The Madness of Crowds

by Douglas Murray

  Anything to avoid the great Scarlett Johansson android consciousness wars of 2017. Clearly if you are going to set a sci-fi drama in 2384 you should expect people in that year to hold the same values as Time magazine’s movie critic holds in 2018.26

  Entertainment of the Netflix variety is one of the most popular and accessible mediums that anyone has yet been presented with. It provides an opportunity for expression and the free exchange of ideas that previous generations could only have dreamed of. And yet even this tool has become a playground of the now omnipresent calls for this newly revived obsession with race. Despite the fact that these attitudes towards race seemed race-obsessed in a way that had not occurred for decades.

  Yesterday it wasn’t like this

  Part of the madness of all this is that the desirable destination had been so nearly reached. In recent decades it had already become completely normal and acceptable for people of any race to play leading roles in Western theatre or film. This row was meant to be over. It is almost two decades since the actor Adrian Lester (who happens to be black) was cast as Henry V by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Theatre audiences flocked to the production as they would to any good production and great performance. Since then, black actors have become so visible on stage, including in period pieces, that their inclusion is rarely even noted. It has been the same for decades in the world of music. Back in the 1970s the great American soprano Kathleen Battle was appearing in works by Strauss, Verdi and Haydn. None of the roles had been written for a black singer, but there was no serious question of her suitability for the role and no negative comment about the casting.

  Likewise with Jessye Norman, one of the great sopranos of recent decades. Richard Wagner did not specify that Isolde should be black. But when Jessye Norman sang the music from Tristan and Isolde under the baton of Herbert von Karajan with the Vienna Philharmonic, nobody thought of ignoring the music and denouncing the casting for being racially inappropriate. We had all got used to this.

  But that was yesterday. Today, it has become wholly acceptable to suggest that the racial characteristics of an actor or performer are the most important characteristic when they are cast. More important, indeed, than their ability at performing the role. Race wars now break out on a regular basis in entertainment as everywhere else.

  In 2018, only weeks after Altered Carbon had been put through the racial purity test, the BBC announced its schedules for that summer’s Promenade Concerts. It was announced that one highlight would be the Broadway star Sierra Boggess appearing in a concert performance of West Side Story. But as soon as the cast was announced there was denunciation on social media. Boggess had been cast to play the role of Maria (a fictional character who is Puerto Rican) while herself being reported to be Caucasian. The fact that the whole thing was fiction – and a fiction whose lyrics and music were written by two Jews – was not a matter for consideration. One Twitter user wrote: ‘You are a Caucasian woman and this character is Puerto Rican. It’s not like you’re hurting for job opportunities. Stop taking roles from actors of colour.’ Another posted: ‘I love Sierra Boggess but Maria is seriously one of the only leading roles for Latina women in musical theatre so can we please cast one of the many talented Latina women out there who would KILL to play this role.’

  By casting Boggess in the role of Maria the BBC Proms were alleged to be engaging in ‘whitewashing’. Unfortunately Boggess took these criticisms to heart and so announced on Facebook:

  After much reflection, I’ve realised that if I were to do this concert, it would once again deny Latinas the opportunity to sing this score, as well as deny the IMPORTANCE of seeing themselves represented onstage.

  She said this would be a ‘huge mistake’:

  Since the announcement of this concert, I have had many conversations about why this is a crucial time, now more than ever, to not perpetuate the miscasting of this show.

  I apologise for not coming to this realisation sooner and as an artist, I must ask myself how I can best serve the world, and in this case my choice is clearer than ever: to step aside and allow an opportunity to correct a wrong that has been done for years with this show in particular.

  I have therefore withdrawn myself from this concert and I look forward to continuing to be a voice for change in our community and our world!27

  The role was subsequently recast and the role eventually performed by Mikaela Bennett, who is from Ottawa, Canada, but was deemed to have a more appropriate ethnic profile.

  So with only a handful of tweets a casting decision that had been made could be unmade. A talented star had been bullied into submission. And in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘diversity’ the most regressive and undiverse thing imaginable clocked up another victory. In an era that is witnessing the politicization and polarization of absolutely everything, the realm of fiction and art – one of the great barrier breakers we have – is also becoming a battleground for racial exclusivity and racial exclusion.

  Perhaps those who are attempting to push such agendas will at some point wake up to the fact that they are heading towards an almighty logical crash. For the same logic that saw Boggess off West Side Story can just as easily be used to insist that all future Prince Hals or Isoldes must be white. Casting can either be colour-blind or colour-obsessed, but it probably cannot be both.

  The same boring fixation now affects every other area of life. There is now no occupation or pastime too serene to be taken over at any moment by a race controversy. And each time that it happens the controversy itself metastasizes, turning one incident or claim into the progenitor of a whole slew of follow-on incidents and claims which it ignites and then loses control of.

