In the Land of Double Talk, Representation is a Constant Struggle
From studying film at AS Level to being a critic to learning about the Hays Code, one could say my journey has been eye-opening.
In November 2012, when I was an intellectually-unstimulated teenager trying to find myself in the Northampton College Library, a little less critical than I am now, the librarians (who actually knew me by my first name) showed me the DVD section. Not that I didn’tt love reading but I have always been a film enthusiast and it was in those three weeks that I managed to plough through the majority of Hitchcock’s 1950s and 1960s back catalogue. It’s safe to say that my life has not been the same since. Growing up, even as a little boy, I watched a lot of older films from the Golden Age of Hollywood but somehow the Hitch AKA Master of Suspense escaped me.
It was that same winter, as well, that I managed to watch Rebecca (1940), the only Hitchcock film to ever win Best Picture, and that changed me forever. Yet, whenever I see films of that time with Black actors, they are almost always embodying racist stereotypes, or cariciatures. In these films, I see Black women represented as sassy, angry, hypersexualised, fetishised and more, encompassing what is now called “misogynoir” (Moya Bailey, 2010) — a form of discrimination where race and gender both play roles of bias. The role of “The Mammy” is quite frankly the most famous (in my opinion) of Black female stereotypes on screen — popularised with Mammy played by Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, a role for which she won an Oscar in 1940, with numerous actors having played it since — from Viola Davis to Octavia Spencer and Aunt Jemima’s breakfast foods. “Misogyny” denoting a prejudice against women; “noir” being black in French, uniting to form this decade-old term that has been practiced for centuries — from the films we watch to the treatment of Black women in sports, arts, corporate, the media and more. We often say that many of the films we call racist are of their time but this concept we call racism is centuries-old and everlasting; misogynoir follows the same thought.
As we see activists looking to cancel texts from the 1930s that were definitely of their time, (maybe), we are also subject to race scandal after race scandal today — from blackface minstrelsy with the BBC’s Little Britain and The Mighty Boosh to high street retailers being caught out with lazy designs, or they weren’t lazy — and times simply have not changed at all. However, as someone that loves films made before the 1970s, it is highly difficult for me to see pictures with Black actors that don’t portray us as stereotypes. Even many of the great Sidney Poitier films, albeit, well-acted, still fall into this trap.
After watching the BBC’s Black Hollywood: They Gotta Have Us, I made it my mission to watch every film mentioned, and ran into the 1954 Otto Preminger film Carmen Jones. Sitting intoxicated by Dorothy Dandridge’s performance, which is quite simply dynamite, this is also one of the few times I have seen Black romance on screen on film that didn’t involve toxic masculinity, violence, drugs et al. Otto Preminger directs both Dandridge and Harry Belafonte as actors, not Black actors. They were Black faces on the silver screen allowed to realise themselves and not directed to “act Black.”
That said, blackface looms over some of my favourite films, like the dance numbers of Fred Astaire. Films like Top Hat — an easy A-grade film made uncomfortable by blackface, essentially racist caricatures of Black people which had also took root in Britain and was on BBC TV until 1978:
“In 1836 Jim Crowe was the comic persona and dance routine of Thomas Dartmouth Rice,… an actor and comedian in the 1820s. […] At some point in the 1830s, Rice began to appropriate aspects of the musical and dance traditions that had developed among the enslaved people of the southern states. He had assembled these cultural fragments and added his own distortions to black speech patterns and exaggerations of black dancing, and created the state character Jim Crow, an enslaved man dressed in rags and faded finery who sang songs, danced and told jokes. … Rice blackened his face and hands, as earlier minstrel performers had done. In 1836, at the height of British abolotionism, Jim Crow came to Britain…” (Olusoga, 2017: 271).
