Never let the truth get in the way ...

The next instalment of 'A Little Something To Hide' is out tomorrow and I can't wait for you to meet Granny Mac.

Much like the trance that Gracie MacDonald found herself in on the coach to Albuquerque, I think I may have written her story in something of a fugue state. I don’t recall much of what led to her being. My original note read:

Granny MacTavish – going to Albuquerque to see her grandchildren. She lost her husband Albert, and has been trying to fill the void ever since.

I’m reasonably certain that had I pursued those thoughts, Granny MacTavish (and thank God I scrubbed that name) would lead a life of stunning mediocrity; a soul searching for a cause, unable to find one, and meandering through the pages of her chapter with a character arc that flatlined – the clacking of her knitting needles being the highlight of an otherwise mundane story.

Beneath that note, and added much later, was another. Briefer, but arguably more intriguing:

Outlandish storyteller or afraid of the truth?

I’m still not sure which she is, but I realise now that the seed above found fertile territory and developed into a story that lingers until the end of the novel.

In developing her as a fantasist, I was reminded of a companion from my primary school years. His real name shall remain a mystery, but for the purposes of this account, let’s call him Boris – it seems a suitable moniker to attach to someone skilled in the art of mendacity.

According to Boris, life was full of adventures, almost all of which were facilitated by a mix of uncles and cousins whose wealth and exuberance appeared limitless. As we recounted our weekends to each other in the playground, speaking perhaps of a visit to the friends of our parents, or a trip to Percy’s Reserve for a bit of blackberry picking, Boris would amuse us with the extraordinary tales from his weekend.

He might tell us of water-skiing on the harbour behind his Uncle Carl’s speedboat, the hunting of wild pigs in the Ōrongorongo Valley with his cousin Bruce, the discovery of gold nuggets in Marlborough’s Wakamarina River on an overnight trip to South Island with his Uncle Mike.

There was always a story with Boris, always remarkable, and always, as we chose to believe, entirely invented.

Three things should be noted though about Boris and his tales. One, we never challenged the veracity of his claims. We simply allowed him to tell us a story that was more interesting than any of ours from the previous weekend.

Two, he had a seemingly infinite number of relatives, all of them male, and all of them wrestling to keep Boris entertained. I suspect his mother spent a significant proportion of her time managing both his diary and the disappointment of those of his relations who failed to incorporate Boris into their weekend plans.

Three, there was always just enough plausibility in everything he said that his experiences might have been true. If that was the case, Boris’s childhood is unparalleled. No child in history has led a more exciting or varied life than our former school chum.

I don’t know what’s happened to Boris. I hope that he’s putting his adventures on paper to create a barely believable memoir, or more likely, producing entertaining fiction born from a highly developed imagination. Either way, if I should ever meet him again, I may not believe what he tells me about his life.

Granny Mac emerged from Boris; a teller of tales whose invention was designed to mask a humdrum existence, taking embellishment to ever greater levels until the foundations of her stories were usurped by the myth that followed.

It may be why I remember so little about writing her chapter. As writers of fiction, we authors inhabit a world of make-believe, where any truths that we might harbour in our writing are veiled in a narrative that we seek to divorce from ourselves. Granny Mac’s knitting machine and the baby clothes and jerseys that she produced from it could just as easily represent my mother’s efforts. The whirr of a carriage zipping along a needle bed is etched in my memory, an observation I plucked from my home life. Unlike Granny Mac’s boys though, we didn’t need to conceal my mother’s knitting; she was a recognised figure at local markets, happy to sell her output. What we weren’t allowed to reveal though, was that some of the items on sale stemmed from the efforts of my father, whose war-time experience as a boy meant learning to knit socks, just like Gracie’s mother. His creations, which extended to other items of knitwear, were attributed to my mother. My sisters had a rule to observe in their teenage years, if they were inviting friends to visit in the evening, they had to forewarn my father so that he had time to conceal whatever fashions he was creating.

And so, Granny Mac’s choice of endeavour and her concealment of the practice is an amalgam of my parents, a microcosm from within the Brown household that found its way into a Boris-like character’s story. But that’s where it ends, the invention and the nefarious practices are Granny Mac’s alone – I mean, did you ever see me driving a Dodge Camaro?

