Medieval Madness
THE Guardian features Lucy Mangan's review of Anne Boleyn, a new television series that apparently thinks it's being rather clever for portraying the Tudors as a Black dynasty. After a diatribe about the feminist connotations of the series - the newspaper never misses a trick, after all - we reach the fifth and final paragraph and it is only then that the journalist cares to mention the racial angle:
"Turner-Smith’s casting caused a stir because she is of Jamaican descent. If you are someone who is bothered by that, well then you are probably the kind of person who is always going to be bothered by that and we need not detain you here."
I'm not bothered in the slightest, actually, simply because I don't watch such patronising rubbish in the first place and neither should any self-respecting Black person. As Mangan continues:
"For what it’s worth, I am aware that Anne Boleyn wasn’t black, but I’m also aware that she wasn’t Claire Foy, Merle Oberon, Helena Bonham Carter or any of the other women who have played her over the years, and my brain is not unduly upset by any of it. What having a person of colour in the role does do, perhaps, is give us a way in to understanding the marginalisation of the Boleyns (Paapa Essiedu, a British actor of Ghanian heritage, plays her ill-fated brother George) at the time. The class, sex and religious prejudices held against them by various factions, and that we have largely lost to time, can be mapped on to the racial prejudice that endures. History repeats itself, but this is television that finds a new way to warn us of that truth."
Truth presented as untruth, I suppose, meaning that it is not actually truth at all. The most dangerous thing about this nauseating exercise in so-called 'positive discrimination,' however, is that it conveniently obscures the more important fact that the Tudors went on to construct an empire that nonetheless enslaved and brutalised large numbers of Black people. So let's not pretend that a fictitious account of a Black queen somehow redresses the balance, Ms. Mangan, because it clearly does nothing of the sort.
As always, this is just another example of the sneering leftism that pretends to appease Black people in order to embarrass daddy in front of his friends at the local golf club and yet never threatens the power of the purse in any meaningful way. Pathetic.
All good points! But what is also perhaps pertinent is that the West African Kingdoms - Tyrannies - from which some Black actors are descended were the most brutal in the whole African continent, and almost all of the gentle immediate return hunting and gathering African societies were either obliterated or driven by militarised kingdoms and chiefdoms to the most extreme ecosystems - equatorial rainforests, and arid deserts. The same applies also to pacifist horticulturalists such as the Venda who fled to the mountains to escape the Zulus lethal march south. They said better to live as cowards than die heroes i think. If you wanted to use all black actors, then you could use an analogy - set it in one of the Benin Kingdoms, a great comparison with the the English Tudors, who were at least as if not more brutal than these African tyrannies. When done right, the use of other ethnicities to stand in for whites can be extraordinarily powerful. Two of the most powerful dramas I ever saw were the Black Julius Caesar, and the West Indian Playboy of the Western World. But all the actors have to be black, or whatever. Also, this works best in fiction, not docu-drama. We are living in Huxleys Brave New World with a big dash of Stalinist fear-mongering and mass brain-washing, all sicklied over with scientism's nihilistic metaphysics.