S: Because they have cultivated it to be so strong here. One of the most xenophobic and racist countries in the entire world.
A: Why remark upon it? They are racist but you are not allowed to say that they are. They don’t want to admit it to themselves. They are under the delusion that they are good people. They have made the country into an embarrassment.
S: The reason I bring it up is to ask you the question. Have you ever pondered upon the impermeability and resilience of hate?
A: What do you mean?
S: These haters can be around people of difference the whole day at work and so on. In different social settings, wherever. They have been around us for hundreds of years. And yet, they still hate us. We are not included in their social networks. Their deepest relationships are like for like.
A: So from that you draw the conclusion that hate is impermeable and resilient?
S: It is not, of course, everyone. There are exceptions. My closest friends are across cultures. But, speaking in general terms, all it takes is a human dung heap like Farage or Trump for them to flare up with their hate crimes. And recruit their little chickenshit scumbags to stoke the flames and rouse up these imbeciles in this society against us.
A: What is the point of pointing it out? It is not going to change anything.
S: To say the truth is an act of resistance in itself. I don’t accept the bullshit lip service narrative that they are trying to project, that racism has been cured, that there is no work to be done, that everyone is living in a rosy tinted reality holding hands. They are wrong. They are atrocious. Their society is atrocious. It is worse now with racism than when I was a kid, when the skinheads were around.
A: You want to say the truth and they want to cancel you. What is this game? Why is it worth playing?
S: One day, they will look back at this period in history and they will say that it was The Tiger that was right. It is right to be militant against their racism. It is right to criticise them. It is right to fight them. It is right to keep on saying that it does not matter what colour someone is, what culture they are from, that everyone is worthy of love and that we are all human beings.
A: But you don’t see these racists as human beings. All you do is swear at them.
S: When you become a monster, then in the story, there will be someone to kill the monster. The hero. In this story, it is The Tiger.
Summary: Artwork from the African Diaspora. The website says:
”As well as surveying the presence of the Black figure in Western art history, we examine its absence – and the story of representation told through these works, as well as the social, psychological and cultural contexts in which they were produced”.
Notes:
– The title ‘The Time is Always Now’ comes from James Baldwin in the 1960s writing about the civil rights struggle.
My comment: So the aim of the exhibition is to combat racism and this is what it should be judged on – if it is giving dignity, equality and positivity to the black figure. Is it?
Overall impressions:
Goes through quite a lot of the current thinking about racism like ‘double consciousness’ when non-white people have to look at themselves through a white perspective as well as their own non-white perspective, etc. Educational for people that haven’t experienced racism and don’t really understand what it is like.
The art is presented as educational and as being completely resistant to racism. Can art be unambiguous and not contradictory like that? How easy is it to escape racism and to be free in terms of artistic vision and in your expression?
And how beautiful are the artworks? Were they captivating? Art does not have to be apolitical to be beautiful. But I wonder whether there were any pieces of great beauty in this exhibition.
The artist says this is a composited fictional character ‘which really looks at the value systems contained within portraiture and monuments’. He was supposed to be giving power and grandeur to ‘fictional everyday people’, the under-represented black people excluded from art history and classical sculpture.
My Comment: Why closed eyes? The artist says she is embracing ‘the inner world that she’s manifesting there and trying to bring clarity perhaps, to all this noise around us’.
I wrote a book about the valuation of symbolic blindness in imperialistic, racist and misogynistic Victorian Britain. When blindness stood for power. Are the eyes closed because of this association from the past? Devaluation of sight in this system of valuation as in Western culture – when for Indians it is the queen of the senses and the motor of revolution.
The statue stands right at the front of an exhibition where we are looking – a guide to how we are supposed to see the rest of the exhibition?
Composited photographs from Victorian Britain by Galton were used to isolate supposed ‘racial features’ – how distanced is this sculpture from that process of racism and essentialisation when we are talking about race and the black figure reframed?
My favourite painting in the whole exhibition. This is an intimate portrait of one of the artist’s friends and family. It is about a ‘human relationship’, not a person.