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Craig Brown is an author living in Newbury.  Discover his serialised novel, 'A Little Something To Hide' at craigbrownauthor.com

BlueSky/Threads/Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2024
16 September 2024

Trying not to be creepy

Volume five in the 'A Little Something To Hide' series is out today.  After reviewing the final draft before publishing, Mrs B said it was her least favourite part.  When I asked why, she suggested that 'Tim & Briony' is a little like 'My Dad Wrote A Porno' but without the pots and pans.

I'm not sure how to feel about that.  Rocky Flintstone, the pseudonymous author of the Belinda Blinks series on which the podcast is based, may not be lauded by the literati, but his son, Jamie Morton, decided to share his prose with his best mates, James Cooper and Alice Levine, in their brilliantly funny podcast.  James, it seems, has overcome his initial horror at his father's pornographic musings.  I'm not sure Mrs B will be able to say the same.

That said, what I've written isn't overtly graphic, and I also suggest that it's unlikely to be included in the pantheon of the pornographic, but that doesn't prevent Mrs B from wondering what the heck is going on in my head.  I'll allow you to judge, although in my defence, like much of what I've written in 'A Little Something To Hide', what landed on the page was not always what I intended. 

In my original notes for Tim, his story began with him happily married to Alicia, both huge Breaking Bad fans, planning a trip to Albuquerque to visit the locations where they filmed the show.  I recorded other details too, none of which make a great deal of sense to me now, although I think perhaps I intended to provide him with a backstory that involved a hit and run while under the influence.

According to my notes, which have no mention of Briony, Tim and his wife concealed the death of a vagrant on a strip mall after Alicia tried to stop Tim driving three-hundred yards from a bar to their roadside motel.  The plot didn’t work for me, neither did the name Alicia, when I found it too close phonetically to the name of Rosa’s favoured daughter, so Briony came to visit.

When I changed the character’s name from Alicia, her personality changed.  Prior to becoming Briony, I had Alicia measured as a dowdy woman; a little short, carrying too much weight, fastidious around the house, everything tidied away before the dust had a chance to settle, not that dust featured in a house belonging to Alicia Bovary, her practices were far too virtuous to allow the intrusion.  Cleaning was her forte, so covering the tracks of her husband’s felony drew upon her talents.

It soon became apparent to me that Briony was the antithesis of Alicia and with her character’s transformation, Tim’s needed to follow, and I began envisaging the awkward young man that found his way onto the page.

Tim’s fantasies, played out in the confines of his imagination and his room, became a surprising reality when he met Briony.  I suspect there are fantasists out there, entertaining similar visions, who wonder what it was that piqued Briony’s interest in that unremarkable man.  I don’t want to disappoint them, but I’m not entirely certain that what happens to Tim occurs in the real world.

Having created an improbable situation for Tim, however, I discovered a freedom to create scenarios where the visions of the fantasist occur on the page as real events, developing faster than our protagonist is able to invent, leading Tim to think that perhaps he is more of a man than we, or even he, perceives.  I had fun building up his ego, only for him to realise that he had little to do with the circumstances within which he found himself, failing to appreciate that he was little more than a willing participant in someone else’s story.

As for Alicia Bovary, I have no idea what happened to her.  I believe she's loitering in a draw at Chez Brown, knocking to come out occasionally when I wander into the room, reminding me that perhaps there might be just another story to be told.  Either that, or she's telling me to stop being a creep.

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Craig Brown is an author living in Newbury.  Discover his serialised novel, 'A Little Something To Hide' at craigbrownauthor.com

BlueSky/Threads/Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2024
20 August 2024

