Of course, in Africa they have the reverse problem. The Nigerian Government got tired of the airwaves being dominated by American company ads full of white faces, that they passed a law requiring television ads to have only black faces. I wonder what would happen if we took a similar attitude.
Now, before we go further, I now have to make a point which shouldn't need to be made. Some ignorant people are bound to take umbrage at the use of a single, honourable word, "negro" instead of triple word term like "Sub-Saharan African". Promoted in the antebellum years of the US by abolitionists and freed slaves as a substitute for "nigger", it remained the standard polite term for the race for all and sundry. Martin Luther King called himself a negro. Back in 1974 the residential college where I was staying contained a large number of student teachers from all over the Commonwealth. I shall always remember a Ugandan commenting jocularly to one of his compatriots, "You're not supposed to say 'negro' any more, but 'black'."
At that point, my friend, Rachel, who was as black as the Ace of Spades, objected. "I am not a black!" she asserted. "I am a negro!" Whether she is now reconciled to the use of "African American" I don't know. I suppose you could say that Guyana, which is where she came from, is American.
Now, back to the subject. These advertisements are a sign of a peculiar new phenomenon: "blackwashing", the insertion of black people into places such as movies, literature, and history where they don't or didn't exist, usually by displacing white people. In Australia it is not easy to pull off, but in the rest of the world it is going full swing.
Certain people get upset by "whitewashing" i.e. using a white actor to play a character which was non-white in the original story. But they don't seem to have any problem with the reverse.
Thus, the 2022 movie, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris was a really delightful experience, but it made a few changes to Paul Gallico's 1958 novel. For a start, Mrs Harris' best friend was a black woman. In 1957 London this was theoretically possible, but unlikely, and not in accordance with the book. Even more egregious was the black Dior models. Not only did they not exist at the time, but they could not. Dresses must co-ordinate with the wearer's complexion. What looks stunning on a dark skinned model would be pedestrian against pale skin, and vice versa. (I noticed none of the prospective buyers where dark.)
The British 2022 remake of All Creatures Great and Small doesn't actually have black people in major roles, but you see them move across stage as if they were part of the background. In a pre-war Yorkshire village? I don't think so.
And whatever was the management of Disney thinking when they cast a black woman as the lead in their 2023 live action version of The Little Mermaid? Now, I am sure that Africa has its own legends of humanoid sea creatures. However, this is a Danish fairy story, based on Northern European legends, and over there mermaids are always depicted as white. Also, this was a remake of Disney's 1989 cartoon of the same name, and in that film, the mermaid was white. The change of colour must have been deliberate, yet they have the hide to accuse us of racism! This is gaslighting.
What about the 2018 BBC/Netflix series, Troy: Fall of a City, in which Achilles is black? He was a Greek, for heaven's sake! And according to Homer, he was blond.
Currently in the UK there is a stage production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in which all four Pevensey children are black. Remember, these were English children evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz. Right now the BBC is producing a remake of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, in which the lawyer is black and a couple of other characters chosen from other racial minorities, all of which were exceptionally rare in England at the time.
Simon Webb, a vlogger who has picked up a number of these absurdities, has pointed out that, although there are far more people from the Indian sub-continent in Britain than negroes, they seldom get a look-in. However, Jules Verne's 1872 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days concerns the adventures of Phineas Fogg, an Englishman, and his French servant, Passepartout as Fogg attempts to win a bet circling the world in the said eighty days. On the way, they save an Indian widow from being burnt on her husband's pyre and take her with them. In the end, Fogg marries her. Here's a good interracial marriage we can all admire. But in the latest television incarnation of the story, the Indian woman is dispensed with, to be replaced by a black British reporter, who could never have existed in 1872, who accompanies them all the way.
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| Anne Boleyn as Channel 5 saw her. |
It gets even worse when historical figures are involved. Take Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I. In 2021 the UK's Channel 5 decided to have her played by a woman who is not just olive skinned, or even slightly swarthy, but completely, unadulterated, full-blooded black. Do they think we are complete idiots to accept this? Once more, they tried to gaslight us by insisting that the resulting outrage was "racist".
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| Anne Boleyn as a contemporary artist saw her. |
Netflix has now come up with another blackwashing series, Bridgerton, set in upper class Regency England, commencing 1813. Here again Queen Charlotte is shown as black, or at least one quarter negro, but they also did a lot of "colour-blind casting", which is code for blackwashing, for arbitrarily portraying lords and ladies as black. Again they gaslight us as racists for criticizing the "historical inaccuracy", which they put in scare quotes as if it weren't real.
