Diversity Gone Wrong

The main problem I'm always going to have when I touch on a delicate subject is my age. Being 62 apparently now makes me a Boomer, despite the fact the goalposts have moved. When I was growing up it was always people born between 1945 and 1960, but it seems it's now 1945 to 1965 and I'm sure at some point in the next few years that will move to 1970. It seems Baby Boomers are people who moan about things Gen Z and Millennials don't have a specific opinion about. I'm saying this because Boomers tend to be picked out for their 'out of touch' opinions, so the following opinion might be out of touch...

Something that bothers me greatly is the depiction of race in the UK. With immigration hatred and racism flourishing here, thanks to the likes of Nigel Farage and right wing Tory rhetoric, even talking about the minorities make up of the UK is to walk on dodgy ground. You can't have a view about ethnicity or sexual orientation now, unless it's positive. You will get people crawling out of the woodwork to call people racists, homophobes and any other derogatory name; but equally you'll get a proportionate amount of people doing to the same to call people woke, lefties or virtue signallers. You can't win with opinions and therefore moderate people are almost actively encouraged to remain silent about anything that might end up having a label pinned on them.

I'm one of the most left wing people I've ever met. My contempt for right wing politics, fascism and people with extreme views is well documented and therefore when I have something that bothers me - something controversial - I tend to remain silent, or talk about it with someone I know isn't going to be judgemental. Last year, I admitted to being something of a TERF - trans-exclusionary radical feminist - when I admitted this to at least two 'right-on' friends you'd have thought I was saying kiddie fiddling is okay in its place. The thing is I support the TERF movement because I believe that the entire trans debate has ignored the concerns of biological women and as someone who is also well documented as being a huge supporter of the feminist movement, ignoring the feelings and beliefs of biological women is tantamount to allowing Victorian principals back into sexual politics. When the SNP passed its controversial gender rights bill in 2023, what I heard from almost every single woman I know is it seemed to ignore what they felt and what their concerns were. The trans community is ridiculously small in the grand scheme of diversity, while women make up about 50% of the population and if my female friends were angry and concerned about their voices not being heard then I'm on the side of my female friends. It has nothing to do with my feelings about trans people - I know several, I'm friends with a few and I have respect for all human beings, except right wing wankers and advocates of exclusionism. 

I have a mate, he's married to a 'brown' woman and he like me has a problem with the disproportionate amount of certain ethnic minorities in television and film (and he's a Gen Z-er). He also feels the same as me; certain subjects can't be discussed openly for fear of alienating people we know or care about. It seems we can have all kinds of hatred for our own demographic, but if we venture into an area we are not a 'member' of, then we have no right to comment and our opinions are classed as extreme. So when both of us have noticed that there seems to be a disproportionate amount of Afro-Caribbean people in TV, advertising and film, it's something we can't discuss in an open forum. The problem is it's not like I have a problem with the number of black people in the entertainment industry, it's the fact we seem to have far more of them than say Asians, Chinese, Turkish, Middle Eastern, South Americans, Native Indigenous peoples. If you look at the non-white British demographic you will see that there are more Indian and Pakistani Asians in this country than Afro-Caribbeans; by quite a wide margin. 

Now, while that gap has been addressed in recent years, we're getting ethnic minorities in films and TV shows where they simply don't exist or in more prominent roles than they would have been. It's like the entertainment industry doesn't want to depict history like it was for fear of being called racist. So when a film like Wicked Little Letters is released and 30% of the major roles have been recast with black or Asian characters in 1920s England, it might not 'spoil' the entertainment, but in a historical drama it does devalue it because someone doesn't want to offend. But surely having a woman of Indian origin in the police force in 1920 - is incongruous; the first serving Asian police woman didn't happen until 1971- over 50 years later. Would this film have been ruined if it had been historically accurate? This film also had the female protagonist having a relationship with an Afro-Caribbean man when the actual woman was married to a white Irish man.

Take a number of historical dramas in recent years, having black or Asian characters in them, but not having Chinese characters, who were actually far more prevalent, especially in cities in the UK before the First World War. You were far more likely to see someone of Chinese origin in London in Victorian times than you were an Afro-Caribbean or Indian Asian, yet we never ever see correct historical depictions. There would never have been black people mingling with the upper classes of UK society and when Pocahontas and eleven of her Native American tribe came to the UK in 1616, they were treated with "scorn and fury" even though the aim was to convert them to Christianity and for them to become part of the United Kingdom. Britain might be a mongrel race, but the entitled, titled and upper classes would not entertain them in 'polite society' and if they were it was on display like some circus freak. Now this is indeed distasteful and probably shouldn't be something you see in, say, Doctor Who, but by placing black and Asian people in societal environments at a time when they would never have been there isn't diversity, it's [ahem] whitewashing a past that probably needs to be emphasised a lot more in these increasingly xenophobic times - if only as a warning.

The same applies to homosexuality; this is something that has never been the norm in society before the 1970s. There are examples of the establishment shutting down homosexual acts, passing laws and alienating those believed to be practicing it. It is probably something that has attracted far more bigotry than race, if such a thing were possible. Yes, it has always existed but it was also something that literally spent centuries in the closet. In the 21st century about 8% of the UK population sees itself as falling into the LGBT+ community, but there is a disproportionate amount of radio, TV and film coverage for this particular demographic. Let's put some perspective on this, however facile one might think the comparison is: the number of vegetarians and vegans in the UK, at the 2021 census, was approx 12%; that's a third more people are practicing vegetarians than the total LGBT+ community, but there is literally tokenism coverage of people who don't eat meat; almost every food show on all channels focuses on the 88% of people who have meat in their diets. I suppose vegetarians and their beliefs are not classed as contentious enough to be at least a tenth of the food show coverage?

So, there you have it. I'm obviously a racist and a homophobe because I want a fairer distribution of coverage and a closer - truer - historical depiction. We are seeing more disabled people in TV and films, but nowhere near the actual % of people who suffer from a disability; isn't that discriminatory towards the disabled? There are certain parts of the UK where Turkish, Greek, Eastern Europeans, or any other ethnic group that is comparable to Afro-Caribbean's, yet for fear of seeming to be over-egging the pudding; you don't see these people in television adverts, but almost every television advert will have someone of Afro-Caribbean origin in them and they represent about 4% of the total population of the UK. It's almost as if the entertainment and PR sectors are deliberately stoking racist fires by not giving a fair distribution of ethnicity in their products.