Achieving greatness

I'd like to say that I planned it, but I'm not that well organised.  It's a happy coincidence that, 'Michael', the next volume in 'A Little Something To Hide' should come out during the Olympics.  It's great to share a story of athletic excellence at the same time that the world's sporting elite stun us with their exploits in Paris. I'm also happy to say that Michael's story is an uplifting tale after the  suffering of 'Rosa', although that wasn't entirely down to planning either.  When I first conceived the phenomenal talent that is Michael Williams, I had somewhat different thoughts in mind. I’m not entirely sure what possessed me, but when we lived in the US, I often listened to what I referred to as ‘Right Wing Radio’ on my drive home from work. For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of the station, and twenty years on, the names of the shock-jocks who hosted the show have also vanished from my memory. That’s a good thing, they were poisonous and their contribution to political and social discourse is something that I’m pleased to have left behind. There is little that I remember from those journeys, listening to the prejudices of the radio hosts and their callers, but one call has forever stayed with me. The topic for debate was affirmative action in American colleges, with the show’s host filling his privileged white boots with an argument that entry into the nation’s elite educational establishments should be based on merit (ignoring the reality that for many, their meritocracy comes in the form of fiscal supremacy rather than academic talent). A caller, whose argument that affirmative action was a necessary device to support the equalisation of opportunities for people of colour, was induced into agreeing that the introduction of an identical policy into the NBA, to give more white boys the opportunity to play elite level basketball, was a ridiculous notion, that the NBA is, and should always be, a place where the very best of talent rises to the top irrespective of ethnicity. In compelling her to agree to his notion, he succeeded in undermining her case. In that moment, I thought he made a valid point, my own white privilege asserting itself in favour of his, rather than the woman’s arguments. What I failed to appreciate at the time were the challenges that ethnic minorities, and Black Americans in particular, have to overcome along the way to success. In his outstanding book, ‘Why We Kneel How We Rise’, Michael Holding, former West Indian cricketer and a broadcasting legend, illustrates clearly why the white shock-jock’s argument was both facile and deeply offensive, coming as it was from a place of deeply rooted prejudice and an ignorance of the systemic racism that Black people routinely face. With the benefit of time and a growing appreciation for the world in which we live, I have gained a greater insight into why the radio host’s arguments lacked balance and reason, but were instead hostile and lacking in empathy. He attempted to undermine a mechanism that is intended, however imperfectly, to level a playing field that is, and always has been, skewed in favour of whites, ignoring the hurdles that Blacks and people of colour must overcome to achieve parity with others. His argument for a meritocracy in education failed to recognise that whites have an institutional head start, that the aim of affirmative action is to get Black students to the same place on the starting line as their white counterparts, not wittingly promote people of lesser ability. Having once been good, but not great in my chosen sport of football, I also gave some thought to the excellence required from any athlete that makes it at the highest level of sport. An athlete’s physical attributes, the obvious one in the case of NBA players being height, is not enough to guarantee entry into the upper echelons of the game. One must combine their natural physical advantages with talent, technique, skill and fitness. Above all, dedication and hard work is required to combine these attributes to achieve elite level excellence. In my original notes about Michael, I planned on him coming from a dirt-poor background and a deeply dysfunctional environment. I intended an unpleasantness to his character that would see him sacrifice his brother to achieve his goals – I don’t like to consider where my head was for that thinking to emerge, but I’m pleased to say that as I wrote Michael, a wholesomeness appeared in the Williams family that makes for a much better read. Michael’s chapter is about demonstrating the attitude and commitment required to achieve at the highest level, and in part challenges the inference from the contemptible radio host that merely being tall and black is enough to succeed. So much more is required and, as demonstrated in the Williams family, so much more can be achieved in an environment where a focus on discipline and effort can deliver outstanding results, both on and off the basketball court. The NBA is filled with young Black men who have been given the opportunity to succeed because of their recognisable talents, their commitment to hard work, and let’s be frank, the financial benefit they will deliver to the NBA’s franchise owners. Imagine how much more the Black diaspora could achieve if the same emphasis was given to rewarding its talented academics or artists, its inventors and entrepreneurs, or to promoting those whose talents lie dormant for want of an opportunity to be discovered. Surely the world would be a better place for it. One final reflection before I close … Momma, who you'll meet in part four, is my favourite character in ‘A Little Something To Hide’. I can see her more clearly than anyone else I wrote, and I mightily enjoyed discovering her and all that she represents. There’s a part of me that would just love to sit alongside her on the veranda in King City, a glass of her world-famous iced tea in hand, and listen to her view on the world. I still have so much more to learn about the inequities in this world and how to address them, but I think that sitting next to Michael’s mother on a sun-drenched deck, listening to her musings, would be a great place to start. If you'd like to join us there, pick up the latest volume in the 'A Little Something To Hide' series. Craig Brown is an author living in Newbury. Discover his serialised novel, 'A Little Something To Hide' at craigbrownauthor.com BlueSky/Threads/Twitter: @GOMinTraining Copyright © Craig Brown, 2024 6 August 2024