This time, however, a historian did attempt to justify it. True, she admits, there were no black lords and ladies, but there were a lot of others lower down the chain. There were "thousands" of slaves brought over by their masters from the West Indies, and "thousands" of black Loyalist soldiers from the failed American Revolutionary War, who then settled in England. This would have come as a surprise to A.B.C. Merriman-Labor, an educated black man from Sierra Leone who, in 1909, wrote an amusing book, Britons through Negro Spectacles (there's that word again!), in which he declared that there were only about 100 negroes in London. Not all of these would have been residents; many would have been visiting sailors etc. Photographs of crowds during late Victorian and Edwardian times reveal that England was racially homogenous at the time. Coloured immigration really only took off after World War II, and even then was more of a trickle than a flood until the 1980s.
Here we have a clue to the motives of the (mostly white) people responsible for blackwashing. In one of the episodes of "Dr Who" the Doctor went back to Victorian England and his (coloured) companion commented on the unexpected number of black people in London. The Doctor said they had been "whitewashed" out of history. No! They were being blackwashed into it. One of the writers, in a rare moment of candour, admitted that they were falsifying history, but they were showing history as it ought to have been.
In the U.S. there is a tendency among the politically correct to try to place various minorities in every venue available, no matter how inappropriate it might be. In the U.K. their motives are worse: knowing that many Britons resent the way their country has been transformed without their consent, they are trying to indoctrinate the younger generation with the lie that the U.K. has always been multi-racial. Now, if only I could divine the motives of the Australian ad-men.
No doubt certain elements will denounce me as "racist" for this article. People with such a mentality are immune to logic, but it would be helpful if they told us what their expanded definition of "racism" might be, and why it is a bad thing.
I have had African friends in the past. I have nothing against Africans in their place. And what is their place? Simply the places where they live, and use to live, in the correct proportions. Is that too much to ask? Stop colonising our advertisements, literature, and history.
Addendum. John Ray's blog, "The Psychologist" has a much larger readership than mine. On 2 February, he posted a copy of this essay. Google deleted it, on the basis that it was "hate speech". It would be interesting to know what criteria they use for this smear. Can anyone claim that the information in it is incorrect? Or is it "hate speech" to complain about it? Interestingly, they left it intact in another of his blogs.
Simon Webb has uncovered so many of these fake histories that I think I might provide a few links.
Ireland's Queen Mebd is blackwashed. (updated here)
A negro aboard Apollo 13 (and racial conflict)
The musical comedy, Six has four of Henry VIII's six wives as black.
Disney's live action remake of Peter Pan and Wendy has a dark skinned Tinkerbell, and many of the Lost Boys are girls, some of them black.
The same black woman plays Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, Cosette in Les Misérables, Laurey in Oklahoma!, and Polly in The Boy Friend. (You couldn't make this up.)
In the new BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, the love interest and the barrister are both black, and a character bad-mouths the British Empire. Oh, and they make a nonsense claim that there were 15,000 blacks in Britain at the time.
A Netflix "documentary" which makes Cleopatra black. (Cleopatra was Greek. And even if she were Egyptian, the ancient Egyptians, like their modern counterparts, were Caucasians.)
Hannibal, the Carthaginean leader is being played by an old black man.
In a new production of Richard III, the king (yes, the king!) is being played by a black woman. This is not a satire.
In a new rendition of Tom Jones (Fielding's 1745 novel), the hero's love interest is black.
In the Lord of the Rings Magic Set, Aragon is black.
Half of cast of Robin Hood: the Legend Rewritten is black. And, as Simon Webb pointed out, this fact is hardly ever mentioned by reviewers.
Disney's live action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in which Snow White is a brown skinned Latina, and the "dwarfs" are of normal size, and some of them are black. When this was announced the reaction was so strong (and justified) that it remains to be seen whether this will be changed the film comes out in 2025.
A television version of the legend of King Arthur, in which his wife, Guinevere, the magician, Merlin, and several minor characters are black.
A Dr Who episode in which Isaac Newton is an Indian.
A BBC series on Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" books, but set in the 1930s ie two decades before the books, with George, the tomboy being the product of a black-on-white marriage. (Even the Guardian thought this adaptation was idiotic.)
A new adaptation on an Agatha Christie novel in which the protagonist is changed to a black man.
A Hallmark version of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, in which the women and their love interests are black.
A real, notable white woman has been changed into an Indian for a movie.
Of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte and Anne are correctly portrayed by white actresses, but Emily by a biracial woman, leading to the suggestion that their mother had been unfaithful.
A new BBC production of Wolf Hall has Jane Seymour's mother and sister-in-law as black or biracial.
