What Are We Like?
How the right won at equality.
Growing up in the suburbs, on the nettles and roadworks side of the M25, I had a fair few friends who also happened to be racists. Often it was an inherited rhetoric as incoherent as the remnants of their religion. Once, my friends James and John took all the boys from their street to the local church hall to sign up for the National Front. All the boys, including their mate Kevin, who was black. I sometimes find myself imagining that cycle ride, a boy army riding in proud phalanx, united by a string of entirely contradictory beliefs. When they arrived at the church the recruiter was furious. My memory of James’ memory was that he tried to make the case that Kevin was “one of ours”, but to no avail. I don’t raise this to suggest a hierarchy of racists, to exculpate my friends’ bigotry as too stupid to be the real thing, there is no too stupid in bigotry. But it does tell something about racism, even the quiet racism of having “friends” who might try and join the National Front.
Oddly this story came to my mind during last autumn’s fever dream when Liz Truss was Prime Minister. At her first PMQs, shortly before she killed the Queen and the economy, our third female prime minister triumphantly received a soft question from the second. Mrs May asked something like why was it that for all their liberal cant, the opposition had only ever filled the top job with white men? True to form, Truss had no useful answer beyond smiling and looking insane. It’s true though. For all the chaos, corruption, law breaking and sexual abuse that followed the Conservative victory of 2019, it remains the case that the progressive left owed its defeat in part to a racism scandal, whilst the hard right went on to install first a female leader, then our first non-white leader, both backed by the most racially diverse cabinet in British history.
Opposing this, it’s easy for the activism of the well educated and wealthy and white to look like a desire to see the change you cannot be. A heartfelt plea for everyone else to embrace diversity and equality. Rather than hypocrisy though, is it just that Labour couldn’t risk a female leader because she would look dangerously like someone who might actually change something. Certainly, the mirror of this argument is what has worked on the right. If Labour strategists argue things must stay the same in order to change, then clearly on the right things had to change in order to stay the same. Note how for the past 13 years only one white man, Grant Schapps has held the job of Home Secretary, and only for 6 days so even he might not remember. I’m sure there are plentiful reasons of personal skill, ability and interest which lead the Conservative administrations of this period to hand the most contentious job in government to non-white non-male politicians but, beneath those lies the truth that the most powerful message is the messenger. Perhaps a policy isn’t cruel if a woman proposes it. Perhaps it is not racist if a person of colour enacts it.
It is, of course, racist to be especially horrified by the racist policies and posturing of our current Home Secretary, or her predecessors. Criticise their actions, their ineffectual grandstanding, but spare them the additional disgust. Expecting Patel or Braverman to feel more kindly toward migrants is the same sort of racism as stopping Kevin joining the National Front. Same as how the nature of the outrage at May’s coldness after Grenfell contained a sexist sense of shock that a woman could lack so much empathy. Sickening inhuman behaviour from white men is history’s main meal. Johnson was offensive but no one was ever surprised. It is a mistake to imagine that the brutality of white men is in either our skin or our testicles. The bleak truth of equality is that there are no limits to the depths any soul can plummet. Everyone is capable of wielding power against the weak.
This is the answer to Theresa May’s question. The fear of letting women in was only sexist in that it imagined women would necessarily want to change things. The fear of having MPs drawn from ethnically diverse backgrounds was only racist in that it imagined this background would naturally compel them towards empathy for the powerless. But all the varied isms that jag like rocks through our society are different expressions of the same thing. It’s all just power and sometimes you have to give power away to keep hold of it.
This all feels paradoxical but changing the face of power to protect the system of power is the basic principle of representative democracy. Capitalism is simpler. Whilst the market has reaped many benefits from all the isms and the cruelty they bring, none are actually intrinsic to it. This is quite frightening to everyone who had been quietly riding the train. Cancel culture isn’t a force of the progressive left, it’s a force of the market.
For years our cultural icons were white men who, with very few exceptions, told stories about being white men. There will never be another Martin Amis, not least because we will never again have need of one. The grumpy, horny, moany white man has not been the most interesting creative voice since the war, when his complaints were at least shot through with worries of being blown up. As the audience’s interest fades, the right to hog the mic gets revoked. Some consider themselves cancelled but for most it is the demand for authenticity that acts as carbolic soap, scouring the conversation. Authenticity, the preferencing of lived personal experience, lifts up voices that have previously been silent. It celebrates the diverse above the homogenous and demands no one dare put words in your mouth.
However, “write what you know” shouldn’t be a call to know one narrow thing deeply. It’s a commandment to know more, to live widely, to encompass multitudes. In contrast, to “be authentic” is to focus on what makes you unique, what makes you singular. This has great value until it eclipses all else. Insulated and insular the divine individual living their truth heedless to any other, this is the equality of atomisation. The market is only ever here to make money; justice, equality, that’s up to us.
Storytelling remains most valuable as the art of empathy, of being other people. Yes, one version of that is being yourself in such a way that others can live beneath your skin, but even that act becomes increasingly taboo for audiences when authenticity is privileged above all else. If no one else can write you then eventually no one else will be able to read you either.
This is not a plea for things to be as they were, rather an observation of how little has really changed. After all, which of your identities is your most authentic and why is it the one that is most commercially viable and why is that the least complex, the least diverse, the least like a black kid on a bmx riding towards disappointment alongside his white friends?
I explore similar themes in other pieces, for instance this about cancel culture, this about the migrant crisis, this about the politics of advertising and this about the dated misogyny of an art house classic.
There are a few places left on my next screenwriting course which starts on June 8th in Camden and on zoom from your house where you live. Click here for all details and booking.