where we are required to suspend credibility to accommodate anachronistic demography.
(Call The Midwife works better because there were people from the Caribbean popping up in good numbers in postwar London in the 1950s and 1960s.)
JJM – not very large numbers of black midwives popping up in London in that historical period.
Paul:
Faced with Mayor Khan’s gaslighting I feel that sarcasm is he only reasonable response.
We are being led to believe that before 1948 London was some sort of backward place before third world immigrants built it for us. Our capital city now has only about a third white British population. This is not natural. When Enoch Powell gave his speech in 1968, he could never have imagined, in his worst nightmares, such a calamity.
No nation can survive when its capital city, and its other major cities and large towns, are taken over by foreign people who owe Britain no allegiance. We are looking at the end of the historic country of Britain before the end of the century. It is like the fall of the Roma Empire, and entirely self-inflicted. It is just an unprecedented calamity, and sinister figures such as Mayor Khan have to convince us that a) it is not happening, and b) it is a good thing. I do not buy his bullshit.
“JJM – not very large numbers of black midwives popping up in London in that historical period.”
No, but at least there were some.
Unlike say, a village with a veterinary clinic in the Yorkshire Dales set in the 1940s.
Regarding Mayor Sadiq Khan’s claim that London was built by migrants – wasn’t it built by conquerors and colonizers from Rome? Londinium, if I remember correctly. Seems they would have used the local indigenous population (as slaves) to do some the grunt work building, but they probably brought in Roman citizens (and/or the army) for engineering and know-how. Some of that Roman engineering is still in use, or at least in place, today.
I could be misinformed – I’m from a former British colony, so I don’t know all the specifics of English history. But it seems that with the difficulty of travel back then, most “migrants” to London would have been from the British Isles themselves, just from rural places, as someone pointed out above-thread.
JJM – yes agreed.
JohnK – yes, and Enoch Powell did think it possible, that is why he was so tormented.
“All political careers, unless cut off by death at some happy juncture, end in failure” – it was the fate of Enoch Powell to be Cassandra, making true warnings – which were rejected and mocked by those in power.
At least Mr Powell was fortunate enough to die, and, thus, not to see the nightmare that now opens before us.
Black Actor: I want to play Isaac Newton.
Casting Director: You can’t. He was white.
Black Actor: That’s so unfair.
Casting Director: You can still apply for black roles.
Black Actor: But there are so few of them.
Casting Director: And why is that?
[Cue uncomfortable discussion about why there is no black equivalent of Newton, Shakespeare etc]
Which is why casting directors say “yes”.
Patrick Crozier – yes, that would seem to be part of it.
But there are, or rather should be, roles of intelligent black people in Western society that are calling out for black actors.
For example, where is the film of the life of Booker T. Washington, or Walter Williams, or Thomas Sowell?