Giving Rosa a voice

 

Today's a mixed day.  Part three of 'A Little Something To Hide' is out, but I don't feel particularly celebratory about its release. Rosa’s a tough read, one that should arguably come with a trigger warning. I have solicited opinion on the subject; some suggested I should include one, others have said it would be wrong to do so. There are valid points to both arguments, and I respect them equally. In the end, I opted to highlight Women’s Aid in my promotional activities, a national charity in the UK working to end domestic abuse against women and children. It’s an imperfect compromise, but I hope it serves a purpose. I am humble before anyone that disagrees. When I wrote the first draft of Rosa in November 2020, Harvey Weinstein had not long been convicted of rape. Soon after the first allegations against him emerged in October 2017, #MeToo entered my conscious as the clarion call to empower women that have experienced sexual abuse, sexual harassment or rape. I was, shockingly, eleven years behind the times. Tarana Burke, a sexual assault survivor and activist, first coined the phrase and started the movement on MySpace in 2006. It wasn’t until 15 October 2017, when Alyssa Milano wrote in a tweet, ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet’, that the #MeToo movement developed significant prominence. That meant that for more than a decade, Tarana Burke’s voice wasn’t carrying to the masses. I quietly celebrated the Harvey Weinstein verdict and that the #MeToo movement hadn’t just found its voice, but was being heard – there’s a world of difference between the two. Until then, and for too long, the voice was muffled. With the outing of Harvey Weinstein and other high-profile predators, the #MeToo movement gained traction. Yet while these cases rightly received prominent coverage, they are the exception, and the coverage stems more from the celebrity of the offender or the victims, rather than because of the crime. Sexual assault and violence against women is a monumental issue. According to the Office for National Statistics, in the year ending September 2023, the Police in England and Wales recorded 191,186 sexual offences including 67,938 rape offences. Over the same period, Police flagged 862,765 recorded offences as domestic abuse-related. The voices of most of those victims are unheard, just as Rosa went unheard. That’s where her story came from, it is intended as a bleak reminder that although we have a #MeToo movement that is allowing women’s voices to be heard, there are many, far too many, that are silent. I was nervous about writing Rosa. I have no experience on which to draw, nor do I knowingly know of anyone who has undergone the trauma that Rosa suffered at the hands of her husband. I don’t know whether what I have written diminishes or reflects the brutality that many women face, but what I wanted to do is remind us that we still have a long way to travel to ensure that all women and children are safe and protected. The conclusion to Rosa’s story is not one that I advocate. But, if you wear the thin veil of a smile at the end, I assure you, you are not alone. I didn’t know the outcome of the story when I started writing Rosa, and neither do I think, did she - but the ending to her story is an exception. Every year for the past nine years in Parliament, Jess Phillips, the MP for Birmingham Yardley has read a list of women killed by men or where a man is the principal suspect in the UK. When she read the list in 2024, it took her more than five minutes to read out the 98 names. Despite the work of Jess and other prominent advocates for the protection of women and children, including my former MP, Laura Farris, I am conscious that the #MeToo voice has lost some of its prominence, that it has faded from the mainstream, leading to a need for greater advocacy when the safeguarding of at-risk and vulnerable women and children should be a priority. The silence that so many women endure, either because they don’t feel safe to speak, or because when they do, they are subsequently failed by a broken criminal justice system, is horrific. I am not professing to have a remedy; I don’t pretend to know what needs to happen to make the systemic changes within society that will make a lasting difference to the way many women are treated. What I do know, however, is that there are many organisations that support the women and children who are the victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault – prominent among them is Women’s Aid. On the ‘What We Do’ page of the Women’s Aid website it states plainly, ‘We save lives.’ To achieve that goal, the charity relies on donations and fundraising, which is why every penny of royalties from the sale of Rosa will go to support their vital work. Please, if you can, do a little something to help. Cheerio for now Craig Craig Brown is an author living in Newbury. Discover his serialised novel, 'A Little Something To Hide' at craigbrownauthor.com BlueSky/Threads/Twitter: @GOMinTraining Copyright © Craig Brown, 2024 23 July 2024

When Women Rule

I get it now.  It’s not hype, it’s not hysteria.  It’s close to a cult, but without the malevolent undertones, and with one important distinction, its members are free to come and go as they please.  I suspect, however, that once they join, they’re never going to leave.  Not because they’re indoctrinated, but because they’re exercising their free will.  There’s a world of difference.