The face is caught in a mood of introspection. A thinking man. A reflection on thought and on the minds that give us our personality, that create our relationships with others. The restricted palette of pink is beautiful: textured, cloudlike, dreamy. Details make up the piece, there are no flat colours, many many colours. Complication. Nuance in technique. The enigmatic meaning of the feet – one clothed foot, one bare. The play between the spectacle of the body and the covering of the clothes, the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’. A drip of paint falls from the black figure as it escapes into liquid from form. There is an air of insubstantiality, dissolution, as though everything is melting away.
The thoughts of this thinking man are what are highlighted by the artist in the personal relationship. So is she connected to him because he thinks? And what is the emotion here about that connection and his thinking? It is a mysterious image, a puzzle. Maybe her thoughts about him are unresolved, oscillating between definite form and the cloudiness that informs the image. An ambigious, contradictory and paradoxical image.
This is supposed to ‘dismantle’ an exclusionary Western visual representation and to subvert it. The artist is replacing the white female figures from neoclassical style paintings with black women. The artist deconstructs the western representation and removes it from the picture through cutting, etc. Then, he inserts the black figure – inclusion.
In this painting, the black serving figure for the white woman then serves the black woman instead, so the racial power disappears from the image.
The white figure disappears and becomes a black face. However, there is a sophisticated point to this image: the white figure is still providing the frame for the black face. Blackness is still being seen through the frame of whiteness. If you look carefully, one of the eyes is cut off by the outlines of the white figure that has been cut out. The black eye is limited by the white outlines that have been given to us from history. There is a tired self-awareness in this image.
The black face inside the white frame looks sad. Her own body is missing – the black body. Even her hair – with all of its power and symbolism – is not being presented. We are seeing the fragment of a black woman’s body – she still hasn’t achieved full representation. The image conveys the sadness of racism and the artist’s rendition of the black figure. It is still a work in progress, still unattained. The Time is Always Now…
What’s on the Turner Prize shortlist this year in terms of ‘Punjabi’ art? Covered with a giant white doily, a red Ford Escort vehicle is presented to us. The ‘art’ is in front of a photograph of a family with the car.
Rosie Cooper, director of Wysing Arts Centre, who sits on the judging panel, said Kaur sees the vehicle as a “representation of her dad’s first car and his migrant desires” and it “blasted snippets of uplifting pop songs referencing freedom and liberation throughout the space”.
Obviously the artist shortlisted in this country – when they are Indian – would necessarily be female. This is what ‘diversity’ means to white people when it comes to the Subcontinent – the women. Their books, their art, their cinema. It is all celebrated. Because they are heroic ‘victims’ of Indian culture to the West. Us men are to be ignored and marginalised. Because we are the ‘oppressors’ of women in this culture.
And what about this piece which white taste has valued? The big white doily is the key. It covers over the car. The migrant desire – according to the rules of white society – is to be covered over in whiteness. The white doily – the whiteness – is self-consciously patterned and artistic – it is the touch of art in the piece. Otherwise, there would just be a car and a family snapshot. The white doily – the whiteness – is what creates this exhibition as a piece of art work. It is what demonstrates ‘taste’, ‘selection’, artistic ‘discrimination’ (the pun is intended).
And what about this ‘migrant desire’ which – despite the capture of the car in the whiteness that is like a constraining net – blasts songs of freedom and liberation (laughable)? It is ideology at work. The veil of ideology covering over the vision of the car, the white veil over things for the migrant experience. Blinding the eyes and vision. Interfering. Coming between self and object, mind and reality. Art is the white veil itself. What else is? They sing of freedom. When they are the exploited. They sing of liberty. When they are constrained and bound by the white net.
The car. The phallic symbol. Red to signify status and dominance. Gross materialism. Migrant desire is couched as greed. Desire for masculinity in this patriarchal white supremacist society. Desire for control – one drives a car.
Desire for freedom – the car represents freedom. A cliched symbol of freedom the car. But this one is caught up in the net. Even the music – they blast snippets of songs about freedom. Even musically, the freedom is partial, disrupted, interrupted, punctured by purposely oppressive silence.
