The primary criticism raised against the recent for-TV adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses was that the show boils down to race-baiting, and that its broadcast will merely stoke an already intensely polarised debate on race in Britain. These ideas come in the wake of Meghan Markle’s relentless racial abuse from the British media as well as Stormzy and Dave the Rapper’s charged commentaries on race at the BRIT Awards. These factors are intensified by the racially significant climate of anti-immigration and pro-Empire sentiment in post-Brexit Britain (a recent YouGov poll stated 30% of Britons believed that former colonies were better off under the British flag).
The debate on what demarcates British identity has been complicated by Brexit. Anti-immigration and Euroscepticism dominate one part of the debate, demands for improvement to institutions of inequality and increased socio-political inclusivity – in light of a growingly populist Europe – consuming the other. The show, following from Blackman’s book, re-imagines Britain as a colonial nation dominated by ‘Aprica’, an analog for the British Empire with black leaders and politicians at its helm. In this society, white people – ‘Noughts’ – are stratified by the black ‘Crosses’. The show, adapted for screen by the talented Levi David Addai (Youngers) and Matthew Graham (Life on Mars), models itself on a alternative historical style, incentivising new debate about race in Britain through the re-invocation of ideas of Empire, which instead disenfranchise the inherited power belonging exclusively to white Britons.
One of the series’ lead actresses Kiké Brimah (who plays recurring character Minerva Hadley) describes the desired effect, for her, of Noughts and Crosses, hoping that it makes “people..feel uncomfortable with what they are seeing. For you to see another person’s point of view, you have to go through it.” The backlash against the show in a way proves Brimah right; the concept of the show, for whatever reason, has incited a level of discomfort in Britain. This backlash, unfortunately, feels more inevitable than surprising. My personal experience of contemporary Britain’s relationship with the Empire has been one of ignorance, immanent racism and discredit of its structural and centuries-lasting brutality. The concept of Aprica’s domination of Albion – which helps inaugurate Aprican authority through use of the ancient word referring to Britain – will offer some white Britons a disorienting perspective. The show gives an opportunity to more holistically understand the position of the colonised other and of how Britons, in turn, may retain responsibility to this day for complicity and promulgation of the rhetoric and power stemming from Britain’s Empire.
The complaints of its opposers can be summed up as expressions that the show is anti-white or, as mentioned, that it is race-baiting propaganda and will only stoke racial tensions in Britain. It is obvious that this show, for even the notion of depicting a dominant black class in Britain, or for attempting something conceptual to help evince issues of racism in contemporary Britain, was going to receive backlash. Our era, dominated by discourse which occurs predominantly over screens rather than in person, is so frequently delineated by the division of those promoting social justice – the ‘snowflakes’ – and those who are opposed to such. Christopher Stevens of the Daily Mail – one of two critics from the same paper who criticised the show – was dumbfounded at how the “brutal racism of the drama somehow reflects real-world racism pervading Britain”. Not only does this demonstrate a keen problem with British attitudes to racial divisions – such as the comparison of Britain to milieus in which racism is apparently more prevalent, like the US, to the end of vindicating Britain’s comparative ‘tolerance’ – but also reflects an issue within the politically right side of the debate. In determining that such ‘real-world racism’ does not exist in Britain, it not only attempts to exonerate very well-documented crimes of the British past which remain pertinent to today’s discourse on race, but chooses to ignore the insidiously structural nature in which racism exists, and continues to thrive, in Britain.
By claiming that a show such as Noughts and Crosses will incite racial tension is counter-intuitive and representative of white British complicity in racist institutions. The show, by offering a non-white perspective on Empire, has proven that there are still those who take pride in former colonisation; those who are offended by the Aprican alternative, for the majority, are consequentially resisting anti-Empire sentiment. This offering of a non-white perspective on Empire – in which white Britons are no longer at the epicentre of power – means that, although briefly, the racial debate in Britain no longer becomes dominated by those who benefit from an inherited colonial power. This, in my opinion, is what is most frightening to Britons. Claims that this show is ‘anti-white’ and an example of race-baiting ‘propaganda’ entirely miss the point of the series, which actually exposes that the notion of ‘anti-white’ is almost impossible to achieve within the institutions of power of post-imperial nations like Britain. Backlash against racially oppressive systems does not make one ‘anti-white’ it – as cameo star Stormzy says in his single ‘Crown’ – simply makes you “pro black”.
