To favour identity politics over artistic vision insults us all
Inearly didn’t write this piece. I realise that as a white, middleclass, middle-aged man wading into the identity-politics debate, I may as well just find the nearest pack of wolves and throw myself in their path. But something needs to be said about the regressive idiocy that is threatening the creative spirit and the sheer enjoyment which the worlds of arts and entertainment bring to millions of people.
The “trigger” (to use a modish phrase) is the comment recently made by Miranda Wayland concerning the character of John Luther, played by Idris Elba, in the hit BBC crime series Luther. Wayland, the corporation’s “head of creative diversity”, said that while she, like many, initially fell in love with the character, by series two she was wondering: “OK, he doesn’t have any black friends, he doesn’t eat any Caribbean food – this doesn’t feel authentic.”
So Luther wasn’t black enough. That is horrendously patronising to Elba, who carried the show (and indeed was an executive producer), and was, as a man of African heritage starring in a leading role on prime-time BBC One, a true pioneer.
Wayland is surely not advocating a sort of reversion to the stereotypes that tainted television drama for years, in which ethnic-minority characters were often gangsters, or (in the case of Indian representation) intransigent patriarchs. With Luther, the show’s creator Neil Cross has said that Elba was initially attracted to that role precisely because race was not a factor.
But Cross has also said that “it would have been an act of tremendous arrogance for me to try to write a black character”. This comment (made prior to Wayland’s) is just as spectacularly unhelpful. It feeds into the new cult of only being allowed to write about your own specific background, siloing the creative mind into the makeshift prison of identity politics.
Cross, as a writer, should be allowed to write about whatever sort of character he wants: that is the right of the artist, who for hundreds of years has enjoyed creative freedom. In the prism of modern thinking, would Tolstoy have dared to explore the mind of Anna Karenina, or Shakespeare ventriloquise the words of “the Moor”?
But now we have reached a stage at which authors’ flights of fancy (which is their stock-in trade, after all) are under threat. Look at the hatred directed towards the white novelist Jeanine Cummins for daring to imagine herself as a Mexican immigrant worker in her bestseller American Dirt, or the knee-jerk criticism directed at the decision to allow the black poet Amanda Gorman’s work to be translated into Dutch by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, a white writer, even though the latter had been approved by Gorman herself. How fascistic, how depressing, how insulting to the very notion of art.
Similarly, we now have a situation in which even actors are expected only to play roles that reflect their own ethnicity or sexuality. You can’t “play gay” unless you actually are – a ridiculous view which goes against the very notion of the profession, which is to transform yourself into somebody entirely different.
These new constraints threaten another worrying outcome. Comments such as those made by Wayland are damaging when the creative industries are working so hard to achieve racial equality – and the possibilities of a multi-ethnic Pride and Prejudice or a black James Bond feel finally within reach.
Theatre has been slightly ahead of the game for several years, and on Radio 3’s Private Passions, the wonderful Adjoa Andoh (of Bridgerton fame) spoke powerfully of the classical roles which had not been available to her as a black actress launching her career in the 1980s, and the recent enlightenment of diverse casting. It’s a relief – isn’t it? – that a non-white performer now has the chance to play Hamlet or Hedda Gabler or Estragon, and that they don’t have to bring their own backgrounds into these roles. They can just build their performances on the words of great playwrights and their own abilities.
But if we take Wayland’s comment to its logical conclusion, we must assume that black actors will have to ensure that their performances are informed by their own ethnicity. This is not a step towards equality but a step towards a sort of cultural apartheid.
Similarly, it’s a patronising limitation to demand the corollary of where Cross’s comment leads – that black writers write only about their own experiences. This is a cultural cul-de-sac.
Wouldn’t it be more progressive if black playwrights could write plays featuring mainly white characters, and vice versa?
As the great (if fictional) Atticus Finch said in Harper Lee’s clear-eyed novel To Kill a Mockingbird: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Without this effort, empathy, perhaps the noblest aim of art, is impossible.
I was brought up to believe that skin colour doesn’t matter – that we are all the same. This, I realise, may seem ridiculously optimistic, but it should still be the ideal. What the arts need is equality, diversity and a shared power base, and from there true talent can be nurtured. Then we can get on with the business of creating entertainment and being entertained – which is something that, in this whole sorry argument sparked by Wayland, has unfortunately been forgotten.
By these modern standards, would Tolstoy have dared to write ‘Anna Karenina’?