As activists and scared institutions alike love to cancel racist art, we must remember that things like blackface came in that era amidst British colonialism (and in the thick of US slavery) and became part of British culture by proxy. Is it this history that allowed Matt Lucas and David Walliams to write this into Little Britain? I do not know. But to “cancel” a television series that’s been out for years does not make sense to me, since the damage has been done and it’s out in the world now. However, what can be done is institutions putting systems in place that prevent these kinds of stories from being made again in the future, before their conception in the writers’ rooms. i.e implementing more Black writers into these rooms. If there were more Black writers at the BBC, would we be having this conversation? Reading film at A-Level, I struggle to think about these sorts of things emotionally, as I find it easier to view these pictures in the time they were made — comedy films with blackface (Everybody Sing); westerns that discriminate against indigenous peoples (like The Searchers) — also films that stereotype based on race, like most James Bond films; epics like Gone with the Wind, Giant and Lawrence of Arabia.
It strikes me that we live in a world that when something upsets people the first thought is still to get ride of it. Cancel, not critique; hysterical not historical — in doing this communities are missing out on valuable discussions on the histories these films and television shows unknowingly possess. In the removal of Little Britain from BBC iPlayer and Netflix, the UK missed a chance for a well overdue conversation on blackface, something that has been part of the British culture for centuries. Something that student unions have been criticised for. There is as much a culture that is as critical of racism in this country, as there is one that is accepting of it. I didn’t grow up with gollywogs like some, but I did grow up reading Enid Blyton which is the next best thing.
The films we watch are footnotes to time and our history still informs our present. Our society is not post-racial because whiteness needs racism to maintain its dominance, ever so evident in the film and television industry, as “whiteness is actually rooted in the political economy; it is in the fabric of the institutions and social life” (Andrews, 2019: 194). Whiteness dominated those films because whites dominated; whiteness still dominates because whites dominates. The only difference being, now there are more white people actively trying to be anti-racists. There have been wins in diversity, one being in new Who where the makers take chances, in the sense “there might be aliens messing with the timeline, but adding Black companions to these stories is not an act of “political correctness” or “pandering” (Prescott, 2020).
These writers are filling in the gaps via a science fiction-period costume drama setting. They are showing the Black history we aren’t taught at school. Rather than seeing Olusoga talk about it, we are seeing it via Doctor Who. Moreover, Prescott (2020) continues “‘Thin Ice’ and ‘The Haunting of Villa Diodati’ are firmly grounded on real events and figures from 1814 and 1816. Abnormal weather events leave room for a giant alien fish and a Cyberman to mess with the timeline of human history.” Doctor Who, albeit often described as quirky and silly, is leading the way in diversity in storytelling and is in juxtaposition to many of the films and shows of the 1970s and earlier. When you challenge whiteness and patriarchy, equality often looks like invasion.
It is telling that “cancellers” float on both sides of the pond, in that there are those out there that want to cancel films and TV shows for being racist and those that want to cancel films and shows, for their more inclusive take on history, no longer stories just for white men. Seemingly, not historically accurate. To be able to see yourself positively reflected in stories on screen is often only a privilege afforded to straight, white men. Whilst marginalised groups are making strides forward on this front, it is still a gain hard won. Marvel’s Black Panther being one milestone. That whilst there are more women’s stories, more trans stories, more stories about gay lives; rarely are they are free from stereotypes and rarely do they feature “intersectionality” (Crenshaw, 1989: 40). In essence, while there may be more of these stories in the English-speaking world specifically, it is heavily whitewashed / man-washed. In the stories we tell, we must approach them as intersectionally as much possible. Race is not a straight line, and storytelling wonkier still. Where are the stories of Black women being their natural themselves? What about Black gay men who aren’t at the mercy of poverty in the Projects, and toxic masculinity? (As much as I love Moonlight).
Macpherson (1999) states “Well, we would say the occupational culture within the police service, given the fact that the majority of police officers are white, tends to be the white experience, the white beliefs, the white values.” Yes, he is talking about policing but this “in-crowd culture” appears in all workplaces, including corporations and filmsets. Whiteness predominates the industry so a white identity will have out and “class and gender operate to reinforce whiteness for those in positions of power” (Bhopal, 2019: 48). The fact the BBC has schemes to recruit for Black and minority groups into its ranks speaks for an organisation where diversity is a problem, and we know diversity is an issue on more levels than just race — including class and gender.