You may be forgiven for not knowing what I’m talking about.  I am referring to the absolutely massive sisterhood that is the Swifties.  They’re not all sisters of course, there are quite a few brothers and others, and for three and a half glorious hours last night, I included myself in their number.  Don’t believe me about the sisterhood?  The concert was at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, that bastion of Welsh Rugby and machismo.  The stewards converted every second gents toilet to a women’s loo in the gap between Paramore, the support act, and the main event, the incomparable Taylor Swift.  Women ruled.

It was hard to find anyone in Cardiff not going to the show, and it seemed everyone dressed for the occasion.  I may have been the exception (although as instructed, I did wear my salmon pink polo shirt to at least be passably present).  Sequins, glitter and glam abounded.  Any cowgirl seeking to buy boots in Cardiff will have found little remaining stock, but she could have picked up a pink Stetson from any one of dozens of hawkers selling knocked-off Taylor merch.

Across the city, fans dressed in their favourite Eras tour fashion.  Whether a tasselled dress, a sequined skirt, a flashy leotard, or a plain white t-shirt bearing slogans from Taylor’s canon, all of them wore an outfit to reflect their adoration for the woman they’d come to see.  Some of the boys wore costume too, the standard seeming to be the number 87 shirt of Travis Kelce, Taylor’s partner.  The marketers at Kansas City Chiefs probably can’t believe their luck.  I hope Taylor’s on their Christmas card list.

It was an astonishing, uninhibited display of girl power.  Total immersion in Taylor and complete ownership of every look.  It was glorious and mighty and perhaps summed up most fantastically on one of the white Ts reading, FUCK THE PATRIARCHY.   I couldn’t agree more.

What Taylor Swift has done through her music and actions, is to grant permission to young women to be themselves, to assert themselves, to challenge the opinions of others.  She is giving license to fans worldwide to redefine societal norms.  Her success, and the way she manages her career – by reclaiming her music from Scooter Braun, by using song to highlight chauvinism and egoism, by instructing women to challenge an invidious status quo, is a message that millions want to embrace.  It’s not a cult, it’s not a fad, I hope it’s not even a movement.  I hope that what Taylor Swift represents is a historic corrective, the moment when one woman told a generation of adoring followers that they are better than the male dominated world would still have them believe.

As the majority of the 67,000 crowd sang along word perfect to every song, I marvelled not only at the performance, but at the staging of an event that was breathtaking in scale, rehearsed to within an inch of perfection: band, backing vocalists, dancers, stage crew, audio-visual, even the audience played a part, like the man four rows behind us who proposed to his partner during ‘Love Story’ – the whole show choreographed to performative excellence, the only glitch, a microphone that didn’t cooperate for a beat during her acoustic set.  Leading it all, Taylor Swift, celebrating what she reminded us was her eighteen-year career, greater than half her life.

The show was phenomenal, a hyperbolic word that fails to do it justice.  As I’m writing this, my light bracelet is lying on my desk, still flashing blue, pink, yellow, its face resembling an alien life form.  Certainly, the thousands worn by fans at the show served to change the place into something other worldly.  As a geek Dad, I loved the technology on display, albeit it’s beyond my comprehension.  But even more so, I’m baffled by the phenomenon.  I’m finding it difficult to find the words to describe Taylor Swift.  As much as she is redefining music, performance, theatre, and what it means to be a woman, she needs to redefine the language of hyperbole, I don’t think strong enough words exist to describe her, but I’ll have a go using my limited vocabulary to express what I thought of last night’s show  and everything to do with it – WOW!

Craig Brown is an author living in Newbury.
Discover the first volume of his serialised novel,
'A Little Something To Hide' at craigbrownauthor.com

Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2024
19 June 2024

The Lady's for Turning

 

With more spins than a child’s gyroscope on a Christmas morning, Liz Truss’s premiership is looking decidedly revolutionary, but only in relation to the number of its U-turns.  There are, however, two changes of heart that she has not yet made, which are a worrying sign of what may follow given her adherence to a flawed ideology.