Do you know what the net signifies in India? The net of maya – illusion. Gross materialism. Trickery. What comes between us and the understanding of reality. The doily is perhaps maya. This white culture and its control, its limitation of freedom for the migrant. The doily becomes kitcsch art – described by several art historians as the artwork of a capitalistic, unthinking and unfeeling, philistine and totalitarian society.
Yet, there is a paradox. If I remember correctly from the Metro newspaper article that I read today about the art piece, the doily also represents the Sikh and Indian workers that worked in textiles factories in huge numbers when they first migrated here to the United Kingdom (Metro 24.04.2024). So this net of whiteness is being created by the migrants themselves. Their deference. Their blind adulation. Their willingness to be exploited. Their inability to revolt against the systems of power.
So what are the migrant desires of the Father in this image? As seen through the eyes of a Punjabi woman? Desire to criticise the wants of the Father? Or an attempt to be sympathetic to his wants?
The artist writes:
‘In this show I am having a conversation with personal histories,’ explains Kaur, ‘exploring improvisation and political mysticism as tools to reimagine tradition and inherited myths.’
But is this a re-imagination? Look at the piece again. It tries to base itself against reality as ideology – against the photograph, the representation of reality. The photograph has the Indian family in it. The base unit of Punjabi and Indian culture. The finished art exhibit has no family in it. It has a relationship merely to the Father in a patriarchal system of culture. A Father that wants to be covered in whiteness. Is this what is valued in this culture? Probably. The probability is on the side that adulates whiteness and patriarchy. The family is forgotten in favour of the Master. In favour of isolation and individualism. In favour of the desire for mastery and control and power.
Abstract: Oppressed groups in our society internalise negative constructions of identity and learned sets of behaviours transmitted in media which override personal responsibility and individuality. They do this because they are required to exhibit such identities and behaviours on the public stage because of the constraints imposed upon them by culture.
Keywords: Stereotypes, Cultural Brainwashing, Free Will, Personal Responsibility, Negative expectations
Elaboration. Clarification. Evidence.
Speculation, even that of the armchair theorist, has to be sustained by the holy trio I have just cited. The last time I wrote, the topic was how the justice of the oppressed has been constructed as inevitably having a violent and bodily conclusion. The argument that I made was that the identity of the violent individual and even the framework of action of this individual have been transmitted across Western culture and time as a model for the behaviour and personhood of oppressed groups in our society. This is a model which they turn to in order to construct ideas of justice and individuality and to deal with injustice in this society since it is conceived of as “their own justice”, a justice that is peculiar to them and in which constructions of personhood and difference are inherent. Another reason why they turn to these models for identity and action is because they have been systematically denied any other form of expression in this society so that they cannot become factors in public thought, politics and in the apportioning of power.
There is a big assumption in the argument that I made. Instead of talking about individual responsibility, consciousness and so on, I cited the phrase “cultural brainwashing” in the key terms at the start of the speculations. I argued that individuals take up the identity and framework of action evident in the plays of Shakespeare and such productions as the recent Black Panther movie because they have been insidiously insinuated to them from the time before they have even been born.
Why have I assumed that the identity of the violent avenger is suggested to oppressed individuals and can override conventional notions of individuality, free will, conscious choice and personhood? Is there any proof of this? Just because something is there in Shakespeare and the Black Panther movie, and a similar thing seems to happen in real life, does that prove that my speculations are correct?
While I was pondering whether fiction can be invoked to prove something that happens in real life, I thought I would make a few notes on the topic of suggested identity and the internalisation of stereotypes and how both relate to free will, choice and conscious thought. To introduce the topic, I want to write about a recent change in advertising standards which you can read about here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40638343
As the BBC writes, the Advertising Standards Authority have set out a mission statement to “crack down on ads that feature stereotypical gender roles.” There were particularly aggravating examples that were cited:
One example was an advert for Aptamil baby milk formula that showed girls growing up to be ballerinas and boys becoming engineers.
