The often overrated Hanna Arendt was bang on the money when she declared that, “Under normal circumstances, the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute.” But she wrote that in 1971. Today falsehood rules everywhere, and the substitute often has far more reality than reality itself. Indeed, “reality” can even mean that a modern state will reward people who apparently detest it, as the black director Steve McQueen clearly does Britain.
His name says a lot. It’s a generally accepted usage within show business, both out of respect and common sense, that no newcomer to the stage or screen who was born with a particular name would retain it if they were named Marlene Dietrich, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe or Laurence Olivier. The least they’d do is tweak it a little. But not our Steve McQueen, who has arrogated to himself the name of one of the great ikons of Hollywood. No doubt the fact that the original Steve McQueen was white probably made the nomenclatural larceny a little easier. Had the black Steve McQueen been born Sidney Poitier – roughly a contemporary of the original McQueen – would he have kept that name?
Hypothesis, to be sure: but what is not hypothesis is that the black McQueen is not merely allowed to make films about white people that no white director would be allowed to make about black people, but naturally is applauded by liberal critics for doing so. The film that brought him international attention was the critically-acclaimed and sexually explicit Shame, about a sex-addicted Irish-American in New York endlessly masturbating. So how would the liberal critics react to a film by a white director and graphically portraying a black person comparably addicted? With enthusiastic approval? Or hysterical shrieks of racist?
McQueen’s latest film Blitz plays another race-card. Set in London in 1940, it features a mixed-race boy whose black father is absent because he was attacked in a railway station by a racist mob of white men, who were then joined in their fun and frolics by a racist group of truncheon-wielding police officers, who, having beaten and arrested him, get him deported to the West Indies. This is not Brixton 1981. This is London, early 1930s. On the street, the boy is called a “black bastard” by other children, and “a monkey” by firemen, and casually racially abused for his appearance until he is finally befriended by a Nigerian Air Raids Precautions (ARP) officer.
There was one such officer: Ita Ikpenyon, who featured in Lucy Worsley’s television-history of wartime London. The real Ikpenyon recalled that Londoners treated him well, some even regarding him as a mascot: “(P)eople believe that because I am a man of colour, I am a lucky omen. I had heard of such child-like beliefs, but I am delighted that such beliefs exist”.
In Blitz, when the mixed-race child, who has been raised entirely by his white mother and grandfather, is comforted by the Nigerian, he proudly declares, “I am black.”
Clearly, at this point the audience is meant to erupt in the Hallelujah Chorus. But this is utterly absurd, a sinister and anachronistic imposition of a modern politico-racial term that had no meaning in 1940, and a measure of the profound untruth that McQueen weaves into his film. I cannot say that McQueen is actually lying, but I can say that he appears to know nothing about the subject of his film. The concept of “black” as an identity in 1940 would be the equivalent of having a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer in the ARP. Moreover, the racism that became tragically evident in later years was virtually unknown in England at that time. Indeed, American black soldiers and servicewomen arriving in Britain after 1942 were taken aback by the warm welcome given to them.
Evelyn Clarisse Martin-Johnson was a black postal clerk with the US Army in England. “Well we were well received by all of the English. Birmingham or wherever, whatever city we visited. And we were received beautifully. You have to remember segregation was still (in the USA) and many of the white military were from the South (and) carried that segregation right over there, but the English were not that way. They appreciated us, they treated us royally.”
‘The people here have a racial tolerance which gives them a social lever,’ reported American journal, Negro Digest. ‘They are inclined to accept a man for his personal worth. Thus the Negro has social equality here in more ways than theory. To put it in the language of the Negro soldier, “I’m treated so a man don’t know he’s colored until he looks in the mirror.”
The word “negro” is never mentioned once in McQueen’s screenplay, and nor is the word “nigger”, though both were commonplace at that time, but without the chic disapprobation that is now attached to both words: hence Joseph Conrad’s novel The Nigger of the Narcissus of 1897. Between 1930 and 1940, The Irish Times used “nigger” 850 times, or more than once a week, meaning that the word possessed none of the stigma that is now associated with it. Naturally, the reviews for Blitz did not mention its absurd anachronisms, and no doubt to criticise McQueen in any way would be considered racist.
So, quite simply, McQueen has been allowed to impose today’s standards on British history, with a clear end in mind: the castigation of Britain as intrinsically a racist society, a theme that has been consistent leitmotif in his work. Britain nonetheless gave him a Turner Prize, made him a Companion of the British Empire, yes of the Empire, no less, and later knighted him. It’s perhaps worth remembering that the racist hellhole that is Britain has in recent years been governed by a prime minister, a chancellor of the exchequer, a home secretary and a foreign minister plus a leader of the opposition, who are all of immigrant stock.
McQueen was born in 1969, when Britain was the world’s largest exporter of commercial vehicles and sports cars. Within a decade, both industries had collapsed, and by 1980, the names Triumph, Sunbeam, MG and Jaguar belonged to solely to vintage car-rallies. When he was three, and before the world’s media, the British Army conducted an open-air massacre of unarmed protesters in Londonderry, and then promoted the two officers mainly responsible to the highest possible rank. How utterly deranged was that? By the time that McQueen was eight, the British economy was on its knees, nation-wide power cuts were routine, and accusations of police bias and brutality against immigrants were rife.
In other words, Britain was a collapsing society, and the horrible injustices that were done by some police on some within the immigrant community were merely one symptom of this. The infamous incidents such as the Notting Hill Carnival riots of 1976 and the Mangrove Nine trial, which McQueen has used for his other artwork, did not exist in isolation. The Flying Squad of the Met. was a notorious and much-lampooned hotbed of corruption, and the police that he systematically castigates as racist were the same police that would later ignore the drugging and gang-rape of maybe 100,000 underage white girls by gangs of coloured immigrants, which is of course a racist term, though it is not racist to write, “immigrants of colour.”
The key element in all this is of course stupidity. What other word can be sued to describe these bizarre linguistic taboos or the behaviour of a state that festoons with honours an artist who clearly detests it? This was the same state that had raised the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy to end the transatlantic slave trade and abolish slavery from Africa. The suppression by the British of the western African slave trade in the 19th Century enraged the native chiefs of the then Gold Coast, because slavery was the basis of their entire economy. But no doubt this campaign could now be portrayed by white liberals as another example of British racist perfidy.
And it is these white liberals who are the real villains here, for they were the architects of a non-negotiable value system that allowed tens of thousands of white girls to have their young lives ruined by gangs of predatory immigrants. That might indeed be a subject for a film by McQueen, though with this possible twist: it’s the bobbies doing the raping, and the girls are the daughters of immigrants. And why not? Did Blitz not do something very similar to the London and Londoners of 1940? It’s called Art, darling, and it wins loads and loads of prizes.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Vulgarity, crime, rapes, coarsening of public life, liberal England is gone