 

The first is her bizarre decision to intervene on King Charles’ appearance at COP27.  The King is a life-long advocate for green issues, to prevent him from attending the conference is an unnecessary interference and, to paraphrase the words of her predecessor, is spaffing Britain’s soft power up the proverbial wall.  As Prime Minister Truss sets about dismantling the power that the UK enjoys, you’d think she’d at least want to preserve some of it with an easy win.  What one doesn’t know is whether the intervention stems from the influence of lobbyists or her ideological position for maintaining small government.  Possibly I am being unkind.  Perhaps she is simply worried that Charles will talk to delegates in the same way that he talks to his plants, or worse, those who fill his fountain pens.

 

The second issue is of far greater concern.  In the seemingly endless Tory leadership hustings, Liz Truss was adamant that she was the strongest advocate of minimal government intervention, a laudable argument when exercised judiciously.  A government that permits its citizens unfettered choices in day-to-day activities is welcome, most of us like our freedoms preserved.  Equally, entrusting decisions to devolved administrations or local authorities to reflect what best suits each community is a preferable state.  However, dogmatically sticking to such principles, when arguably an intervention is warranted, is not the demonstration of strength that Liz Truss appears to believe.

 

Truss has intervened to prevent a public information programme designed to encourage responsible energy use and practical tips to reduce consumption.  That Jacob Rees-Mogg, Honourable Member for the 18^th Century, proposed the initiative, makes it even more remarkable that Truss should think it too ‘woke’ to proceed, especially given his previous role in government as Minister for Rogering the Peasantry.  Having announced the plan, the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy had to immediately withdraw the initiative on the basis that our Prime Minister believes “the country does not need its government telling it what to do.”  While libertarians may consider the policy commendable, it points to a wider concern – the rigid adherence to a dogma, rather than introducing a communication strategy that will benefit the country.  In these straightened times, when fuel bills are advancing at unprecedented rates and energy security is at risk, it is a sensible measure to provide information to the citizenry that will lessen energy demand.  Notwithstanding, it is a communication exercise, not a statutory directive, we will still have the freedom to make our own decisions regarding energy use.

 

A public information campaign is a responsible action for our government to take.  Not issuing guidance misses the opportunity to educate the nation in practical measures to ease the pressure on energy resources for the sake of appearances (which as her Instagram account illustrates, is singularly important).  Truss will argue that it is what she promised in her leadership campaign, albeit she’s rapidly developing a track record of dispensing with commitments faster than Elon Musk can change his mind about Twitter ownership.  Not that we should be surprised, her history demonstrates a politician with a chameleonic character.

 

Her dogmatism in limiting government intervention does lead to concerns as it relates to recent history.  We are emerging from a global pandemic in which government intervention was critical to addressing the spread of the virus.  Those governments that were more interventionist were considerably more successful in containing the disease.  By contrast, those countries whose leaders preferred a more libertarian approach, including Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, and Johnson, presided over some of the worst death tolls on the planet.  Of course, ‘libertarian’ is being kind, it was arrogance and apathy that prevailed in their administrations, and vast numbers paid the ultimate price for their hubris.

 

With Truss adopting a rigid policy of non-intervention during the energy crisis, what can we expect from her in the event of another pandemic – a rigid belief that the public would know best what to do and should not suffer dictate from Government?  I would hope not, but it is a worrying prospect.  It makes sense that a responsible government would act appropriately to protect its citizens in the event of a pandemic.  Equally, one could argue that a responsible government would inform its people of measures to reduce fuel consumption during an energy crisis.  Truss clinging to her ideology demonstrates an astonishing lack of responsibility and a disregard for the most vulnerable.  Let us remember that we are discussing a public relations exercise as opposed to a policy directive.  At the end of it, we are still at liberty to choose what we do – she hasn’t yet curtailed that right.  If Liz Truss’s dogma prevents her from making coherent decisions regarding measures to avoid excess energy use, God help us if she is still in office should another pandemic hit.

 

 

Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2022
12 October 2022

What is White Privilege?