Complaints had also been made about adverts for clothing retailer Gap that showed a boy becoming an academic, and a girl becoming a “social butterfly”.
What was the justification for cracking down on such adverts? As the BBC journalist writes:
The review suggested that new standards should consider whether the stereotypes shown would “reinforce assumptions that adversely limit how people see themselves and how others see them.”
“Portrayals which reinforce outdated and stereotypical views on gender roles in society can play their part in driving unfair outcomes for people,” said Guy Parker, chief executive of the ASA.
“While advertising is only one of many factors that contribute to unequal gender outcomes, tougher advertising standards can play an important role in tackling inequalities and improving outcomes for individuals, the economy and society as a whole.”
There is a simple idea at the heart of the justification of the advertising crackdown: media plays a role in constraining individuals to adopt certain identities and schemas of action. Media can determine and limit notions of personhood and action. Media can override ideas about free will and choice to produce certain types of individuals that act in a certain kind of way. Stereotypes in the media can be internalised and magnify and build on societal expectations to influence behaviour and identity. There is a qualification: media is just one factor in contributing to “unequal gender outcomes”.
The question remains, however, whether this justification is valid or not. The ASA suggests that media is just one aspect of an entire societal apparatus which is producing gender and gendered forms of identity and behaviour. They make the same claim about cultural brainwashing that I do, that such cultural brainwashing produces zombies that lack responsibility and free will. How exactly is this process of cultural brainwashing played out?
As I was thinking over this topic, trying to work out how individuals internalise expected identities and learned sets of behaviours, one persistent image kept on coming to mind. I am talking about the case of the athlete with the home crowd advantage. There is no need to focus on a particular example, since everyone knows exactly what I am talking about. Here is the typical scenario. There is a home crowd which is composed of people of the same nationality. The home crowd have one athlete in the final who is of the same nationality as them. If one looks at the past record of this athlete, there seems to be very little chance that they will win anything. The athlete’s ranking is not that good. However, the crowd expects the athlete to bring home a medal. Somehow, amazingly, the athlete performs better than he or she has ever performed in their life. They fulfil the crowd’s expectations and bring home a medal. It is the same with teams as it is with individuals.
Here, then, is the prime illustration of how a society’s expectations can be internalised in order to produce a certain identity, that of medal winner, and an expected set of behaviours, a medal winning performance. But what isn’t remarked on and what is brilliantly weird about this phenomenon is that it actually happens. How can someone whose body hasn’t ever and seemingly can’t perform at that level suddenly do what it does in the final? Why does their body and their behaviour change so radically? It is precisely because of the societal expectation that they act in a certain way and become medallists. And this societal expectation is based in nationalism and ideas of national identity. These athletes are drawing on notions of shared and constructed identities in order to behave in a certain way. All the training that they did in their life never allowed them access to a medal winning performance before. It required an internalisation of shared national identity and a meeting of the expectation and demand of the nationalist crowd in order to achieve that result.
One can see then, that individuals can internalise identities and behaviours which are expected of them by society and which themselves radically transform them and their actions in a way that is nothing short of miraculous. The expectations of a group can change the very fabric of reality. These expectations can override conscious thought – the athletes have always consciously tried to win but were never able to gain the victory, however much they trained and tried. It is the adoption of a shared cultural identity and set of behaviours by athletes which, although they are seemingly unrelated to the task in hand (after all, it is not a requisite qualification of being British that one is a gymnast or fast runner) completely changes performance and result and, indeed, alters the body at a fundamental level.
Well. Let us return to our ideas about how culturally shared negative expectations of oppressed individuals can transform their behaviour and override conscious thought, free will and choice. If the scenario in the athlete example can be seen as analogous to how a culture works, then we can see how and why negative expectations fundamentally change the character of individuals. Such expectations, transmitted though media, are internalised and are too powerful to resist. They do away with ideas about free choice, individual responsibility and individuality. Such ideas crush the very stuff that persons are made out of to reproduce stock types. They are too powerful. The group’s expectations completely overwhelm and defeat the individual. The individual can then only exhibit learned behaviour. The word exhibit is important. I think the athlete situation is analogous to the situation in culture because of one important point. Both the athlete and the oppressed individual are on display. They have to perform as though they were in a play to a society that is watching since their actions take place in public. This is why I think that the justice of the oppressed is a form of communication and perceived as the only way to express ideas about justice and the resistance to injustice.
