By All Means Stage Your Passion Project…
But let’s not go pretend you’re on a crusade to make the world a better place. Warning — may contain rant.
They arrive, as predictable as a Japanese commuter train, every few weeks I get something popping up. It’s usually an invitation to support something ‘bold’ and ‘innovative’. A production company seeking to ‘rebalance’ the modern world and carry light into the darkness of injustice.
A ‘Go Fund Me’ request about some important message that needs to be heard. ‘This’, I am assured, ‘matters’. You know what, in many cases it does — which is why I’m writing about the woefully misguided way this is being handled by people I know.
The last thing systemic racism needs is woke and I’m going to tell you exactly why and I’m not going to pull any punches.
The genesis of this article
This article has been put together because an acquaintance of mine has decided to stage something about undiscovered black voices in the North of England. He’s done this because he’s woke; he thinks it’s interesting and he thinks it’s ‘good’.
And on the surface it is. What a wholesome chap.
Because he’s a good upstanding sort of chap, he’s put together a Go Fund Me. Now closed. A sort of middle-class begging bowl for UK artists. His friends and family have come out in heavy support. This, they think, is good — he can be the torchbearer heading boldly into the darkness of oppression.
He needs £15,000 to stage a mixed multi-media theatrical event; unsurprisingly he’s hit the target.
In his hot little hands, he has £15,000 most of which has come via the backdoor of his Dad’s company. I read down the list of donors out of curiosity. I know many of them because they’re mutual friends and they’re almost all exclusively white woke and middle class.
So now his project is going to go live. Except nobody asked him to do this and this is what he’s decided the world needs pretty much on his own based on his reading at a decent but very left-leaning University.
Will it do any harm? No… not really. But what is this really about?
I have some insight. Because a few years ago he asked me to write a play for a group he had set up. The group, he assured me, was gearing up to tackle political apathy in young people. He would be in the play, but we’d work together to make some political outcomes and after the play he’d seek funding do some workshops.
I agreed in the cause and duly wrote a full-length play for him and a few of his buddies from drama school. I enjoyed myself, he duly produced and starred in my play and we had fun. I wasn’t overly bothered with the subject matter, I think some sections of the youth are somewhat politically apathetic, but it’s not the hill I’m prepared to die on.
His passion, however, was evident. Once the play was over, he lost all interest in the project. The play was a means to an end. His end. He wanted to be in a play — everything else was tacked on as a reason for this to happen. It’s a model I see a lot in the creative arts.
I have similar reservations about this project. And I have similar reservations about a lot of the issue-based creativity that’s springing up right now. A lot of the gas isn’t coming from disenfranchised minority groups — they are being sought as an addendum to allow an already established middle class engineer some sort of catharsis.
I find the whole thing morally repugnant — it’s not the only reason I don’t like identity politics… but it sure as fuck doesn’t help.
You have to change the system, dummy!
The problem with woke ideology and the middle-class work that’s springing from it is two-fold. Firstly, if you go out looking for the sort of work you want to stage, you are the selector. I can see this in almost every advert for playwrights and actors at the moment.
One casting I saw required a fluent in Korean trans-male actor… no experience necessary. The priority was evidently the identity of the actor, not the quality of the work. Even if you managed to find one of the maybe eight or nine people in the UK who meet your criteria, should you be responsible for firing them into a production they aren’t equipped or qualified for?
You aren’t empowering a voice, you’re elevating a puppet. If you agree to stage absolutely anything by a trans-writer, you aren’t empowering the best stories about trans people (read Rotterdam by John Brittain) you’re giving carte blanche to anyone with the sufficient genital configuration to be the ill-prepared voice of a group to which they belong.
When you create a system in which selection happens on the grounds of anything but talent, you’re creating a system that puts people into boxes — or profiling as we used to call it.
An Indian director I had a lunch meeting with last week is bored of it. She wants to write ‘stories’, but everything she drops off into the BFI is pushed back with a request to see if it can have a bit more of a ‘cultural edge’. The sorts of stories she’s writing aren’t Indian enough… not the sort of Indian meeting the approval of middle-class white people. Not the sort of Indian that sells.
And that’s what woke is really about — it’s about middle-class white people patting each other on the back and creating art, or allowing other ethnicities to create a certain type of art. Something inspiring. Something that’ll reach people.
Contrition is highly marketable at the moment — but only once it has been vetted and passed through the eyes of gatekeepers.
Gate-keepers like my friend. I’m sure he’ll do a great job on the project he’s set up and his parents have funded. I’m sure it’ll look great on his CV and help his inexorable rise through the ranks of British theatre. I’m sure it’ll be politely applauded by the same white people who have donated their £20 to the Go Fund Me.
I’m sure they’ll all clap themselves on the back for a job well done.
He could’ve taken that £15,000 and donated it directly to an inner-city school for books or even just given it to BLM if they could identify a worthwhile cause. If he was really serious about tackling racism — he would’ve raised that £15,000 and put an aspiring working-class actor or film-maker of colour through drama or film school.
Then perhaps by the time their fundraising finished, society would’ve moved on so they could direct or film whatever stories they want.
I’ve made the argument many times before
The answer to tackling racism comes with economics. There aren’t enough black people in the arts is an observation. The solution isn’t for white people to pay themselves as a cheerleading squad. The solution is to make drama schools and film schools free and fair. It’s for the middle class wokerati to stop talking about how they want equality and cede their fully funded places at drama school or hand their expensive camera equipment over.
And not hand them over with supervision in the role of benevolent producer. You want to make space in the industry, then shut the fuck up and get out of the way.
I once flatly refused to give my friend ‘go fund me’ cash because I knew her parents had multiple houses and she was planning to spend the summer before drama school with her boyfriend away in South America. She’s the same girl who got a hardship scholarship to help her get through all three years.
Great job everyone. Round of applause.
Middle-class people who are purporting to solve the problem are buying their way into the industry. A theatre company I know that’s super keen on diversity and inclusion is comprised entirely of white folks from University who gave each other the job.
Want to tackle racism for real? Let someone else interview for the job you were given — if they can do it better than you… you have to leave. That’d be great. A version of ‘inclusion’ has popped up that means ‘here’s some space for you to be in, and look how great I am for offering you it’
And I call bullshit on that. I want to live, work and operate in a system that promotes talent. It doesn’t promote identities out of some reflexive need to demonstrate ‘goodness’, it doesn’t allow people to buy in at the top table. I want to go head to head with people of all skin colours, faiths, creeds and sexualities — and I want the best work to win.
My work is good enough to speak for itself — I do not want to be told what I can and can’t write any more than my Indian friend does. Talent doesn’t care about what skin colour or genital configurations you have —you have it, you should be front and centre. If you don’t — you shouldn’t get elevated by your parents.
This sort of nod-and-a-wink activism has to give way to something better. Something more socialist and less tokenistic. Something which empowers without an agenda. You want to tackle racism properly, you rebalance the wealth. Or you end up with white-run, white-applauded, self-congratulatory bullshit, and people of colour performing tricks for your gratification.
Just like the ‘good old’ days but now with added smug self congratulatory crap on top.