  Take the controversy surrounding the tennis champion Serena Williams in September 2018. During the US Open final she was issued with a code violation and then a penalty point after she broke her racket. Williams lost her temper spectacularly with the umpire, in a way that happens but is still frowned upon in the genteel-ish sport of tennis. But Williams really went for the umpire – calling him, among other things, a ‘thief’. Williams was fined $17,000, which given that the prize for winning the Open is just under four million dollars and the prize for the runner-up almost two million, is small change for Williams. But the issue could not stop there. Because Williams is a woman the Women’s Tennis Association decried the referee as ‘sexist’. Because she is black the matter headed straight into a full-on race dispute.

  Among others the BBC alleged that criticism of Williams for her on-court outburst played into a long racial stereotype of the ‘angry black woman’.28 Nobody explained how a black woman could be angry without playing into this stereotype. The Guardian decided to put an even more racial spin on things. According to its contributor Carys Afoko, the criticism of Serena Williams had a larger lesson – in that it had been a demonstration of ‘how hard it is to be a black woman at work’. In her opinion, wrote Afoko, ‘Black women aren’t allowed a bad day at the office. Or to be precise, if we have a bad day we can’t usually risk expressing anger or sadness about it. So many of us develop a work persona that allows us to get ahead in white workplaces.’ This may point just to the specific challenges of being a contributor at The Guardian. In any case, Afoko continued with an example of what she meant, and what she herself had had to put up with. ‘A couple of years ago I disagreed with a male colleague’s idea and he pulled me aside to tell me I was being aggressive. When I attempted to explain that the word aggressive is racially loaded he burst into tears.’ Who knows why her colleague burst into tears? Perhaps it was yet another demonstration of racism on his part. Perhaps it was fear that an accusation of racism was about to end his career. Or perhaps he was reduced to a weeping wreck because he was beginning to feel that there was absolutely nothing he could say that his colleague would not end up interpreting as an act of racism.

  Afoko at any rate drew a different lesson from her reduction of her male colleague to tears. ‘It reinforced a lesson I learned throughout my 20s: mos
t of the time it’s not worth trying to explain racism or sexism at work. Just get your head down and get the job done as best you can.’ Then, in order to assist any Guardian readers who were not yet up to speed, she added the helpful pointer, ‘If you are not a black woman and are confused right now here is a two-minute video about intersectionality.’29 This helpful video was in fact entitled ‘Kids explain intersectionality’ and true to the description it showed under-10s explaining how straightforward intersectionality is. With some minimal intervention from adults it explained in easy, slightly sing-song language, how intersectionality was simply ‘a concept that allows us to realise that people live, like, multidimensional lives’. Despite having intersectionality explained to him by a child of First Nations origin, a white boy of five or six years old is shown still expressing some confusion about what intersectionality actually is. Eventually he is shown ‘getting it’ and explaining to the nice black woman who started off the short film that ‘people aren’t just the one picture. The whole picture basically has to need your entire personality going together to make you.’ For getting it right in this fashion and overcoming his initial confusion he is congratulated, ‘Thank you – that’s really cool’, he is told. And then he is offered a high-five by way of reward.30

  Cultural Appropriation

  One obvious way to try to stop this digging down and down on race and racial characteristics would be to keep trying to blur the edges, for example by making those aspects of race which are able to be communicated and shared into an experience open to all. Aspects of a person’s or a people’s culture which others admire may for instance be shared so that a greater understanding can be found across any divides that do occur. That might be an ambition. But sadly a theory got there before that ambition could be fully realized. This one too started on campus and then spilt out into the real world. This concept was called ‘cultural appropriation’.

  It originated in post-colonial studies with the idea that colonial powers had not just imposed their own culture on other countries but had also taken back aspects of those foreign cultures to their own countries. A benign reading of this could view it as imitation, and the sincerest form of flattery. But whatever else they are known for, professors of post-colonial studies have never been known for reading things in a benign way. Instead, the least benign reading possible came into play, which was that this cultural theft was the last insult of colonialism, and that having raped a country’s natural resources and subjected its people to foreign rule the colonial powers could not even leave the subject peoples with their own culture unmolested or unseized.

  Perhaps it is inevitable that having originated on campuses, the greatest opposition to ‘cultural appropriation’ has burst out in university cities. The early wave of accusations of cultural appropriation came in reaction to inappropriate fancy-dress costumes such as the ones the Yale students had become so terrified of at Halloween 2015. The explicit fear was that there would be incidents involving people who are not themselves Native Americans being found to be wearing, for instance, a Native American headdress. This – to adopt the vernacular now used to oppose such practices – is not OK.

  For some time now, Portland, Oregon, has begun to distinguish itself as the test laboratory of almost every maddening idea. In recent years the city has become especially bothered about expressions of cultural appropriation. This has included turning what one local writer described as a ‘foodie paradise’ into something closer to a foodie warzone.31 In 2016 a local woman opened a bistro called Saffron Colonial. Furious mobs gathered outside the restaurant, accusing her of racism and of glorifying colonialism. Review websites like Yelp were filled with people writing negative comments about the establishment until the owner eventually gave in and changed her restaurant’s name. She had been accused of setting up an establishment dedicated to bringing back empire through the back-door method of opening a restaurant in Portland. But even more egregious cases could be found. The worst, to local eyes, was that of people who had no right to be cooking the food they were cooking because their DNA was wrong.

