‘Why is Bridgerton’s race twisting acceptable?’ The real problem with the show’s Black fantasy
Fantasy collided with reality last month, when the Black British actor Adjoa Andoh, who plays Bridgerton’s Lady Danbury, was invited by ITV to commentate on King Charles’s coronation. Andoh described the lineup of waving royals on the Buckingham Palace balcony as “terribly white”. With the family’s solitary person of colour – the Duchess of Sussex – conspicuous by her absence, Andoh was technically correct. Even so, the comment prompted the highest number of complaints to Ofcom of any broadcast this year.
Perhaps Andoh had lost sight of the yawning gap between fiction and fact. Shows such as Netflix’s Bridgerton have been applauded for introducing actors of colour into the “terribly white” space of costume drama, but some people remain resistant to anything that upsets their ideas of the past (even if those ideas were largely gleaned from costume dramas).
We’ll come back to Bridgerton. In the meantime, another new show has had people up in arms: Queen Cleopatra, a Netflix docuseries co-produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith. Its sin was to cast a Black actor as the Egyptian ruler: Britain’s Adele James, who is mixed race. Cleopatra has been portrayed many times by white actors, including Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor and Monica Bellucci, but this supposed “blackwashing” was too much for some – and not just the usual suspects. Egypt’s antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass, complained: “This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black.” One Egyptian lawyer even sought legal action to block Netflix in the country for its promotion of “Afrocentric thinking”.
Cleopatra’s precise pigmentation is up for debate: she was descended from the Greek-Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty. But, the show’s makers argue, the dynasty may have intermarried with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years, at a time when no one was classified as “black” or “white” anyway. “Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister?” asked Tina Gharavi, the show’s director. “And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter.”
Queen Charlotte, the latest Bridgerton instalment, hangs on a similar scrap of historical speculation: the theory that German-born Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz had African ancestry. Thus, young Charlotte is portrayed by British actor India Amarteifio, who has Ghanaian and German ancestry. “I know there are a lot of people who believe it’s absolutely fact that she’s from Black Portuguese royalty,” said the show’s creator, Shonda Rhimes. “The idea that that would make her their first Black royal was very interesting to me.”
Queen Charlotte begins with the disclaimer that it is “fiction inspired by fact” and that “all liberties taken by the author are quite intentional”. There turn out to be quite a lot of liberties. This prequel chronicles Charlotte’s arranged marriage to George III in 1761, which blossoms into real love and ushers in a new era of racial unity in Britain – just like Harry and Meghan didn’t.
The Bridgerton extended universe has always taken a curious approach to race, but in Queen Charlotte it reaches bizarre levels. This parallel 18thcentury Britain contains many wealthy Black people, such as the young Lady Danbury and her older, buffoonish, darker-skinned husband (who some have condemned as a racial caricature). These rich Black Britons went to Eton and Oxford, we’re told, but are excluded from white aristocratic society.
Charlotte and George’s union prompts what is dubbed “the great experiment” – bestowing upper-class titles and acceptance upon these posh people of colour, and thereby bridging Britain’s racial divide. Racism is vanquished overnight, within the space of a formal dance to a string arrangement of an Alicia Keys track. “With one party,” George tells Charlotte, “we have created more change, stepped forward more than Britain has in the last century.”
It wasn’t quite like that in the real world. There were between 10,000 and 20,000 Black people in Britain in the 18th century, but vanishingly few were wealthy. They were primarily men, mostly sailors, soldiers from the American revolutionary war – who were promised emancipation in return for fighting for the British – or servants working in the households of white people.
Bridgerton doesn’t really do “poor”, but the real elephant in the ballroom is slavery. At the time Queen Charlotte takes place, the brutal mechanics of the slave trade were in full swing. The abolitionist movement was just getting started, but the slave trade was not legally abolished in the British empire until 1807, and slavery itself not until 1833. During George III’s reign, 1.5 million Africans were captured and shipped to plantations in North America and the Caribbean. In 1800, the slave trade made up more than 10% of Britain’s GDP. These are the ill-gotten riches on which Bridgerton’s (and Britain’s) world of palaces, parties and gigantic wigs was built, but in the show itself, this side of the story is ignored. There are a few tiny references to “the colonies”, but slavery, human rights and abolition are never mentioned.
“It’s an absurd take on Black history,” says Steven I Martin, Black British author and historian. “It is set at a time when Britain was the largest trader in human lives on the planet. Slavery was central to the British economy.” Martin accuses Bridgerton of “inviting, or fomenting, the forgetting or overlooking of the realities of that period”.
Martin finds Bridgerton’s race fantasy problematic for other reasons: “There are no other groups to which this absurdity would be applied,” he says. “I often offer the example of having a series set in the Germany of the 1930s – all ethnically harmonised simply because the Führer married, say, a woman of Jewish background. It would just be laughed out. Somehow this – having people of African origin, expecting us to be happy with this twisted image of ourselves – seems to be acceptable. I find it really, really uncomfortable.”
Yet the Bridgerton franchise has been hugely successful all over the world – third and fourth seasons are in the works. For BAME viewers, it is refreshing to see people of colour in aristocratic finery, rather than the rags of servants and enslaved people. For white viewers, it’s colonial history without the racial baggage – all the gilt, none of the guilt.
The “Bridgerton effect” has brought more characters of colour into the zone of historical drama. In addition to Queen Cleopatra, we’ve recently had ITV’s Sanditon, extrapolated from an unfinished Jane Austen novel, which includes a central Black character who has inherited the fortune of her white,