It’s pantomime season again. Is Britain racist? Oh no it’s not. Oh yes it is! The script is ready – all we need is to find new stars, maybe update the rest of the cast here and there. The last performance, at the end of December, featured Stormzy, a crowd favourite whose misreported quote about racism in Britain sent the country into days of absurd debate. Is it “100% racist”? Or is it definitely racist, yes, 100%?
The headlines were already well rehearsed. “‘100% wrong!’ Sajid Javid hits out at Stormzy over claims the UK is a ‘racist country’”, said the Daily Express. Javid has become a key character in these national circuses, cooing out denials with a robotic chirpiness on Twitter. Before Stormzy’s starring role, there was the performance featuring Naga Munchetty – a special edition with the BBC as an endearingly bumbling villain. And did you see the one with Diane Abbott? It’s one of the most popular – and long-running – of the “but is it racism?” shows.
This week there is a very special guest in the pantomime – Meghan. Has her treatment in Britain been marked by racism? Oh no it hasn’t! Oh yes it has! The cast assume their positions. On one side of the stage, black and brown people are summoned to perform their parts in the pantomime – with frustration, disbelief, even tears. In the middle are the mediators, the TV and radio programme hosts – earnest, but clinically, unrelentingly goading. On the other side of the stage, the professional race-baiters, the red-tops, the “journalists”, the online trolls elevated to respectability once again, and Piers Morgan. There is always Piers Morgan.
Britain’s conversation about race endlessly repeats itself, first as tragedy, and for ever thereafter as farce. Instead of discussing race relations in this country through the issues of hate crime, systemic police prejudice and the dramatic disparity of opportunity between people of different ethnic backgrounds, we have decided to debate it by constantly arguing about whether it is relevant. Because things are so much better than they used to be, aren’t they?
In many ways, any improvement in race relations has come with a proportional decline in self-awareness, and with it a degradation of the public conversation on race. The increased visibility of black and brown people in those spaces where this conversation takes place – in politics and the media – has achieved little apart from sifting them into for and against camps. Whenever a public figure is subjected to racist behaviour, a sort of kangaroo court is set up, one with an impossibly high bar for proving a racist event has occurred – anything short of an explicit slur or a violent attack can easily be explained away. The outcome of the litigation is certain because the whole point of the exercise is the spectacle, rather than the inquiry. It’s a set-up.
The subjects of the spectacle are not chosen by accident. As a nation, we love a celebrity racism row, and the media is happy to play both sides: everyone loves to read about celebrities, and it’s easy work to tear down someone young, famous and wealthy for claiming to be a victim of racism. In fact, it is this cherrypicking of the most prominent figures that guarantees that the national conversation about race is diverted into one about privilege.
Is there a worse advertisement for victimhood than a literal princess? Are there worse advocates for the literal princess than the few black and brown people in the media – whose very presence in these exclusive debates (where they are generally not included unless race is the subject) is taken to demonstrate their own privilege? They will be accused of ungratefulness for living and thriving in a 100%-not-racist country that has provided them with the opportunity to appear on Newsnight approximately once a year to be sneered at.
The chosen protagonists – the princess, the pop star, the TV presenter, the politician – ensure that the conversation is never really about racism. Confining our attention to elite victims conveniently shrinks the subject to something neat and quick: it can be packaged into a short viral video, a highly quotable column that is basically an extended tweet, a studio shouting match that will light up social media.
There will be no time to discuss the laziness, complicity and complacency of a media class that has turned racism into a spectator sport. There will be no time to discuss the unique toxicity of tabloid culture, and why it thrives in the UK. There will be no time to discuss the large swathes of a deeply conservative country that are goaded and taunted by a cultural showreel from the metropolis that inflames and excludes them.
There will be no time to talk about the rightwards creep of our political culture under successive Tory governments that have consistently turned up the dial on nativism. There will be no time to position these elite victims as central characters in a culture war led by the right – one that has weaponised the word “woke” to discredit any efforts, or even gestures, towards social justice. There will be no time for anything but performance.
And in the performance, behind a mask of innocent inquiry, the same old interrogation – which pretends to ask about racism in Britain, but in fact only hopes to smoke you out in the open and then draw some blood. Look out. It’s behind you.
• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist. Her latest book is We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
