While it’s excellent with many great insights, especially about how production companies don’t take on the added responsibility of their decisions to hire black actors in lead roles like this one, at least by offering some therapeutic support, I still feel conflicted about some ideas and statements like this one highlighted. Have black British people “always” played a significant role in British history or UK life? I’m not so sure how to take that. This is country that was number two (after Portugal) then number one in the slave trade until 1807. They then planned and executed with their Western European allies the biggest planned military invasion perhaps ever, carving up and drawing the political borders over Africa at the Berlin conference in 1884 and 85. They then executed that military invasion, occupying the countries that they made, and stripping a lot Africa of natural resources by using African labor—once free, now captured.
They didn’t do all this with kindness, but by using at the time the greatest military invention, the Maxim Gun, bought from the Americans at the Gatling Gun in 1869 then perfected after they hired Mr. Maxim, another American inventor. The British were absolute experts at crafting the narrative, literally pointing the camera away from the bodies littering the battlefield. The pictures show poised images of British men crisply dressed standing around proudly, near the Maxim Gun or around the objects that they stole, like all the officers standing in front the pyramids in Egypt. They had just won the battle and captured the country, putting it into their collection, or empire, acquiring it through force of war and weaponry from the Ottomans. Yet they are standing there looking like tourists, not conquerors, invaders, and occupies subjecting Egypt to their rule for decades. Which is exactly what happened.
They always expect a free pass because they’ve engineered the media that way. It is amazing how they’ve escaped culpability and responsibility. They are perhaps one of the greatest military occupiers, destroying the sovereignty of “the locals” in Africa, mixing up their countries, using the “natives” like enslaved humans to take the coal, crops, diamonds, etc. from the country they are militarily controlling and occupying after a war they declared and an invasion they declared and did. They even managed expertly to silence King Leopold II in the first decade of the 20th century because the extreme depravity in the Congo which he invaded, where he cut off the hands and arms of children to get the fathers and mothers to work taking rubber and minerals left about 15 million dead, according to a non-white estimate I’ve seen, but not the white estimates that always minimize the number ever downward when and if it arises. That’s a genocide twice Hitler, disappeared from History and the popular mindset. The mass lynchings and arm ‘amputations’ of children was called “a scandal” by the British in their report on the Congo, and they pressured the King to give up administrative “control” and turn it over to the Belgium government through their report on the “scandal” and situation.
Ignoring the history and accountability has meant a great surprise when white supremacist racism arises in riots—mostly because it disrupts tourism. It will be tamped down and “handled” again until the next outbreak, as they obsessively return to “normal.” In short, I’m hard pressed to believe that black Brits were “always” part of “normal” civil life in the mainland UK. The white racism that bursts out there, like the recents riots and these black and minority acting “scandals” of performative inclusive normalcy that rewrite historical depravity in favor of the white monarchy don’t address the underlying centuries of extreme atrocity against the other races. Stuffing the genie back in the bottle only makes the genie more angry.
It’s weird though, because black American writers like yourself are now routinely surfacing this history, not allowing to just “go away” like in Britain so we can pretend to return to “normal,” a time that didn’t exist for black Americans. I’m glad to see more voices emerge and engage. The great white accounting is far from over, but it certainly shouldn’t be disappeared. Thank you for your incredible persistence and serving as that thoughtful light shining into these issues.