Well, such are the speculations of the armchair theorist. What is the importance of such idle speculations and this short note on the matter? I think the significance is that in Western media, there are only really negative representations of oppressed peoples. They are always shown as violent, barbaric, backward and criminal. Where are the positive role models? When was the last time you saw a British Asian as a hero in western media? The fact is that it is negative expectations of us that are always channelled in the western imagination. If people then internalise and act on these negative expectations, which are not just in media, but everywhere around us in this society, are these people really to blame? If personal responsibility and individuality are really obliterated by group expectations, can we point the finger at perceived criminals? Surely our ideas about law and justice, which rely on notions of free will, choice and individual responsibility have to change?
The Failure of Diversity: The First Indian Superhero Out of Love in Marvel’s ‘Eternals’
I was standing in a noisy, barely contained line of schoolboys outside a classroom, indulging in my usual habit of stand up comedy. It was the mid-90s. My routine consisted of an imaginary scenario where the top heroines of the time pestered me with phone calls and visits at my house. Suddenly, a teacher, a bespectacled white woman with a nasal voice, figuratively pulled me by the collar into a classroom where the sixth form girls – the only female students – were vegetating. The teacher asked the several white girls if they would ever go out with me on a date. Politely, looking down at the short ethnic minority man wearing his older brother’s cast off blazer, the girls declined.
The point of this bizarre ritual was to humiliate me, the ethnic minority man, to show that we were unworthy of romantic love. It was meant to destroy my confidence in myself. But the performance did not work. It failed. Even at the time, I knew that I had got the reaction from the girls because they were white. Everyone knew that white women thought we were undesirable. What do I mean by ‘we’? We call ourselves British Asians in England if we hail ethnically from the subcontinent. A brief quote about a male, British Asian character from Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth in 2000 shows that the Western presumption is that we are not attractive:
Pulchritude – beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till. (1)
British films like Bend it Like Beckham extend these conceptions when they represent sexual freedom and desire for British Asian woman as a release from coupling with British Asian men. America is hardly innocent of these characterisations. In The Big Bang Theory, the Indian Raj is the only one that cannot get a girlfriend, much to the amusement of the audience it would appear, who could not get enough of this running joke. In light of such racist, unspoken assumptions, the bizarre ritual that I was subjected to should not be seen as an isolated incident. As I will argue, it informs the representation of us on the screen. Ethnic minorities that have historically come from the subcontinent. Even when lip service is being paid to ideals of ‘diversity’, used as a tactic of selling movie tickets.
Kingo: The First Indian Superhero and Western ‘Diversity’
The Indian character in the Marvel Eternals team is Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani). This is a historical role, the first superhero from South Asia on a Western screen. In an interview, Nanjiani spoke of the grave responsibility of portraying Kingo in a representative way that accorded with ideals of diversity:
The responsibility is a real thing, because there haven’t been other South Asian superheroes in the MCU, or any other Hollywood mainstream movie for that matter… I can’t represent every South Asian person in the world, because we’re all completely different, right? So while there is that responsibility, I want to do a good job. (2)
Eternals itself has been marketed as a positive ‘diversity’ film. Salma Hayek (Ajak) says, “the Eternals film is a “huge” step forward for diversity and inclusivity in the film industry”, sentiments echoed by Gemma Chan (Sersi). (3) This marketing tactic has indeed influenced audience reactions. Oliver Jones of the Observersays that “one of the most impressive aspects of the Eternals is how the culturally representative team’s identities play into the theme and story in powerful and essential ways”. (4)
However, for all the talk, Kingo carries the racist, Western association of undesirability and failure at love. That is, Kingo is a failure in Western diversity, a continuous failure which is always represented, tragically enough, as a success. A short reflection on how Kingo is related to the other Eternals reveals that Kingo loves no one. Kingo is loved by no one. He is an Indian man completely out of love in all its variants, romantic and non-romantic.