  In 2017 there was the case of a couple who opened a food truck selling burritos. According to the new local rules, this couple were guilty of cultural appropriation – specifically of ‘stealing’ Mexican culture by selling burritos while not being Mexican. The owners of the food truck ended up receiving death threats and had to close all social media accounts and eventually their business. To say that victories like this embolden people is to understate matters. In the aftermath of the burrito van victory a list was compiled and circulated by local Oregon activists titled ‘Alternatives to white-owned appropriative restaurants in Portland’. Suggestions of restaurants owned by ‘people of colour’ were given instead.32

  Like events at the universities, events in Portland might be expected to stay in Portland. But again, as with the universities, the feeling begins to grow in this interconnected age that we are all at risk of living in Portland now. In the summer of 2018, while most people were on their holidays, an outbreak of the cultural appropriation food wars broke out in Britain when a black MP called Dawn Butler denounced one of Britain’s most famous television chefs. Jamie Oliver had recently released a new dish called ‘punchy jerk rice’. There was swift criticism that the recipe Oliver had released was missing a number of ingredients which were traditionally used in the marinade for jerk chicken. And from criticism of missing aspects of a recipe the ruckus immediately moved on to race. Butler tweeted her disgust at the chef. She wondered whether Oliver actually knew ‘what Jamaican jerk actually is? It’s not just a word you put before stuff to sell products.’ She went on, ‘Your jerk Rice is not ok. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.’33 Fortunately Jamie Oliver’s chain of Italian restaurants – Jamie’s Italian – which had branches in dozens of British cities, appeared to have gone under Dawn Butler’s radar.

  But one of the things about stampedes like this is that while high on moral fury the allegations can quite as easily be levelled at people who are wholly unknown as at people who are famous. In any ordinary time the end-of-year prom at a school in Utah would not cause as much consternation as a spat between an MP and a celebrity chef. But in 2018 an 18-year-old girl called Keziah shared photos online of the dress she was wearing to her prom. The red dress was in a distinctive Chinese style and the wearer was clearly hoping to get some ‘likes’ for looking nice. Rather than getting the praise she was looking for, Keziah instead got an immediate worldwide backlash. ‘Was the theme of the prom casual racism?’ asked one Twitter user. Other users poured in to accuse the non-Chinese girl of cultural appropriation for wearing a Chinese-inspired dress.34

  In a sensible world all of this should be a tremendous gift for artists, not least satirists. But even casting a critical eye over the phenomenon seems to create another rain of accusations and another escalation in claims and sensitivity. In September 2016 the novelist Lionel Shriver gave an address at the Brisbane Writers Festival about ‘fiction and identity politics’. Shriver (the author, among other novels, of We Need To Talk About Kevin) used the opportunity to address the issue of ‘cultural appropriation’. In the weeks before the lecture the term had come up repeatedly in a variety of contexts. It had arisen over whether or not non-Mexicans should have the right to wear sombrero hats and elsewhere over whether people who were not from Thailand should be allowed to cook or eat Thai food.

  Since using imagination and getting into the heads of other people might be said to be a novelist’s job, Shriver felt that these movements were getting uncomfortably close to her territory. Her Brisbane address was a full-throated defence of her art, and the legitimacy of writers writing about whatever they wanted to write about. Shriver explained that thinking of a character for one of her novels, an aspect of a character such as being Armenian may be a start of a character. But ‘merely being Armenian is not to have a character as I understand the word’. She went on: ‘Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Be
ing deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.’

  The response was predictable. Over at the New Republic Lovia Gyarkye said that ‘Lionel Shriver shouldn’t write about minorities. The lack of nuance in her 8 September speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival proves that she mostly doesn’t get it.’ And Gyarkye had a question for Shriver. ‘My question for Shriver is: If these labels are not identities, if being gay or disabled is not a part of who you are, then why are hundreds of people abused, shamed, and killed everyday because of them? . . . What Shriver seems to miss about cultural appropriation is its inextricable link to power.’35 Thus catastrophism and Foucault coalesced in a single assertion.

  However, Gyarkye’s aggravation was superseded by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who had actually been in the audience at Brisbane. Her first-hand account was picked up and republished in The Guardian. According to Abdel-Magied:

  We were 20 minutes into the speech when I turned to my mother, sitting next to me in the front row. ‘Mama, I can’t sit here,’ I said, the corners of my mouth dragging downwards. ‘I cannot legitimise this . . .’

  There followed a fascinating, drawn-out account of what it feels like to stand up and leave a room.

  It turned out that Shriver’s speech went along different lines from Abdel-Magied’s own thinking. So much so that it was barely a speech. Rather, it was ‘a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension’. Abdel-Magied tried to explain the perils of people writing in the voice of someone who they are not. By way of example she expressed her own limits:

  I can’t speak for the LGBTQI community, those who are neuro-different or people with disabilities, but that’s also the point. I don’t speak for them, and should allow for their voices and experiences to be heard and legitimised.