Idris Elba, the star of the BBC’s popular series Luther, is black. How do I know? Well, he looks black. (Is one allowed to say that? Is one supposed to? Things can get frightfully confusing nowadays.)
So black, in fact, that one doesn’t even have to Google his background to see that. I did so anyway, just in case. Sure enough, appearances aren’t always deceptive. There it is: father, from Sierra Leone; mother, from Ghana.
Black credentials don’t get any blacker than that. Or do they? Damn right they do, says Miranda Wayland, a BBC diversity chief. (Note the indefinite article: the BBC has a whole staff of diversity chiefs.)
Though Miss Wayland didn’t use the slang expression, Elba’s character, DCI Luther, is a coconut: black on the outside, white on the inside. Thus he doesn’t pass muster within Miss Wayland’s remit.
But do let her speak for herself, in that refined style for which BBC executives are so justly famous these days: “We all fell in love with him. Who didn’t, right? But after you got into about the second series you got kind of like, OK, he doesn’t have any black friends, he doesn’t eat any Caribbean food, this doesn’t feel authentic.”
Neither does Luther freebase cocaine, push drugs, mug pensioners, do rap, run hookers (sorry, sex workers), wear gold chains and/or a full-length fur coat topped with a wide-brimmed hat, live in Brixton, speak in gangsta slang, shoot hoops, walk around in a rolling gait with a ghetto-blaster pressed into his ear, drive an old BMW with extra speakers fitted into the boot.
In other words, I’m kind of, like, OK, he doesn’t conform to the racist stereotypes Miss Wayland and her ilk are committed to promoting. And you know what’s the most amazing thing about it? She doesn’t even realise how condescendingly racist her remarks are.
As a black woman herself, she must be aware that not all blacks come from Jamaica or Trinidad. Some actually come directly from Africa, as Mr Elba’s parents did. Those atypical, inauthentic, unrepresentative souls are about as likely to eat Caribbean food as I am – perhaps even less so because I do love it and some of them don’t.
She may not know such trivia, but she does know that the series would be very different if it were created today. Luther finished its run in 2015, that antediluvian period before Miss Wayland’s appointment to her post, and that’s a lot of Caribbean water under the bridge.
The BBC, guided by Miss Wayland’s hand, has since learned that just casting a perfunctory black falls far short of authenticity requirements. “It’s about making sure that everything around them – their environment, their culture, the set – is absolutely reflective,” she explains.
Now, I’ve worked with quite a few blacks, and none of them would be accepted as genuinely reflective by BBC diversity chiefs. They walked the same walk and talked the same talk as everybody else. So much so that nobody thought of them as blacks, nor expected them to act out the racist caricature Miss Wayland has been hired to draw.
Granted, they were middle-class, but then so was DCI Luther. Detective Chief Inspector is a fairly high rank in the Met, equivalent to a US police captain. Luther would have had a university degree, possibly a post-graduate one, and his salary would have been about £60,000 a year – less than what BBC diversity chiefs make, but enough to be as middle-class as my former friends and colleagues.
On this evidence, I’d be happy to redistribute the income of every diversity chief in the country to all the cops. Our society would be safer, happier – and even less racist than it’s supposed to be.
The fact is that diversity chiefs don’t want to eradicate racism. Like all holders of meaningless sinecures, they are mostly concerned with self-perpetuation, which makes Britain’s putative racism their bread and butter.
That’s why they were up in arms when a recent landmark study by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities described Britain as a “post-racist” society. How dare they say any such thing?!?
Of course Britain is still a country of slave-keepers who treat blacks as simians. If that weren’t the case, Miss Wayland would have to get a real job, and we can’t have that, can we?
Brilliant piece, although Luther does have a funny walk, but it’s closer to John Wayne’s than that of, say, Snoop Dogg.
Speaking from experience, I consider Kitchen Porter the perfect job for our post racial, post classist society. Zero qualifications or experience required and the opportunity to learn new skills and meet people from other countries, Perhaps Miss Wayland would enjoy it?
People working in the media make a huge fuss about race, because they have a vested interest in maintaining black people as excitingly different. Soulful, authentic, spontaneous, deep, and possibly nursing a few psychological wounds caused by the racism that white people just can’t shake off. Oh, and they’re good at sports and dancing, and probably like sex a bit more than white people do. And they use slightly different language and a few patois expressions. They’re interesting, black people.
If they weren’t like that, then it would be so much harder to write convincing drama and adverts.
Basically, the American black is held as the model standard of authentic ‘blackness’ for other blacks in the world. Ironic, since Blamers (Black Americans), I think, are the whitest Blacks in the world; albeit their cultural influence on Whamers (White Americans) is quite one sided today.