Everyone else in the team of Eternals either loves a team mate, is loved by a team mate, or has a partner, as in the famous gay pairing between Phastos and his partner that showcases homosexual couples for the first time in a Marvel movie. Except, that is, for Kingo. Sersi and Ikaris love each other and have even been married at one point. Makkari and Druig are falling in love. Sprite secretly loves Ikaris. Thena (Angelina Jolie) is in a relationship of love and protection with Gilgamesh. Even Ajak, who appears to be solitary and celibate, has been described as a beacon of love by writer Chloé Zao, who comments, that the role called for “a woman with the heart the size of the ocean” and represents a powerful, maternal love. (5)
So this is Western ‘diversity’. Even when we are portrayed as superheroes, we are unattractive, out of society, unable to form not only romantic relationships, but other loving relationships. In fact, as we see when his film posters are shown, Kingo conceals his immortality by reproducing asexually in his Hindi film avatars where he is his own grandfather, father and self. He is like some virus outside of normal sexual reproduction. Ironically, one poster is for a Hindi film (‘Bollywood’) entitled ‘Yuva Prem’ (Young Love), where Kingo plays a romantic lead. It is only in another non-Western cinema and space of imagination that he can be recognised as a lover.
In contrast to Kingo (and the other ethnic minority men in the movie), the white man is constantly loved romantically by women. The main character, Sersi, only falls in love with white men. There is not only a love triangle between Sersi and two white men, but also a love triangle between Sersi, Sprite and Ikaris for the white man. The white man is repetitively, irresistibly desirable, the Indian man is supposedly not. Not only this, but in the ending of the movie, the white man’s love is the ultimate saviour of all humanity, in a reworking of the trope of the white saviour. Ikaris fails to stop Sersi’s plan to rescue humans which he believes is counter to the mission of the Eternals because he still has feelings for her. To add insult to the negative and racist depiction of an Indian man and white love supremacy, Sersi and Ikaris have an Indian wedding, attired in Indian costume. Emphasising the point that, even on the Indian’s own terrain, the white man is the victor in love.
Kingo is not absolutely, entirely excluded from the domain of love. In fact, he is the only one that can see the secret love that Sprite has for the white man, Ikaris. He is relegated to just looking at the field of love and not being a part of it. Like a sexually frustrated viewer who seeks solace in pornography, Kingo can only look at the love of others as an outsider. Also, Kingo dreams of being in the position of the desirable white man. While Ikaris steals Kingo’s sexual and romantic identity by having an Indian wedding, Kingo can only unsuccessfully play at being the desirable Ikaris on film. Thus, Kingo is introduced via the ‘Bollywood’ song sequence, for a film called “Shandaar Daastan-e-Ikarus” (The Splendid Story of Ikaris). Predictably enough, the dance performance is strained and comical.
Conclusion
The bizarre ritual that was played out in my youth, ‘proving’ my undesirability as a South Asian is a mainstay in British and American media, although it has received little critical attention. Because it is such a solidified set of implicit assumptions. When we were finally able to be seen as superheroes on a Western screen, all the old prejudices were added to our representation. The worst thing is that all of the female directors, authors and screenwriters that I have cited above all have something in common. Those that cast us as undesirable are mixed race or ethnic minority women themselves. Perhaps showing that racism against the self by such women is tactfully exploited by the Western system of representation.
Yet, Marvel has taken over the world and is celebrated for being ‘diverse’. So this is what diversity means in the modern world? In fact, Western ‘diversity’ is a continual and embarrassing failure of real representation and real inclusion. The on-screen portrayals of us in the West and their bizarre, racist rituals have always and will always fail in my eyes. Because I do not hate myself. I have been given love and status as a loving being in this world. At home, my nickname is ‘Sonu’ (‘handsome’).
1 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), 273
diary of a lone man 