I saw a Tweet during the week in which comedian Nathan Caton undertook the ‘Check your privilege’ test, lowering his fingers in response to an audio clip featuring some of the systemic racism that black people face.  Check out his reaction at 51 seconds when he’s run out of fingers and the narrative continues.

Now do the test.

How many fingers do you have left?  I had 10, which I achieved by ignoring the teasing that I get from friends for being a Kiwi.  I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count.  It was a salutary lesson in what so many of us white people fail to understand and an illustration of why those responding to the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter with their indignant ‘All Lives Matter’, really don’t get it.  That’s White Privilege

Another comedian, Mark Steel, writing in the Independent provided an analogy that summed it up rather well.

“there are people who object to the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’, making the reasonable point that “ALL lives matter ACTUALLY.”  They make a good point, as long as you ignore the fact that obviously all lives matter, but clearly many people, including armed police, don’t think black lives do matter.  It’s like ringing for an ambulance after a heart attack, and being told, “Why are YOU so important, surely ALL hearts matter?”

I don’t consider myself to be racist, and I’m not, overtly.  However, I’ve just written a screenplay and, in my mind, I had a clear vision of the characters I was writing.  Admittedly, I didn’t dig too deep for inspiration.  It was a cast largely plucked from a Richard Curtis movie: Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Renée Zellweger, Rowan Atkinson, Kristen Scott Thomas – you get the picture.  The problem though, is that they’re all too old, and dare I say it – white.  Its conception illustrates my unconscious biases, that a white upper middle-class demographic would fill the roles.  It’s a subtle form of racism; a 50-year-old-man penning a trope that reinforces an embedded stereotype.  I failed to see it as an issue, and therein lies the problem.  For so many of us, it’s not.  That’s White Privilege.

It wasn’t until I submitted my screenplay for professional scrutiny to The Black List that I was challenged to think about the composition of the cast.  The website has a section that invites details on each character including gender, age, and race.  Until then, I hadn’t confronted the ethnicity of the characters.  Their ages are important, so too is their wealth, but they could be from any ethnic background – it’s immaterial.  My prejudices had coloured my thinking, if not my cast.  That’s White Privilege.

I reflected on the cast of ‘Hamilton’; Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical telling the story of one of America’s founding fathers.  It is an outstanding production with a fabulously diverse cast that play the parts of white historic figures, deliberately so.  At no point during the watching of the show did I even consider that the casting was flawed because the actors weren’t white.  Frankly, it was performed by an exceptional cast and is a supreme performance which is delightfully colour-blind.  There is no need for the characters to be played by white actors.  What the show needs, and what it has, are the absolute BEST actors; a requirement that should be adopted in many more walks of life.  But it’s not.  That’s White Privilege.

That may lead some angry white men to complain that affirmative action is discriminating against them, denying them their privilege.  I almost joined them when I heard an interview with a literary agent who suggested that right now, it’s not a good time to be a white, middle-aged, heterosexual male writer if you’re trying to break into the industry.  Woe is me.  I determine a career change to pursue my dream to find, after hundreds of years of publishing being controlled by my demographic, that the odds are against me.  At least, that’s the excuse I can use if my novels and screenplays continue to gather dust.  Heaven forbid I should think they remain unpublished for any other reason like, for instance, they’re not good enough.  That’s White Privilege.

Instead of feeling aggrieved or bemused, we white folks need to take conscious and conspicuous action if we’re to dismantle the implicit racism that exists with White Privilege.  We probably don’t have to think, as John Boyega did following his impassioned speech in Hyde Park recently, that his words about the injustices that black people are facing may result in backlash from the moguls in his industry.  Would a white person face the same risks?  Listening to his address, I don’t know why any of what he said would result in censure – but then, I’m a white man, so why would I?  That’s White Privilege.

As it happens, John Boyega just about fits the age profile that I need for my characters, so if he’s interested, there’s a role for him – and he can decide who he wants to play, although perhaps the story’s entitled arsehole should be played by a white man.  Of course, whether it gets produced is another matter altogether.  I think it’s brilliant, but then it’s written by a middle-aged white man and the cards really are stacked against me.  That’s not White Privilege, that’s just delusion.

Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2020

05 June 2020