Whilst my entry into film was not filmmaking but as a naive boy then teenager who had an enjoyment for watching the art, I have since began to engage in the politics, including the need for diversity in front of the camera, as well as behind the camera, including senior leadership roles with greenlight power. Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017: 55) illustrates this, quoting David Oyelowo in the Radio Times: “I remember taking a historical drama with a black figure at its centre to a British executive with greenlight power, and what they said was that if it’s not Jane Austen or Dickens, the audience doesn’t understand.” What Oyelowo talks about here is gatekeeping at its best; this happens across society — from the arts to education, corporate, finance, charities and more.
As I enjoy older films as far as I can in knowing many of them were not made for my enjoyment in mind, there is the other edge of the sword that states that Black and brown characters in lots of films and television are stilll only good as stereotypes. That despite people that look just like me populating the industry, the roles on offer to these actors are stereotypical, made worse when Black British actors are forced to leave the UK for roles in America, now having to compete with their American counterparts. In his essay (2017: 162), actor-rapper Riz Ahmed writes “the reality of Britain is a vibrant multiculturalism but the myth we export is an all-white world of Lords and Ladies.” Black and brown actors being denied roles in period dramsas because “historical accuracy” also runs parallel to the blinkered school curriculum we were all taught, and on the cycle goes— from education into every industry.
I started this piece talking about racism in older films and what got me into film. We know the industry is a lawless wasteland, even more so if you’re not born into the safety net of white, (often middle-class) privilege. Representation is a constant struggle because it is a spectrum of overlapping layers. As many of the characters we see on screen only inhabit one to three intersections, often Eurocentric plus others, I await the day when we see a more inclusive narrative of austerity Britain and the working-class in the same light as Claudine. We know you are more likely to be in poverty in Britain if you are not white, so why is austerity a whitewashed narrative? What about people of colour that happened to be on the autism spectrum? The murder of Elijah McClain has made me think about that narrative and Black and brown neurodiverse children and stop and search. Autism is portrayed as something only white boys / men get but we know autism is so diverse. Crenshaw (1989) argues that her focus on the links between race and gender showed a necessity to look at more identities and how they interact when analysing how society is made. Stories are the same, in addition to the people that are recruited to commission and write stories.
Whilst intersectionality was coined from a legal perspective, it can be applied to all industries, including film and television, and how certain groups in our society are more likely to have unequal outcomes. A contributing factor to the reason why Amma Asante seems to be the only Black British female director with a high profile (mad). Representation is infinite and the current approach to not just anti-racism but equality in general is narrower than what is comfortable — nice enough so that institutions don’t have to do any work.
The film and TV industries benefit from inequality; it has done historically and it continues to do so in our present moment. The white execs are shaking because the boat is starting to rock. I suppose it’s time to let the dinosaurs die and evolution take its course, fighting the drip drip of this staying power.
Referencing
Ahmed, R. (2016) Airports and Auditions. In: Shukla, N (ed.) The Good Immigrant. London: Unbound, pp. 159–168.
Andrews, K. (2019) Back to Black: Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. London: ZED.
Bailey, M. (2010). They aren’t talking about me… — the crunk feminist collection. Available from here.
Bhopal, K. (2018) White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society. Bristol: Policy Press.
Crenshaw, K (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. 1989(1). pp 139-167.
Eddo-Lodge, R. (2018) Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. London: Bloomsbury.
Home Office. (1999). The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. (Chair: William Macpherson). London: TSO.
Olusoga, D. (2017) Black and British: A Forgotten History. London: Pan.
Prescott, A (2020). The Real Black British History Behind #DoctorWhoBlackOut. Available from here.
